Ok... Just playing with Scan's website at the moment, trying to put together a file server with a balance between low power, and high disk performance. So far. Motherboard CPU RAM PSU RAID Controller 3 of these in RAID5 (already have these) I'll stick it all in any crappy case I can find. Opinions?
CPU: Celeron E3200. - £35, dual core and more than enough power. RAM: Damn, memory is a lot more expensive than it used to be! Do you really need 4Gb? 2Gb would probably be just as good for the server. Everything else looks fine, but how do you plug those 3 SATA Drives into the controller? It only seems to have 1 SAS connection. Am I missing something?
There's an adaptor lead... just not sure whether it's included with it or not yet. Is has a SAS plug on one end, and 4x SATA on the other.
Good choices on everything, but the drives. DO NOT get anything that is a Green or Low Power drive, it causes faults when trying to access on a Raid. Those drives have a idle shutdown, and if you let it sit, and then try to access, it can cause faults and even total raid error. I'd go with some Samsung F3s. They are standard drives, but are probably the most economic in terms of both power consumption and raid safety. That one SAS port uses a break out cable that spilts to 4xSataII. Langer has the same type of card and the cable for it as well in his build, if you need an example.
Oh right, that makes sense. Shame the card costs more than the rest of the computer. What OS are you going to use?
Vista 64bit.. as I already have that. It's OEM and was used on this rig prior to Windows7, so I may need to make a phonecall to get it activated. Yeah.. I may get the celery instead of the Conroe. It's only a file server after all. Gonna do some research to see if 2GB will give me a performance hit or not. Shouldn't do I suppose.. but you never know.
Depends on how much money you want to spend really, I think both will provide similar performance. Having said that, if I was in your shoes I'd probably just spend the extra cash and get all the faster parts - just because.
I'm thinking the 450W PSU is overkill now. A celery with crappy onboard graphics and 3 hard drives can't need 450 watts surely.
Definately not Pook, get yourself something smaller but equally reliable. A 300W would do that I think. Do they even make PSUs that small nowadays? The rest looks good, although what someone said about the Cav greens is worrying. Any proof that this is the case? Don't want your R5 array crashing because you were trying to save energy...
He has an '06 'Stang, I'm guessing his wife is probably the coolest, most understanding lady in the world
How about this RAID controller, just as an alternative. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Adaptec-3405-4-port-SAS-SATA-RAID-controller
What dis someone say about Cav Greens? I missed that. Nah... she's all for it. We both have our entire lives on hard drives now - photos, music, video, work, documents.. the whole 9 yards. Indeed she is Right.... I'm now about to tear my hair out, because I've been reading that people using Intel's ICH9R onboard controller in RAID5 are getting write speeds of 120MB/Sec etc. If this is true, I'd rather do this than buy a £250 RAID card, especially as 125MB/Sec is the theoretical limit of my network anyway! I hate things that aren't simple. Still researching...Zzzzz..... Will report back. [EDIT] Check this out. Makes me seriously question why anyone would use a dedicated RAID card in a desktop environment.
here is an idea, get the basic setup and run the drives connected to the chipset and perform some benchmarking. Then if its ****, go for a RAID card. I also started looking at home servers, as i plan on swapping out my ubuntu OS on my server to windows home server, and in doing research i came across pre-built home servers. People might argue its cheaper to self build, but the pre-builders have done there research and got everything to function hassle free. Hp mediasmart server is one for example, i think this line of NAS servers are for people in your situation. Because you are kinda needing a small/medium buiness solution.
Hell, I forgot about Windows Home Server. Like Burnout21 said, you can buy pre-built boxes. Not sure how fast the I/O is though.
True... but I'd need at least a X38 Mobo to get ICH9R... and they're not cheap. If it turns out to be crap, then I still have to buy a RAID card... Grrr... I have nothing else to do today, so will carry on researching.
my old gigabyte P35 board had that controller http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products...board&ProductID=2551&ProductName=GA-P35C-DS3R
Could you try the chipset on your P6T to give you an example (ICH10R)? Not sure how different it is to the previous version but at least you've already got it.... OR - how about this HP Windows Home Server? http://www.amazon.co.uk/MediaSmart-...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262353926&sr=8-1
Damn.. there's an idea... Hmm... still.. it will take HOURS to build a 3TB RAID5, and even if it rocks.. it's not proof a ICH9R based server would work as well. Nearly £500 for 1TB is the answer
