Sounds cool. Make sure to post pics, I'm always up for new server ideas. What I found lacking was the board! I had the PC2500E. The CPU was great, I certainly wouldn;t want a C7 for everyday use but for a server it was perfect, especially with a 7W TDP. Dislike: Noisy HSF; No GbE LAN; 3 pin fan connectors (both HSF and case fan); only 2 sata ports; form-factor; the list goes on. I would not be put off buying another Via board, nor would I rule out a C7-D, that board just seems misplaced to me. Low TDP says 'server' to me, so why only 2 sata ports and no gigabit lan? You could use the 2 PCI slots for a lan card and a sata port card, but then you've got no room for expansion, no TV tuners or anything. It can't be used as a HTPC as it has minimal GPU power, which again suggest that the board is meant for servers. 2GB ram limit? It also won't fit in a mini-ITX case, so I'll have to find a bigger case for it, a bigger case which would allow me to use more drives if only it had more than 2 sata ports. When all is said and done, it's a perfectly decent mobo if you can find a use for it. You certainly can't complain bout the sub £40 price point!
Oddly enough, that's exactly the board I have I agree, it's limited, and the lack of GBe was annoying (even more so was that it took me a couple of tries to find a GB NIC that FreeNAS liked), but otherwise it has been great. I only needed 2 SATA ports for my 2 drives, and I used the IDE port for my CF card adapter. The Via C7 boards were designed for embedded applications in industrial settings, things like small workstations and running equipment. I will agree that it is a fairly limited board, but for what it does it works well for me.
ye post pictures will invest in a larger raid card and a bit larger motherboard for the server, will go from 1.5Tb f3 to 2Tb f4 will see it in a long time investment since i have a bit larger space needs then i first planed
Like I said, if you only need two ports then I still think it's a decent board. I wish the fan was quieter, or could at least be replaced by one that is. Mine certainly never complained in several months of being on 24/7 and dealing with RAID 5 parity calculations. Hope you get on better with yours than I did.
Input? Are you building a server or a desktop pc here? A server wont need a GPU at all, nor will you benefit from having that high-TDP processor when even a Sempron will be idling most of the time. You're just wasting money twice, once when you buy them and then forever with the electricity they're using up. You're definitely going about this the wrong way. If you don't need much from a home server then something low-power and probably mini-ITX is the way to go. If you have need for either extremely high reliability or processing power then use the money to buy proper server-class hardware such as Xeons/Opetrons, EEC Memory, RE4s and other enterprise-class disks. Either way, a high-end desktop (which is essentially what you've specced out above) is a waste. It's too noisy, power hungry and expensive to be small, unobtrusive and ecofriendly like most people want their home servers to be. It's also too expensive, badly balanced (money on a gpu rather than something that would benefit a server) and unreliable to be a high-end server.
i probably have read something wrong i will get rid of the gpu (bad advice from some other place) i am trying to get myself a system with high amount of storage that have processing power, been looking at Xeons for processor but i don`t know were to go from there by looking at it now i can see that it looks more like a deskop at the moment wich is what i know, servers are unknown theretory for me and with a salt of bad advice it can get really screwed fast could you help me back in the eight direction?
Well, that's up to you really. If you still want a machine that can do all the things you listed in the OP then what you really want is just a fileserver-level machine. You can handle movie encoding in one of 3 ways. The first way is easier on the serve but requires more work from you and that is to encode on your desktop, leaving the server mainly for storage. This way the server can be built using practically ANY hardware. The NAS boxes that you buy for home use (that share files, torrent, host webpages etc) are built with the kind of processing power usually found in a smartphone and they manage fine. Secondly is to move encoding over to a frankly underpowered server, it takes ages but you get to keep the unobtrusive, small and quiet server. Even if you do have to wait a little longer for your movies. The third option is to have a bigger, more powerful server that races through a movie in no time at all. This is great. But the issue is that when it isn't encoding then all of that processing power is wasted because you're back to just fileserving which is limited by network speeds, then hard disk speeds. CPU power really doesn't matter. So the big, noisy, expensive (to buy and run) machine is sitting there underused and overspecced. So decide, there really isn't a right way to do this an all of the above options are viable. You just need to think about what your needs for this project really are. If what you really want is just a £1500 NAS, then spend £500 on a proper one and £1000 on a Caribbean holiday. Throw an Atom board into whichever case tickles your pickle and add as many disks as you think you need now plus a few more. Either RAID or don't, but make sure to have a backup strategy. (My server is my backup strategy and has NO unique data on it.) Or, if you can't be arsed, have someone else do all the work. If, however you really want a 'proper' server that will be on 24/7/365 without missing a beat then either look at Dell Small Business or (a little more realistically) swap the mobo/cpu/ram combo from your spec above for something more like: this motherboard; this cpu and as much of this as you think you need. I don't know if those particular Xeons are new, I cant keep track of Intel at the best of times. Feel free to substitute with an Opteron or another newer Xeon. Enterprise-level stuff is leagues ahead of normal pc stuff when it comes to reliability and stability. This is also normally when I'd again mention enterprise-class disks, but they're so cheap right now (like this) I wouldn't bother. The more efficient power supplies (at least 80+) will help you sleep better at night, knowing that you're helping save the planet in your own computerish way. I'd say your two biggest issues are space for disks, 8+ means you need a pretty big case. Rather than 8x1TB disks could you do 4x2TB? Secondly, video encoding. This is where you tell me that you are building this for your design lab at work. It will have 300 clients all needing access to terabytes of files and that everything I've suggested is in fact 'not big enough'. EDIT - I've just noticed you deleted that post above. I certainly hope I didn't mean to make you feel stupid. I'm a mega-newb here, but on other forums (ones where I know stuff!) I do sometimes come across a little condescending in text. Sorry if I made you feel stupid!
well the fact is that i know my inns and outs of computers and its hardware so setting up a good pc rig are not any problem for me, but i have little to zero experience with building/setting up servers or large storage array`s up to now i have relied on a friend of mine that had buildt 2 from scratch himself but when he set one up for me i felt it was more like a gaming rig + that he seems to not know as much as he would think. you didnt make me feel stupid i felt stupid because of him, the project got blown out of proportions by miles and i lost focus on what was most important for my needs instead i got hung up on TB hundreds of TB, so i felt it was time to start from scratch tats why i postes last night
Cool, then in which case: I'd go here (in fact I'm thinking I might anyway!). Bit-Tech thread about a HP MicroServer deal. As far as I can tell it's not limited to UK-only.
DIMM DDR3 HYPERX 2GB 1333MHZ DDR3 NON-ECC CL9 (1X2GB) x2 Cooler Master Centurion 590 - miditårn - ATX CORSAIR TX 650W ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V AMD PHENOM II X2 555 BE 3.2GHZ 6MB SOCKET AM3 BOX SAMSUNG ECOGREEN F4 2TB 5400RPM SATA/300 32MB GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H DDR3 AM3 ATX XFX RADEON HD5770 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E SINGLE SLOT 2DVI/DP Areca ARC-1220 Serial ATA 8 port RAID Controller my own try to get something a bit more down to earth, a decent raid card with room for up to 8drives i have enough processing power, 4gig of ram and the chase got enough 5.25bay`s so i can sett all hardrives in Hot-swap i am still a bit unsure about the graphic card but i have chosen a ATX board with 2 x8 bandwidth lanes and a smaller PSU then what i had, it got 8x SATA power cables total price is £1.210 with all hardrives
ok i will drop the GPU and found a decently priced Chieftec 19" 4U UNC-410F-B-500, 500W instead of a mini tower anything you more you would change?
Nice case, do you have a rack to put it in? Nothing else I can think of. I'd choose a lower-powered cpu, but that's cos my server doesn't encode. You could probably use it, and 80W isn't so bad. Ubuntu will underclock it massively anyway. I have the Phenom 955 (which has the same clock speed of 3.2GHz) and my cores sit at around 800MHz each most of the time, jumping up to 2.1GHz, 2.5GHz and then 3.2GHz only when needed. That's good for power saving.
i do. happy to see that i have gone in the right direction, i am very pleased with how it looks now compared to my budget its spot on to. now it looks more like a server then what i had before Beezie
Since there have been no new input in the thread i take that as in the set-up is al right and i can proceed with the plans over the holiday`s DIMM DDR3 HYPERX 2GB 1333MHZ DDR3 NON-ECC CL9(1X2GB)x2 Chieftec 19" 4U UNC-410F-B-500, 500W COOLER MASTER HYPER 212 PLUS AMD PHENOM II X2 555 BE 3.2GHZ 6MB SOCKET AM3 BOX SAMSUNG ECOGREEN F4 2TB 5400RPM SATA/300 32MB x8 GIGABYTE GA-890GPA-UD3H DDR3 AM3 ATX Areca ARC-1220 Serial ATA 8 port RAID Controller thanks for the help so far
