this is what i did, although my fileserver now looks rather amusing - 5 beautifully wired hard drives, and a huge rats-nest of cables in the rest of the case. do you know where you can get more of those connectors though? i ripped some off an old power supply, but now i've run out.
Slightly old image (cables now tidy) The IDE cable is for the aging optical drives. 6x500gb Seagate 7200.9's [Spec] In sig. [Role] FTP/HTTP/SSH/VNC/VPN/D-Link Media Lounge/Games (often host multipalyer games from home) Server Video media converter.. divx/dvd/x264
[Specs] AMD Athlon XP2800+ (Clocked down to 1.6Ghz) 2 GB ram 600W psu 8 HD's making a total of 4 TB running windows XP [Role] File Server sql server webserver backup server
NSLU2 running Unslung with a 250Gb drive Atom330 running xp with Dsychronize with 2x500Gb drives in bays, 1Tb WD external usb drive and external usb 500Gb lacie for extra backup.
2U chassis Dual P3 1GHz 1.5GB memory 2x 9.1GB Seagate (U160 SCSI) RAID 1 (Operating system) 4x 18.3GB Seagate (U160 SCSI) RAID 5 (Web files) 8x 1TB Samsung (eSATA) ZFS Raid-Z [Similar to RAID 5] (CIFS/Windows File Shares) Other duties: Apache, mySQL, ntp, ldap, samba (as domain controller), dns, dhcp NTP, LDAP, DNS, and DHCP are being offloaded to my shiny new (to me) Proliant ML530 (Nothing special, Xeon 1ghz, 2gb ram) this weekend. I'll toss up pics of all my servers, eSATA enclosure, etc after I get home, if anyone wants.
You sure you want to play it like that? (and, you know, technically, you need more than that to constitute a fileserver)
currently a work in progress, will post internal pics when finished.(just an external enclosure for HDD's, separate PC to run them )
Ooo, I like this thread. I got a chance to build a fairly epic NAS server whilst on placement. Though I'm cheating because I didn't get to keep it. (Above pic actually shows one Adaptec RAID card, which didn't support JBOD, required for ZFS! Waste of money. The spec for anyone interested: Supermicro X7DWE motherboard (absolutely EPIC board for this stuff.) 1x Xeon 5430 (Quad) 4x 2GiB DDR2-667 modules 3x LSI 3081E-R SAS/SATA cards (8-port) All wrapped-up in the Supermicro 846TQ. Which was awesome, especially given that the motherboard was laid-out perfectly to use the supplied shroud... Essentially negating the requirement for an extra fan on the CPU. It was very well built, but so noisy my ears nearly bled. That and, when we came to rack mount it, the rails were the biggest disappointment ever: they didn't even lock! Definitely worth using a shelf instead. Eventually settled with Nexenta (an OpenSolaris distro) running on it, with its root ZFS pool consisting of a simple 2x750GB mirror, and then the other 8 drives we actually bought were stuffed into a data pool: 7-drive RAID-Z1 vdev, with a hot spare, that obtained 330MB/sec write on Bonnie++. Not bad for WD RE2 disks. Now if only they'd let me keep it... I'd be deaf, but I'd have 4.6TB of space to play with.
This is what I run full time (opened so you can see its innards): Not much in the way of hardware specs, just a P4 2.4GHz on a Serverworks chipset (no USB 2.0 controllers, thus the need for the card to attach USB and my printer). Each one of those drives is on a seperate IDE channel, so I could theoretically have 4 more. No RAID there, but I am a tad paranoid about a catastrophic failure. It is also easier to swap out disks for upgrades. Though the lack of SATA is starting to be a problem. I need to look into getting some Startech PATA to SATA converters and see if I can go SATA (will need to do an external enclosure). Here's one of the more interesting pieces of hardware I have worked on in the server realm.
I've given up having a dedicated "fileserver", so now my main data store lives on the main rig. There is 7tb over 7 drives. The family HTPC has another 1.2tb for recorded TV and there's another couple of tb of storage floating around on laptops & USB devices Meet Ripley, she's very nice Although the wiring is a little cramped, the old skool coolermaster ATCs didn't do cable management very well This is where she lives
