Building A Mega Server

[jeffjenx]

Hey, I'm getting a house built and have a lot of MP3s and videos (live bootlegs of my favorite bands, media center recordings, etc) and and going to be building a server. Now, for what I want to do, I just want to have the right to say that I have a terabyte of disk space available for my network and, well, I'll be doing something with a RAID-5 configuration and about 4 or 5 hard drives.

What I need help with is finding something that can house these hard drives. Do you think it would be best to have a regular computer tower with the drives in there? I think it might have a heating problem, but maybe not. Or would it be best to go with a rackmountable setup that's designed to house just hard drives and have a SCSI controller connecting it to the server PC?

[dstryr420]

err on the side of caution/safety... get the rack

just my opinion, id do that if you could afford it

[Billco]

What kind of machine you build largely depends on what your needs are for a file server. How fast do you need it to be, how easily upgradeable, how many clients will be connecting at any given time ?

I've got a file server for all my movies and music, at 1.4 tb right now going over 100mbit ethernet. It's kind of slow, but since it's all streaming media I don't mind, it just takes a little while to copy new files across the network.

If that's the sort of thing you want, just get a cheap PC. Try to find a motherboard with built-in SATA support, some Athlon64 and Pentium4 boards support 8 SATA drives plus the usual 4 IDE drives, or you can add more ports to an existing system with PCI controller cards from Promise or Highpoint that add 2 to 4 hard drives each.

Get a top-quality power supply, don't be cheap on this part because your server will be running 24/7 and you don't want to fry your hard drives and the data that's on them. Go with something nice like an Antec or Seasonic, at least 350-400 watts. If you can find an ISO-450 power supply, that's also a very good one for the price, it is an OEM product made by NSpire (ASI distribution). A good rule of thumb is each drive needs 15-20 watts, plus the board and cpu need 150-200 watts; so with a good 400-watt power supply you could have around ten hard drives without stress.

For the hard drives, just get the best value-for-money SATA drives you can find. Right now you can get 300gb drives for about 120$ or less. If you know Linux, use that with software raid, otherwise use Windows Server 2000 or 2003 (XP doesn't support Raid-5).

The single best thing you can do for this server is to get a system case that lets you mount 120mm fans right up near the hard drives. Keeping them cool is your top priority, as this will make them last forever.

You should be able to build a 2.0 tb server for under 1000$ this way, and using a good power supply and quality fans like Vantec Stealths, you will enjoy a very quiet server. I wouldn't touch a rackmount with a ten foot pole, those things are designed for air-conditioned server rooms and they have extremely noisy fans to compensate for the small size.

[jeffjenx]

Thanks for the info, Billco. I'm going to be running Cat6 at my house and will be using it like you, primarily for streaming video/audio throughout the house (on the tv and other computers in the house). It will only have around 2-5 users on at any one given time, so maybe a PC would be good. I had a decent rackmountable case that was designed for a regular PC. It had the capability to hold about 8 hard drives at one time, but the thing would heat up like crazy because there's no room for any fans at that point.

I'm not much of a hardware guy, so I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I'm going to keep the company names you are giving in mind so my friend and I can build something that's safe and cheap. I do plan on running Windows 2003 Server, only because I know nothing about Linux and don't really have the urge to learn. At heart, I am a Mac guy and will have a couple of Macs in the run.

Anyways, enough babbling, thanks again and I'll return with some info on what I plan on doing, maybe you can help me make some of the right decisions.

[Billco]

I've been in the biz for well over a decade, hardware and software, mostly in the high end Feel free to msg me for help anytime. Whatever you do, you will end up spending the most on the actual hard disks so it doesn't matter all that much what kind of PC you use, as long as it's at least 1000 mhz you should be fine.