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What's the Best Server for Home Use?
vrmlguy writes "I've seen recent posts about low-power, off-grid computing and about small systems, but neither quite captures the object of my desire. I'm looking for the ideal LAMP-based server for home use. Cost of ownership (though not TCO!) is one of my primary concerns, followed closely by reliability. Here's my idea of the perfect server. The software requirements are easy. I want to run Slash, WIKI and/or blogging software that I and my family can access worldwide. The system should be able to keep up with requests coming in via DSL or cable-modem, but doesn't need to withstand slashdotting. There are Linux-based systems available for under $200, which appeal to me as a low-cost base. I would want to add at least one additional disk for OS-level RAID. Also, since this is a server, it will need to be available 24x7, which could run up my electric bill. Therefore, I'm willing to spend a bit more for something that supports a 'napping' mode that can, say, spin down the disks and slow down the CPU, but still respond to web-page requests. Are there systems available that do what I need at a price I can afford?"
An old workstation.
I picked up an old IBM Pentium 200 MMX box (64 megs 'o' ram, onboard NIC, no CD or HDD) for 16UKP. It's now running FreeBSD under my stairs. It's doing samba, nis & nfs, apache, cvs, ircd and a few other things besides. How much power do you need for this thing?
R Tape loading error, 0:1
A top of the line G4 with OSX Server.
You get what you pay for.
I'm running a mini-itx at work. They consume less than 40 watts (not counting the HDDs) and can manage without active (fan) cooling. Also, they are small and have network integrated.
The best home server. Let me see.
Easy to configure/expensive: Win2000 Pro, Pentium 300, Raid, two harddisks, a graffix card, an external card for sending movies over the air to your telly and mp3s through your home-cinema audio. (I watch divx'es like this). I recommend F-Secure for servers for antivirus. Use Apache or IIS for web.
Harder to configure/cheaper: FreeBSD, same system. FreeBSD also have some power management. I recommend F-Prot for FreeBSD. I takes approx 2 weekends before the system is 100%. Use Apache or tomcat for web.
Spinning down the disks is bad for the health of the disks, and you'll probably need the RAID-1 to ensure that your system stays up. Basically, a continuously spinning drive goes through less stress than one which constantly stops & starts, so watch out.
Since nowhere in your post did you mention that it must be a fast machine, and your desired goals are very light-weight, just buy a cheap, slow Pentium machine from Ebay or a place like this.
Save energy how you can, if it's important to you. Toss the CPU fan, and keep the heatsink. GlobalWin makes some huge Socket7 heatsinks which are suitable for this, all of which come with easily-removed fans screwed to them.
I've got a P133 which has been running various incarnations of Windows (now 2k) for years, with only a quiet PSU fan and a modest 6.5gig Seagate drive which spends most of its life spun down. It's nearly silent, doesn't make much heat, and I don't even think about its power consumption.
Configuring hdparm/apmd/kernel/BIOS to put the system to sleep would be good. As long as you don't let it drop into suspend mode, it'll come right back to life as needed.
Avoid hardware that you don't need. Don't use a sound card, find a slow/old/efficient video card. Keep things simple.
If you're worried about the reliability of a used machine, don't be. Remember, only the moving parts are subject to wearing out in normal use. Of these moving parts, you'll be completely eliminating the CPU fan. You can buy a nice new Sunon or Panaflow fan to replace whatever comes with the PSU, either of which should last a long, long time (the last dead fan I replaced was a Sunon that I've had spinning for 8 years).
All that's left is the hard drive, and you'll probably want to buy a couple of new ones no matter what you do, anyway, so that you've got two of them that match for your RAID.
That all said, I'm not exactly sure how this is Ask Slashdot material -- even if it's not something Google easily spits out answers for. Since specifications are so decisively absent, and cost is a factor, there's no way in hell you're going to listen to any of our suggestions, as none of them will be nifty enough or cheap enough for whatever purposes you actually end up using the thing for.
I strongly suspecct that you're either lost trying to figure out what kind of horsepower you need for the software you haven't picked yet, or that you already have a good idea of what you want and are looking for some sort of devine Slashdot Affirmation of your unspoken decisions. But you didn't ask us for software advice, or moral support - you asked us about hardware.
Running a glorified bulletin board for a small household is not a difficult task for a computer -- I had hundreds of users dialing into my 10MHz XT a decade ago, and things were plenty fast. WWIV under DOS, FWIW. In other words, the slowest computer capable of running Linux is more than fast enough for your purposes.
Find yourself a nice 386SL notebook, and be happy. The one I have here draws less than 12 Watts at full tilt, and the hard drive spins up in less than 2 seconds. Powersaving features are built-in, and the box supports killing the power to unneeded accessories. I just put Slackware 8.1 on it tonight, and things are looking good with a $2 PCMCIA network card. I bet an old Tandy/Northgate/AST/Blue Dolphin/Honeywell/AT&T/whatever 386 would work just as well, with a slight power-efficiency disadvantage.
And if you think you need anything faster than a 7-year-old Pentium desktop with RAID or a 10-year-old notebook for your family to write notes to eachother not more than several times a day, call Dell and buy yourself a new Optiplex or Dimension or whatever it is that they're hawking these days.
Or, stop complicating life by making things so simple, and invest in a corkboard and some scrap paper, plus a few moments to consider a proper location in which to put them.
Kid-proof tablet..
You want a laptop!
- Get something a couple years old
- Load the OS and software
- Pull the optical drive and replace it with your mirror HD
- set up software RAID
A laptop sounds almost ideal for your use -- low power (the powerbricks usually draw 70 to 100 watts), and they include a sleep mode for the CPU / disks / screen / etc. As an added bonus, they're quite compact and include their own keyboard, mouse, screen, and speakers! A nice little 3Com 10-base ethernet card (if the unit doesn't come with ethernet built-in), and you're all set.I'm a big fan of IBM ThinkPads. A nice, small (5 pounds or so) ThinkPad 600X (P-III/500, 256 MB, 20 GB, 1024x768 (XGA?), DVD reader) should sell on Ebay for about $600. Also, it's quiet! (That's important if this thing is going to live in an apartment.)
If that price is a bit high, step a little further back. The P-IIs get REALLY cheap ($200 range, though you give up memory and HD size too), and if you find something with an 800x600 screen it will be a lot less. (Unless it's a 'palmtop'.)
If you're in New England, check out Kaplan Computers in Manchester, CT. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, check out Boeing Surplus or RePC -- both have stores (in | near) Kent. If you aren't near any of these, sorry, I can't suggest anything other than (shudder) eBay.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
is just enough, make it run linux (i prefer debian)
...
or freebsd thingy....
(i like debian cause i don't need the sci-fi moments
that the commercial distributions have added, apt-get
is handy too.)
samba/squid/apache should run of them 'out-of-the-box'
so
that's my advice.
[ps. if u can, avoid running the machine with less than
128 megs of ram, it will save you from swapping often etc.]
if u must server dynamic content from your webpages,
choose perl or php (java and python are a bit more
heavy weight) and mysql or postgres.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
what everybody else has said so far is absolutely true - your requirements are trivial to say the least, something that even a 386 could easily handle.
What you really need is a cheap box of any kind, with say 32MB ram and a reasonable disk. A laptop would probably do, but thats more beans.
Just go for an old 486 desktop, CPU cooling shouldn't be an issue, and you should be able to rip out all fans, and make use of power saving features too. Look an ebay, reckon you'll find what you want for less than $50
Use VNC or a temporary external monitor/keyboard to configure the machine then tuck it away in a closet or under your desk or somewhere else you can forget about it.
Everybody seems to think that a low end Pentium machine is fine as far as power consumption goes. I think we should be able to do better than that: There are much more efficient solid state systems with low-power cpus. Something along the lines of the cerfcube comes to mind. We have the technology to move away from i386 based machines, especially in the small server arena. Let's do it.
Don't forget the Gameboy Advance! It's cheap, silent, small, and you can play more games on it than you could on a P3 running Linux!
But seriously, folks, pretty much any computer made in the past 4 years would be sufficient for your purposes, even if it takes a little extra RAM and a new HD, which it probably will. If you ask around, you could probably get somebody's old reject computer for 20 bucks or less. If you're not very familiar with GNU/Linux, BSD, etc., I'd recommend Mandrake as a good first distro, but LindowsOS looks pretty nice, as well.
The machine doesn't spin down it's hard drive or throttle the processor speed, but it's power draw while idle is probably within the 50-65W range as the power supply can provide a max of 90W. You can probably find quite a few of the first or second gen machines on eBay or other used hardware sites.
I also have an older Gateway 2000 machine (P5-200 MMX) with 160MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive running FreeBSD as my firewall at home. It's a bit overkill, but hey... it was given to me... the only thing I had to do was to clean it up, pull out the floppy drive (with the drive in, there was only a 2mm gap between the drive and the CPU's fan... not good!). Doing a make world on the machine is slow, but I'm able to pump around 40Mbps through the machine without any problems.
Another option is to check out some of the older IBM desktops that IBM is selling as refurbished machines. The specs on some of them are P2-300/350, 64MB of RAM and a basic hard drive. In most cases, you can slap in at least another hard drive, more SDRAM, and keep the processor as-is and have a fairly decent, small and fairly low power machine.
Other options include looking at the Mini-ITX machines or the VIA Eden platform as other have mentioned. Check out the Seagate ATA hard drives if you are looking for quiet hard drives. I have two Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB hard drives in a machine at work... all I have to say is that the power supply fan is louder than the drive. I can barely hear the drive seeking. I wish I could say the same for this 10K RPM SCSI hard drive I have at home :)
Powell has a nifty little box that looks like it has everything you would need. I'm not sure how much they would be, but since it's socket 370 I can't imagine it would be a lot. The motherboard is Intel designed and has 3 ethernet ports, 3 ide controllers, 1 PCI slot, and 2 USB ports.
I have the same motherboad and had no problems getting Linux installed on it. Right now I have a P3-800 running and it works fine. The great part is the power supply is an external brick, so you could probably put in a Via C3 to make it completely fanless. I think the PSU is something like 70W, with a Celeron and 2 drives the consumption would probably be less than half that.
Have you been stalked by Seth today?
Ok... Why RAID? Justify yourself. What are you going to be serving that won't fit on a cheap 80 gig drive, and why the redundancy?
Let me see if I can distill what you want. You want a cheap, low-power, stable, Open Source home web server, and you don't want to pay much for it.
From a system architecture standpoint, the low-power, low-cost Via C3 is the chip you are looking for, and wallmart's C3-based systems sound perfect.
Really, with the needs you describe, ANY computer from a P2 on will suffice. Unless you have symetrical DSL, your server won't be processing a lot of requests at once. Unless you have metal shavings in the case, or have removed all of the fans, any computer will be as stable as its operating system from a home web server standpoint. And given the right configuration, any system can spin down your hard drive.
My girlfriend and I keep three computers on all of the time, and have noticed no significant increase in our utility bill. The power to keep RAM alive, CPU cycling blanks, and fans blowing is negligable compared to the power it takes to microwave dinner. Just keep your moniter turned off and you won't notice the bill.
Go forth young man, install Debian on the computer you are using RIGHT NOW, and make a dual server / surfer. Whatever it is, I'm sure it is strong enough.
-Chris
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
Do you, by any chance, have a 13 GB (or so) drive? I have a 770Z with a drive that's so loud that I hate being in the same room with it! My wife's P-III/450 (18 GB drive) 600X is so quiet that I have to look at it to know whether it's on or not.
My email file is on that 770Z, shared on my LAN. So I leave it in the den and read mail on my workstation (which has speed-adjusted fans and a Barracuda IV drive -- nice-n-quiet!) I haven't had any problems with leaving it on all the time -- it's been one of my home systems for almost three years now, no problems.
I've used several laptop brands -- the ThinkPads with metal housings I would not really call "fragile." Yes, it'll break if you drop it, but most laptops will. If you're worried about that, buy a Panasonic ToughBook.
You're right about the batteries dying, they sure do degrade... can't speak to your 6-month figure, though. I'm still on my original 770Z battery, and it still lasts about an hour at full-tilt. I'm not going to buy a new one anytime soon, mainly because Pricewatch showed figures in the $270 range!!! There's a place near me that'll rebuild laptop batteries (Pacific Power Battery), so I'll patronize them if I can't buy a fuel cell by the time the thing fully dies.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Redundancy == instant backup. My home server setup has a partition for home directories and important data. This partition is mirrored on another drive. This means I don't have to worry too much about backing up the system and a regular basis.
This is just 4gb Travelstar, model DBCA-204860, I have just taken it out and it seems to "rattle", which might explain where some of the noise is coming from. Unfortunately, I have to power the drive down as much as possible, which means no ext3 for me on this drive.
What I meant by fragile wasn't that it is easy to damage the Thinkpad, which does seem to be a tough little blighter, but more in the leaving it powered on constantly, wearing out the CPU, fan and drives. Mind you, if you have experience of doing that, and I have never tried, you win!
This machine was half-inched from work, so the battery was already dead. I have found a place in the UK which has replacements for £52.87 (what's that, $80?) which has to be a bargain. They label them genuine IBM too!
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
So when the basement floods, or a fire breaks out, you can feel secure knowing that not one, but two copies of your data were destroyed at the same time.
RAID != backup.
Raid == fault tolerance. When one drive goes bad, your data is still ok.
Backup is for allowing you to get a system up and running again in the face of total catastrophy. Like a meteor hitting the house.
So use raid setups, but don't think you are off the hook for doing backups. Not unless you really could do without the data.
I find this to be a more than suitable server for home use, and actually, it can be taken to work if you need some service there, too.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Heh, not "indead" "indeed" :)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My current DNS, mail, and web server is 11.5" x 2.5" x 10.75" and draws about 20 watts. It's based on the VIA C3 EPIA motherboard. The only downside for your use is that there's only room for one hard drive inside this tiny case. But it's cheap (less than $200) and as the power input is 12V, I use two paralleled gel-cells for a UPS. (That way I can swap out one battery for maintenance without interrupting anything.) My DSL router also runs off 12V. Linux installed very easily.
There's a similar VIA-CPU based low power motherboard for a little less money that draws so little power that there's no CPU fan. For reliability this may be a good choice as it reduces the number of moving parts.
If you insist on room for two hard drives, see these cases.
I've never tried this, but I've thought about it on more than one occasion. Maybe you should try putting NetBSD/hpcMIPS on a handheld PC device. Compile Apache, PERL, whatever. Buy a 256MB flashcard and serve off of there. If you're weary of flashcards, try a microdrive (more space, less price). In any case, these devices should use less wattage than a laptop, and they are available on eBay for cheap (check out the IBM z50 -- its what most people seem to use with NetBSD/hpcMIPS). Just don't go serving any heavy traffic :)
Hope this helps.
-Turkey
When the basement floods or a fire breaks out, I think I have other worries than my low cost hobby server.
Losing non critical data is annoying, losing a house (or a part of it) is disastrous.
the pun is mightier than the sword
With 256 megs of ram and a pair of mirrored 9 gig disks, you should still be talking well less than $200. Heck, even a Sun SS10 or SS20 should due the job with capacity to spare, if you go dual processor with something like SM61s or better.
If you have a bit more to spare, some of the older Netras are incredibly nice for low amounts of cash.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Hope you don't expect to be connecting over the standard consumer DSL or Cable providers' lines. In case you haven't read most of the "acceptable use" agreements lately, you will *not* be permitted to run these services out of your box. They'll be sniffing for open ports, and you'll probably get nailed for violating their terms of service.
Then again, if the reason that you're looking to do this on the cheap is because you're plowing all your cash into a higher-end pipe that permits servers, never mind!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
The early model G3's shouldn't have any problem with the kind of network loads required (the cable/DSL bandwidth is going to top out before the CPU, disk or memory bandwidth becomes a problem) and should only cost about $400. Add in some extra RAM and a copy of OS X, and you're looking at no more than $650. If you go with Darwin, NetBSD, or one of the PowerPC Linux distro's, and you can get by with just the base system price.
If you really want a deal, and feel up to a bit of hardware hacking, you could look for a dead iMac. So long as the logic board is Ok, you should be able to hack together a power supply (if/when you need a monitor you can use any VGA style monitor with a Mac/VGA converter). The only real issue with an iMac would be support for a second hard-drive, but you might be able to make due with an external drive on a USB or Firewire port.
I don't know what a dead iMac goes for these days, but I can't believe you'd have to spend more than $300.
Hey -- is this place seriously any good?
My in-laws live in central CT. Always looking for a worthwhile excursion the next time we're visiting.
thanks...
If you look hard enough at the hobby websites and ebay, you should be able to score a nice hardware raid card that will do Ultra2 or Ultra SCSI or an IDE RAID card for under $100. That would greatly reduce your CPU load, making a Pentium or PPro machine more feasable.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I use a Shuttle SV24 with a Via C3 cpu for my serving needs.. The shuttle is a nice compact box, and the C3 uses less than 15 watts of electricity.
Kaplan computers is a custom builder (your infamous 'white box' computers), a parts seller, but most of all a recycler. You'll find much of the cast-off computers from Aetna, Cigna, Travelers, The Hartford, etc., littering their sales floor.
I stopped through when I was visiting family back in August, and they had Dell OptiPlex desktops -- P-III/450s and 500s -- for a couple hundred dollars. If you can load the iPix thing on their homepage, look at that center aisle (frequently stacked five-plus feet tall!) That's a LOT of computers!
The store itself is pretty big, their warehouse/refurb site is bigger -- an old supermarket. You wouldn't BELIEVE some of the crap they have on pallets there... (okay, maybe you would.) That site isn't "open to the public," but if you ask for something that's not in the store, and they have it, that's probably where it is.
There are a lot of laptops, someone had just offloaded a bunch of Dell units when I was there. Not too many ThinkPads -- probably because those go fast.
Used printers are available -- they had a couple HP 5si/MXs, perhaps a half-dozen color laser printers of various parentage, some wide-format (11x17) HP inkjets. (And a couple dozen 'regular' laser printers.)
They have all manner of cards (PCI and PCMCIA), dongles, cables, monitors (I'm looking at this on a 21" Digital from them), and whatever other corporate hardware could possibly be re-sold.
Their prices on new parts aren't great, so know the market of what you're looking for before you go there.
The Kaplan brothers can be a bit mercenary about their pricing. I think they follow the adage of "you'll never get it if you don't ask." This leads to:
- Rule #1: Don't forget to haggle!
The place has grown so much that you won't actually deal with one of the brothers, so your experience will vary based on which employee you get and what kind of mood they're in. I had decent luck -- walked away with a handful of 3Com 100 Mbit PCMCIA ethernet cards (among other things) for less than $100.The same axiom they live by also applies to you -- they only paid a tiny fraction of what they're asking, so there's plenty of wiggle room. (In some cases, they were paid to remove the hardware they're selling! What a beautiful racket!)
So yes, I think it's a decent place. It can be a fun place to blow an hour or two just picking through the old hardware. I wish we had a place like that out here on the west coast, but there isn't the industry to support it (read: insurance and financial-services companies). We do have used-computer stores, they just don't have the kind of stock that Kaplan does.
One more thing, if it's closer... there's a little hole-in-the-wall shop in East Granby called (IIRC) Corporate Computer Salvage. Yellow sign in a strip mall, right off the intersection of Rt. 20 and 187. Decent place if you want a $15 Pentium for an OpenBSD firewall. Not worth much of a trip, though.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I wanted basically the same thing as you want. I got my machine hooked up to my network, and for about a week I had what I wanted: Wiki, Slash, ssh, et cetera. Then the folks at the head-end of my broadband connection blocked all the ports (and before you ask, I wasn't using the defaults, and I wasn't running P2P of any kind).
They don't want you to have a home server, even if it's just for family or personal use. I'm almost mad enough to cancel the service, but then I'd be back to dial-up and we all know what fun that is.
So I'd advise you to check your Terms of Service carefully before you invest any money in this scheme. It's been said before here, but what the broadband people want you to do is what they show in the commercials: Send video e-mail (as if), and download streaming "content" (or is that steaming?) from their "partners."
Sounds great -- thanks for the info (esp. for the haggling tip -- I always haggle at flea markets, but actual stores aren't always so keen on it..)
At last, an alternative to the wasteland of Buckland hills mall....
I would recommend an MSI Net PC or equivalent system. They are small and quiet, have limited power requirements with everything onboard and 2 pci slots if you want to add a second ethernet card for nat/firewall purposes.
This one is $179 without memory/hd/processor, which you could probaby scrounge (or buy for probably $100).
I have had two of these systems (not this exact model) for quite some time and they do really well with Linux.
If you're throwing a second drive in there anyway, why not just spend the 5 minutes required to create a mirror of the first disk?
The tar kludge is more trouble than it's worth; why reinstall and re-customize your entire OS when you could've been mirroring the disk the whole time?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The guy is talking about using it as a server, which would most likely be stationary, so there's plenty he could do to the chassis to increase airflow: cut holes, even pull out all the guts and mount them on a board. In the later case you could likely eliminate the CPU fan entirely.
As for the battery, I wouldn't even consider using a laptop battery for anything other than portable use. A UPS that can handle the power draw of a laptop is dirt cheap, and would probably have longer battery life under that kind of load than the laptop battery would.
Also, laptop hard drives are actually more durable than their desktop bretheren. Part of the reason they're so much more expensive is that they are designed to endure far more mechanical stress, so leaving a laptop drive spinning all the time is much less of an issue than leaving a desktop drive spinning all the time. Additionally, the vast majority of hard drive mechanical stress occurs during spin-up, so never spinning down the drive actually increases life expectancy.
As for wearing out non-mechanical parts by leaving them powered, as long as they have adequate ventilation that's a non-issue. Non-mechanical part die because of excessive heat or freak power spikes (which should be eliminated by the UPS), they don't "wear out".
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Power is an issue, as is processor heatup. In my tests, also looking for a low-power, not necessarily too fast home network server, I measured a loaded Athlon XP 2000+ system eating up 1.2 amps off a 127v AC circuit. A basic P5-133 system consumes 0.4 amps. That's about equivalent to keeping a 60w lightbulb on at all times. So keep that in mind..
Seriously, are you expecting that your bulletin board will take up that much space? How much space are we talking about here? Is this anything that couldn't be handled by a simple guestbook program on the webspace that is most likely included with your DSL service? I honestly have no idea how much web space I have, but the basic SBC/Yahoo DSL package includes 110MB of online storage.
Let your providor worry about uptime, security, the power bill, and all the other the other headaches that come along with hanging your info out on the WWW. It's not like you aren't already paying for the service!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I'm looking for the ideal LAMP-based server for home use.
An iMac?
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
This puppy works and, for those who need it,
is very easy to install, configure & operate
It's just that simple...
I think you mean loser. Or maybe you really DO mean you're a looser baby.
I run a P233 with a somewhat recently released version of some server software *AHEM* for the OS. The mobo and memory (256MB) were free from a friend, but you may already have similar hardware gathering dust. I bought a 60GB HDD and since the BIOS on the machine was older, I had to buy a PCI IDE controller off of EBay ($15). Total cost was less than $100, and most of that was for the hard drive. The machine serves files in the house, and also acts as an FTP server for trusted persons. I also run it 24/7 for P2P file sharing. It also hosts my printer, acting as a print server. In other words, it performs a host of tasks that can be bandwidth intensive but not processor intensive. A 10/100 MB NIC rounds out the package. I run this in headless mode, attached to just power and ethernet. It's a great solution for me.
...is a server with LOTS of REDUNDANT drive space. I've had 3 drive failures since January of this year. I am sick to death of losing data. I want a Linux box with dedundant drives that I can mount locally. I have 480GBs in the PC I just built. It doesn't need that much space. I do need enough to save most anything I'll ever write though.
If you're trying to imply "use fewer, larger disks," then how do you expect to store a database in the double digit terabytes without using a storage cluster with several hundred hard disks? If that wasn't your point, then what did you mean?
Will I retire or break 10K?
as to power consumption / saving, i found from my daughter's science project that os/2 uses 20% less power (measured on the same machine)than windows both idling and with standard loads applies such as web page serving and graphics loading. contact www.scoug.com there are freeware web servers like dink's web >1 meg and FTP servers available. i use dinks web for my intranet.
The RAID is for redundacy, not capacity. My idea was to add a second 10 Gig harddrive to the one that comes with the Walmart box. If something breaks when I'm on a week-long business trip, the system should stay up until I can get home to fix it.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Oh, I understand the difference between fault-tolerance and a back-up. At work, I burn a CD-R quarterly as a personal backup, because once upon a time a previous employer suddenly and unextectedly laid off several people, including myself. I wound up losing a lot of stuff (primarily emails) that I wish I still had. As for my home server, I'll probably back it up regularly to my work latptop. OTOH, my ex-wife lost a hard drive immediately after uploading and deleting several dozen pictures from her camera. That's what the RAID is for.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?