Building a Budget Storage Server

An anonymous reader noted an article running over at Firingsquad talking about building a budget storage server. Talks about cooling, power, RAID, expandability, etc. Good overview type article, with practical application.

Comments

a tip

[flok]

A tip which I don't see mentioned very often: when using multiple drives in a raid-array, use drives from different batches. Or even better: from different vendors. Why? You don't want your complete raid-array failing because to much drives fail because of a common problem in their hardware/firmware.
Ok, chances on that might be slim, but in my opinion you're better safe then sorry.

Re:a tip

[supersmike]

Interesting tip. I didn't know that. At the same time, 3Ware recommends using identical drives if you want maximum performace for reads on RAID1.

Re:a tip

[Chronoforge]

Identical *model*. They can, and should, still be from different batches and (preferably) vendors.

Re:a tip

[pmz]

You don't want your complete raid-array failing because to much drives fail because of a common problem in their hardware/firmware.

Also, you don't want drives failing due to unpredictable failures of unmatched drives failing to interoperate.

If there were truly a statistical benefit to mixing drives like you say, I would have thought the analysts and Sun, EMC, and IBM would have adopted this strategy by now. Or have they?

Why is it that Sun's drive model numbers are also specific to a firmware revision? Why are arrays sold with matched drives and why are patches offered to upgrade firmwares to know revisions?

How is it even possible to integration test sets of unmatched drives and have any notion of the long-term MTBF of drives with firmwares who have never met before?

Re:a tip

[supersmike]

What constitutes an identical model? Is it number of cylinders and heads? I don't know much about hardware, but I'd love to try this if I could be sure I would still get that read performance they talk about when using identical drives. I seem to recall they even said from the same manufacturer. Probably because they assume I'll screw it up otherwise. =:-o

Re:a tip

[pmz]

How do you obtain identical models of drives from different vendors? Different lots from the same manufacturer, sure, but not the same models from different manufacturers. Or does Fujitsu sell Seagate drives, now?

Re:a tip

[Otter]

What constitutes an identical model?...I seem to recall they even said from the same manufacturer.

I assume he's saying to buy one Seagate UltraATA 160 Gb from one vendor and another one from a second vendor. Certainly "identical model" implies the same manufacturer.

Re:a tip

[flok]

Also, you don't want drives failing due to unpredictable failures of unmatched drives failing to interoperate.

True, but what if they're all on a different channel of your controller. Problem solved, isn't it?

If there were truly a statistical benefit to mixing drives like you say, I would have thought the analysts and Sun, EMC, and IBM would have adopted this strategy by now. Or have they?

Maybe nobody analyzed it. But nevertheless, you have some good points.

Re:a tip

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but many other places do sell Seagate drives. He said different VENDORS, not MANUFACTURERS.

Re:a tip

[RevDobbs]

Jebus, where is my "-2, Redundant AND Wrong" mod option?

Re:a tip

[bconway]

This is extremely poor advice to give, and I hope no one takes your word on this and jumps in the deep end. There are a host of unforeseen problems that can arise from using unmatched drives. This is not what the array manufacturers designed for, and they even warn against it in their documentation.

Re:a tip

[mindstrm]

head tracking.

ITs' not just identical numbers of cylinders and heads, but identical mappings of those to virtual cylinders/heads that you see in IDE.

No, it won't screw anything up, but performance will suffer.

The idea is that all heads can move in parallel with some types of raid. you don't want one drive writing it's block to have to move farther than the other one..

As for 3ware, I have a 12 port 3ware controller with 12 120 gig drives in it... and though its' tough for me to judge performance, as I use it chiefly over 100mbps ethernet, I will say it never seems to have hte IDE blocking problems when moving around large files that you see with normal IDE (which makes sense, considering the OS is talking to a real controller, which is taking care of all the IDE stuff behind the scenes.)

I don't think the performance is the same as a high performance scsi setup, but it certainly is good. and cheap.

Re:a tip

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we've analyzed it. It isn't worth the cost, time, and effort. Even from the same "bad" batch drives don't fail close enough in time for it to be a problem.

Re:a tip

[kfg]

Performance and data security are often at odds. So much so and so often that I think we can nearly take it as a given that increasing one decreases the other. It is the nature of the beast.

One must ask one's self, "How fast do I want my corrupted data delivered?"

KFG

Re:a tip

[Cramer]

• Why is it that Sun's drive model numbers are also specific to a firmware revision? ...

Because Sun puts Sun specific firmware on the drives they supply. No one has ever told me exactly why Sun has to have their own firmware -- or Sun isn't telling anyone what parts of the specs they rewrote specifically to work with their own OSes. Arrays are sold with a set of TESTED drives. Every single drive has been spun-up and stress tested before it's shipped with the array. That's why they cost more than what you can get at the local 7-11.

Let me bring up up to speed on MTBF... it's just a f***in' number. It doesn't mean anything. And it means even less for IDE drives. (IDE drives are tested in batch... make 1000 drives, test 10 of them.)

Re:a tip

[fatdave]

We had ca 25% of our deathstars fail inside two years. Out of about 30 drives we have had to change 7 or 8 due to failure. That is a failure rate we don't see with other brands.

Re:a tip

[pmz]

It doesn't mean anything.

For an organization with a very large number of deployed drives, it helps them estimate the number of spares they need for a given amount of time.

Re:a tip

[Macgruder]

Man, is it the day for everyone to switch off their brains?

He said different batches and different vendors. Not different models.

Use the same model all around, but buy them from different vendors (such as CDW, NewEgg, etc.) That way the chances of having a batch failure is minimized.

Re:a tip

[jcochran]

Let's see if I got it.

The manufactures say that you should/must use matched drives.

One implication of this, is that if a drive in a RAID array fails, you should replace it with a drive that matches the other drives in the array. But, since you most likely don't have a spare matching drive or two, then you should replace all of the drives in the array.

Somehow, that doesn't seem right and therefore the claim that the drives in an array should/must match is false.

Re:a tip

[pmz]

We had ca 25% of our deathstars fail inside two years.

Enterprise-class drives come with a five-year warranty. A truly bad batch of drives should be purged by then, leaving the manufacturer to pick up the tab for replacement. Also, you cite having to replace a drive every two to three months, which is a pain but not as bad as patching Windows.

Re:a tip

[karnal]

I can actually back you up on this with real world experience.

Just for grins (since my older motherboard supported it), I had a 7200rpm maxtor 30gb. Thought, hmmm, can do raid 0 - and get better performance.

Bought a 7200rpm seagate -- performance dropped through the floor. Why? Well, depending on where the data was, the seagate would have to reposition the head while the maxtor was still reading the same track....

Finally bought a similar maxtor to replace the seagate, and my performance did increase. Not by any amazing amount above the norm, but it wasn't dog slow anymore on reads and writes.

Re:a tip

[k12linux]

While we're handing out tips, here is one I learned the hard way. Create your RAID paritions at the lower side of the "specified" drive capacity. In other words if your new 180Gb drives actually have 180.5Gb available, DON'T use the extra .5Gb!

I had to replace a failed 180.4Gb drive on a 1Tb server and the replacement was exactly 180Gb. I had to back up 400+Gb of data, re-create the RAID array with 180Gb partitions and then restore. If you think backing up 60Gb is slow... ha!

Unfortunately, the 3ware utilities don't seem to allow you to specify the partition size.. they just use the whole drive. Mixing one 180Gb drive in with the 180.4Gb drives made it use 180Gb for all of them. Unfortunately that isn't very practical when you are creating a raid array on a batch of brand new drives. (You'd have to find one slightly smaller drive.)

Re:a tip

[jaavaaguru]

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Vendor Vend"or, n. See Vender.
A vender; a seller; the correlative of vendee.

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Vender Vend"er, n. From Vend: cf. F. vendeur, OF. vendeor.
Cf. Vendor.
One who vends; one who transfers the exclusive right of
possessing a thing, either his own, or that of another as his
agent, for a price or pecuniary equivalent; a seller; a
vendor.

"Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)"
Manufacture Man`u*fac"ture, v. t. imp. & p. p.
Manufactured; p. pr. & vb. n. Manufacturing. Cf. F.
manufacturer.
1. To make (wares or other products) by hand, by machinery,
or by other agency; as, to manufacture cloth, nails,
glass, etc.

So there you go. A manufactrer makes, and a vendor sells. One vendor can sell goods from more than one manufacturer.

Re:a tip

[DAldredge]

Why you are being an ass, you might want to check for typos before you post.

No definitions found for "manufactrer", perhaps you mean:

web1913: Manufacturer
wn: manufacturer

Re:a tip

[tigga]

No one has ever told me exactly why Sun has to have their own firmware

Firmware is a software, right? Software could be written in different ways and could serve different purposes incuding performance and reliability increase etc. They might as well hide hardware bugs, SCSI bugs etc.

BTW Network Appliance also have their own disks firmware.

Re:a tip

[Chronoforge]

No, by vendor I meant you buy two Western Digitals, one from mwave.com and another from newegg.com.

Re:a tip

[Chronoforge]

I mean you buy two SuperDriveCorp ReallyBig drives, one from store X and the other from Store Y.

Re:a tip

[revmoo]

As for 3ware, I have a 12 port 3ware controller with 12 120 gig drives in it... and though its' tough for me to judge performance, as I use it chiefly over 100mbps ethernet

Ahh, so you run a porn FTP too?

Re:a tip

[Cramer]

NetApp has "certified firmware" not "their own"... There's a difference between saying "we like fw v 4.1.0.5" and having your own custom "only given to us, made specifically for us" firmware. Sun (and Apple of the old days) have custom firmware. In fact, the drive ID says it's a sun (or apple) drive. NetApp drives are still seagate/quantum/whomever drives. And they use firmware you could find in retail drives.

NetApp's quality control requires all the drives have the same proven stable firmware so there are no gotcha's down the line. (I have several dozen drives from netapp arrays, btw.) Which means none of their drives run the latest junk from the factory.

[Please note, it is very rare to update the firmware on a hard drive. (or it used to be.) And it's equally difficult to get the update out of the manufacturer.]

Re:a tip

[lgftsa]

Yep, we just bought a StorEdge 3510 and the 5 drives we currently have installed all have SUN firmware.

We've also bought an Arena 8511 to test how an identical-but-IDE unit compares, and we're using standard Maxtor 7Y250P0-3(the fast ones with 8Mb cache).

It'll be interesting to see how the V240/3510 compares to a Xeon/8511. Both are dual CPU, with fibre.
channel.

Re:a tip

[laxrox]

Also, make sure the firmware is the same (and up to date) on all the drives.

Re:a tip

[Anonymous Coward]

We had ca 25% of our deathstars fail inside two years.

Count yourself lucky. The Empire lost 100% of their Death Stars in less than 7 hours.

Re:a tip

[bconway]

Who keeps an array without spare drives? Array manufacturers stock countless spares of the proper make and model for this exact reason, even if you don't. Please try again.

Re:a tip

[Polo]

That's interesting because the promise raid controllers (I have an sx4000) have an option that allows you to leave some space allocated from each drive just to solve this problem.

However, the driver support is kind of a pain. You have to install their drivers, and they're specific to one specific kernel. I installed redhat 9.0, but they support only the initial kernel (I think it was 2.4.20-8). If you used up2date to update the kernel (I believe the update was 2.4.20-20.9), the driver doesn't support it. What a pain.

Re:a tip

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read the other comments posted; he said different vendors, not different manufacturers. As others pointed out, you buy a 7200rpm maxtor 30gb from newegg, and another 7200rpm maxtor 30gb from compusa. That way, the odds of them being from the same maxtor batch that had a flaw in the head mechanism is lessened. Mixing different manufacturers is a recipe for disaster (in performance, if not otherwise).

Re:a tip

[karnal]

"Mixing different manufacturers is a recipe for disaster (in performance, if not otherwise)."

Is there an echo in here?

Re:article text

[Dav3K]

You were worried about this article being slashdotted??

Some people are just so lucky...

[ThatDarnHCIGuy]

I mean, I can't even afford to build a storage server, but some need a storage server just to store their budget!

Whoa...

[eurleif]

Their definition of "budget" is $3,140? Someone give me their budget right now!

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're talking about an enterprise level storage server type of deal, $3000 is cheap. I don't think we're talking about "I want a cheap computer to store my mp3's!"

I've got a $25000 mail server in the other room. $3000? Big whoop.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we're talking about "I want a cheap computer to store my mp3's!"

And you think you're gonna put IDE drives that aren't even in RAID in place as enterprise level storage? PFFFT!

Re:Whoa...

[obsid1an]

That is actually a pretty good price. This is not geared towards the average home consumer. This is more useful for a small business. To toss down $3000+ on a good network storage system for a business is money well spent.

Re:Whoa...

[AchmedHabib]

I've got a $25000 mail server
Yes, but would you want to replace that server and all the others with a budget server?

I mean, the people that bitch about the hardware is to expensive, are the ones that would not understand that you have to bring the entire server down to replace a harddrive. and who's "spare/family time" is going to be allocated for the job? :)
However for a near-line backup system it could work, or any other system where you can afford it to have downtime during business hours.

Besides from that, they seem to fall between 2 chairs here, whats with the geforce card for a storage server.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Besides from that, they seem to fall between 2 chairs here, whats with the geforce card for a storage server."

I think they missed the point, they went budget, then went picky with things like expensive keyboard and not using onboard video because they really needed a DVI input. Lame.

I could save $ on that stuff alone.

Keyboard and mouse combo are beyond needs, gimme a $5 keyboard and $5 mouse. A display requiring DVI is probably LCD, we'll say he wants a $250 display (to be cheap to say the least) and %70 for the excess video card. I'll go with onboard video and a cheap $50 monitor (hell I can save on that by just switching one from another PC) for.

I saved $300 there at least.

It's a storage server, you're not supposed to connect to it ever once it's started up. And what's with the statement that it shouldn't run Linux? I couldn't think of a better OS to run a server on under a budget. Why spend bulk cash to pay for an operating system on a machine that's just sitting there? His concern is USB/Firewire compatibility to access old data as it's moved out of the machine... uh, I have no intention on ever bringing my storage servers down after they're up, especially to do a dirty op in removing a storage disk. And what's with DVD writers for backup? You're storing 1TB of data on the machine and you're going to back it up 5 GB at a time? Please connect to a tape library if you're going to back up that much crucial data PER YEAR (as stated the drives should fill in a year).

This is not a good article for any of it's goals.

Re:Whoa...

[jridley]

Price out storage for an EMC box sometime. We pay about $15,000 for a single 18GB SCSI LVD drive. I guess $14,600 of that is the cool plastic rails they bolt on, the testing, and having some drone come out, plug it in and configure it (we're not allowed to actually touch it).

That doesn't actually get us 18GB of space. We have to buy TWO of them for every 18GB we want. Plus, we're in a split site failover configuration, so it's actually four.

So, besides paying about a quarter million for the chassis and six digits a year for support, we pay about $60,000 US for every 18GB of space.

Happily, our company is dumping EMC. There are plenty of storage companies out there that are as good for way less money.

Re:Whoa...

[PPGMD]

I priced out a pretty nice one that was hot swappable EIDE RAID with a tape back up for $6,000 no OS. Just wish I remembered where I saw it, forgot the URL.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

the ones that would not understand that you have to bring the entire server down to replace a harddrive.

Woah. You have to bring down your $25,000 server to replace a hard disk? Christ, the only reason I have to come down is if RAM goes bad, or if a CPU fails. And that's on more of a $15,000 server, rather than $25,000.

I think you're doing something wrong. =(

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was a server. What's with the need for a keyboard, mouse, and monitor? My v880's don't even have video cards and have never had a keyboard or mouse plugged into them.

Re:Whoa...

[RevDobbs]

Firing Squad is a gaming site, and their goal is to also make it a workstation, and a 1337 one at that. As such, they dumped money into silly things like LED displays, rounded cables, an uber kewl case, graphics card, DVD burner, etc., all of which upped the price with out improving the performance that one would look for in a "storage server".

First, the last thing I would want is someone doing daily work on such an important computer. I don't need Word or IE to crash & burn and eat the OS with it, rendering everybody else's work unavailable to them.

Second, no comments are made about the OS, or even about what the performance of their "Budget Storage Server" will be. It seems odd that they so blithely dismissed RAID, even though the performance and reliability improvements are known.

Finally, there's no mention of tape backup, pretty much the quickest and cheapest way to archive tons of data; why collect a terrabyte worth of information and leave it to the reliability of the HD?

Based on the title, I was hoping the article would be about a file server with high performance-to-cost ratio, something like integrating a BSD/Samba machine into an mixed NT, MAC, & UNIX enviornment, with some concreate numbers regarding sustained data transfer or multiple users in an office workspace. Instead, it was an article about stuffing 5 HDs into a gaming rig. BFD; I find the case mod articles to be more interesting than that.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

Their definition of "budget" is $3,140? Someone give me their budget right now!

Damn dude, they only spent like, what was it, $190 for the power supply? Thats like nothing. You can only buy a COMPLETE desktop system for $400-500 dollars!

Re:Whoa...

[tigga]

You even do not need monitor, keyboard and mouse for server... Some Intel motherboards allow BIOS redirection through serial port.

And what's with the statement that it shouldn't run Linux? I couldn't think of a better OS to run a server on under a budget.

FreeBSD!!!

Re:Whoa...

[Diag]

I'll say "whoah"... Are you locked into a decade old price or something? We pay 10 Australian cents per MB which would come out to about $AUD1,800 for 18GB, or about $US1,200. And that's Useable RAID-5 (not Raw), including incremental cache and chassis upgrades. The disk is HDS 9960.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are too quick to comment. The parent post is talking about the budget server, not the $25K one.

Re:Whoa...

[WNight]

What makes FreeBSD better? I know it's an option but as far as I can tell it's just another *nix, but with fewer drivers.

Re:Whoa...

[dpoulson]

I totally agree. I was hoping for some interesting stuff on IDE vs SCSI ( I know, flog a dead horse!) and the various RAID options open to both. I'm currently looking at building a file server with RAID and have seen some pretty good stuff that is priced pretty well for the home user.

I got bored half way through the article when it just got more and more involved in making this system 1337!

Re:Whoa...

[_Sharp'r_]

Yeah, go take a look at some NetApp products.

They're easy to use (no consultants required), easily expandable and cluster easily, plus you can network attach them and get speeds comparable to EMC SANS that cost 10x as much up front.

If you can't tell, I'm very happy with our NetApps and just wish I could figure out an honest justification why my company needs to sell me one cheap for personal use...

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

just checking out Apple, to get their single proc 1U XServe with only 720Gb, 1GB ram, a ATI7200 or something, and 2 GbitNICs costs 5,000 to get dual proc, it costs 5,900 for Dell... $4,889, again, in 1U. me, I'd pay the 1,300 extra for 1U sacraficing the expandability.

Re:Whoa...

[Aviancer]

I built a department webserver for my company. They insisted on using vendor X, whose 2x PIII Xeon 1.7 system cost $15000.

No, price is not usually the issue in corporate america.

Re:Whoa...

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is for people with bigger penixes

Re:Whoa...

[jridley]

We're very happy with our new NetApp server as well. The EMC contract runs out Dec 2, and we'll have the chassis on a pallet the 3rd.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The choice of IDE over SCSI is now easier then ever due to the vast difference in their price/performance ratios"

Yeah, if you want to build a mickey-mouse file server.

Re:WTF?

[pivo]

Yeah, if you want to build a mickey-mouse file server.

Which is what they've done. Notice they're also using it as a workstation to play games.

Self?

[jargoone]

CDs may self-destruct at sustained speeds of greater than 56x

The author (or the person who wrote the sidebar comment) needs to learn the meaning of self-destruct...

Re:Self?

[Mulletproof]

Of course, most people aren't quite that anal and knew exactly what he was saying.

Re:Self?

[jargoone]

You mean most people (myself included) knew what he was trying to say. Writing a technology-related article requires mastery of both the technology, and the language in which you are writing. That particular example should have seemed odd to anyone with halfway-decent English.

Re:Self?

[swordboy]

As a side note, engineers *never* use the term "self-destruct" in a technical report. The same goes for "explode" and other synonyms. The correct term is:

"Spontaneously Disassemble"

If your laughing, make note that I am being completely serious. I've seen this term on paper too many times.

Re:Self?

[SharpFang]

Didn't you know the new CDs have special chips that using photometrics, measure their RPM, and once 56x CD speed equivalent is reached, they start a timer, which gives you exactly 1000 seconds to spin down (which resets the timer) and if you don't, a small C4 charge embedded in the inner ring of the disc is detonated?

Re:Self?

[Anonymous Coward]

That particular example should have seemed odd to anyone with halfway-decent English.

That rules out most slashdotters, then.

Re:Self?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only terrorist would want to go faster than 56x!

Re:Self?

[schlick]

I vaguley remember a newspaper article about a nuclear power plant experiencing "super rapid radical disassembly"

Last time I checked

[bigjnsa500]

Last time I checked, motherboards only come with 2 IDE channels. According to the article, they are using 4 250gig IDE in 'standard' configuration (ie, no RAID or SATA) and using a system drive. Uh, 4+1 don't add up to 4.

Since they couldn't afford RAID, what about software RAID? Way faster than normal IDE operations.

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

The system drive uses the S-ATA connector. The other 4 use the 2 P-ATA connectors.

Re:Last time I checked

[mindstrm]

Lots of motherboards come with 4 IDE channels now, and onboard IDE raid. Very common, not expensive.

Re:Last time I checked

[Space cowboy]

I've never trusted software RAID on a multi-CPU (ie: one of our typical servers) system. I've had the raid screw up far too often for co-incidence. I'm pretty sure there's a race condition in there somewhere. I've had a server run for 5 months with no problems, then suddenly I get an SMS that a node is down. Bike over to the co-lo, and the filesystem's completely screwed... Never again. Hardware raid all the time :-)

Simon.

Re:Last time I checked

[splaytree]

From the Article:


ATA-133 controllers

We added a PCI Promise ATA-133 controller so we can run our four Maxlines as all master drives. This will improve simultaneous access performance and allows for an easy upgrade to eight storage drives.

Cost: $30

Re:Last time I checked

[swb]

And hardware RAID isn't that expensive, especially IDE raid. Under $400 to eliminate all the worrying and guesswork is money well spent.

Plus I'm not aware of any software RAID solutions you can install the OS itself into, it's always just the data drives.

Re:Last time I checked

[Zapman]

In principle, I agree with you. HW Raid (if you can get/afford it) is the way to go. Dead drive? Yank it, and pop in another. Automatic resync. No down time.

SW Raid however, isn't (always) as bad as you make it out to be, at least under solaris. Their 'disksuite' product has been very reliable here. Every server has it, and we've yet to see any real problems with it. Great for mirroring the OS drives.

Before version 4, disksuite had some teething problems, but the 4.2.1 release rocks.

Re:Last time I checked

[Space cowboy]

I should qualify what I said - I've not used it under Solaris. My bad experience was with Linux, and that was about a year ago last I "was tried" by it.

I would also say that the Irix xlv system is fantastically reliable - there's a 20 Terabyte "disk" at one of our clients (Post-houses have a lot of disk for all those film-frames :-) which has never had a problem...

Hardware raid is surprisingly cheap for commodity PC's. Certainly it's worth the peace-of-mind for me :-)

Simon.

Re:Last time I checked

[macdaddy]

I last used it on my Linux Distro mirror server about 5 years ago (don't have the server any more) and it worked flawlessly. Of coure I didn't waste my time with IDE at that time. I only used SCSI back then. That might have made a difference. Oh, and this on was a PPC Linux box as well. My $.02

Re:Last time I checked

[Sketch]

I've been running Linux software RAID1 on a few SMP boxes 24/7 for the last 3-4 years with no problems other than drive failures. My oldest one even still runs a 2.2 kernel with the old raid-0.5 subsystem that does not do automount, background consistancy checks, etc.

Assuming your software is up to date, if you are only having the problem on one machine repeatedly, I'd look for a hardware problem...maybe a flaky controller or bad cable? (This is why you should not put two drives from the same array on the same cable.)

Re:Last time I checked

[Lehk228]

You can get IDE PCI cards, my roommate has one in his Machine.

Re:Last time I checked

[chunkwhite86]

Never again. Hardware raid all the time :-)

I totally agree. I use a 3ware 8500 raid card in my machine at home. It's about $300 I think and supports hardware SATA raid, including RAID5. This card is well supported by Linux and is the only ATA raid card found in the kernel's "scsi" section!

Re:Last time I checked

[Cramer]

"install into" != "boot from"

The OS can generally reside anywhere as long as the core kernel knows how to mount it. In Linux and most other *NIX, that's a matter of keeping the kernel (plus boot loader and initrd) outside the array. For Windows, it's a little harder as various drivers have to get loaded.

[where array is something other than RAID1. RAID1 is just a bunch of disk clones.]

Re:Last time I checked

[antifun]

Been using Linux SW raid in the 2.4 kernel series for a year+ now and it has worked like a champ, with both IDE and SCSI devices. All disk servers were SMP (overkill but management wanted it that way). Dunno what you screwed up.

If your criteria for an adequate disk server include either (a) high performance or (b) long-term maintainability, then you should choose SW raid.

Most HW raid systems, especially cheapo PCI cards, but even expensive Fibre Channel-SCSI3 rackmount monsters, offer either extremely primitive performance metrics or none at all. With SW raid, you normally get the full performance-monitoring and tuning capabilities of the host OS. Big win. You will also get better performance from a SW raid, given the same drive layout, and as long as you do not use the box for anything else at the same time. It should be obvious but some people don't believe this.

The other big win is more important when you spend more money than $3000 (a pittance in this market): there's no hardware manufacturer to get bought, go out of business, or change product lines. No multi-thousand-dollar support contract or custom software to configure the RAID or any of that other crap. Trust me, when your dedicated RAID box's motherboard flakes on you and you discover the manufacturer has gone out of business, you'll be cursing yourself for choosing HW raid every time you search Ebay for a replacement part.

Not to mention that commodity, general-purpose HW is always cheaper to replace, and its performance/price ratio grows much faster than special purpose HW. The HW raid system with the 200MHz i760 and 64MB RAM might have looked great in 2000 but now you're stuck with the proprietary on-disk format of an out-of-business vendor with no way out except to build a new system of the same capacity and copy everything over. (In the case of large data warehouses, "full backups" don't usually happen.)

HW raid was compelling in the past. Now, with commodity hardware so cheap, and open, stable SW raid systems floating around, you'd be a fool not to prefer them in many situations. If you want a fire-and-forget dedicated box, go for it. But be ready for the "forget" part in a year or two.

Re:Last time I checked

[Cramer]

Well, mirroring (RAID1) is pretty painless on any system. Arrays are simply clones. It's very easy to deal with situations where a clone has dropped out.

For RAID0, a failure means lost data. "Please drive through."

For RAID>1, software based solutions can be a serious pain in the ass. Ok, what's the commands to quiet the bus for drive removal? what's the commands for restoring a drive? What happens when I update the kernel/raid software/etc.? I've had major trouble with linux basically having to bring the system back to the workbench to get RAID reactivated. I've had minor problems with Solaris -- patches breaking things until I read the solution to a non-public bug report. (A public patch breaks things but only contract customers are told how to fix it.) Windows is just a pain all around -- it stores the raid configuration in the registry (or used to).

Re:Last time I checked

[antiMStroll]

Four channel IDE boards have been available for years at a marginal premium. My home server is based on the HighPoint-equiped Abit-KT7 RAID board, running Gentoo and a couple of 120 gig Maxtors in software RAID0. Effortlessly saturates the single 100 mbps NIC and never burps.

For a better home server though, my recommendation would be to find something along the lines of a P3-550 Compaq desktop. It's dead quiet, generates no heat runs for years without problems. It's more than enough horsepower for home use. I bought one from work for $50.

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, never had a problem with software RAID on Windows...

Re:Last time I checked

[stmfreak]

Never again. Hardware raid all the time :-)

Riiiiight, because that hardware RAID doesn't have any of that untrustworthy software in it. No bugs there. Move along.

Re:Last time I checked

[PygmySurfer]

The system drive is Serial ATA, not Parallel ATA. So, the 4 x 250GB drives sit on the Parallel IDE chain, and the Serial ATA drive plugs in to one of the SATA ports. 4+1 don't add up to 4, it adds up to 5.

Re:Last time I checked

[PygmySurfer]

I guess I should've read more.. Actually, they're using a Promise PCI IDE controller, so all four of the Parallel ATA drives can be configured as a Master, rather than utilizing a Master/Slave combo.

Re:Last time I checked

[Lumpy]

and the other funny part is that they talk that reliability is important and yet dismiss SCSI right away.

please find me IDE drives with a 5 year warrenty. Or server class IDE drives.

I can't. I tried. and I decided that for our "cheap" server we use U160 drives off a 29160 scsi card and use software raid 5 on a linux box running samba.

I came in less than they did, yes I have less storage but I know that my drives will still be spinning and running happily in 2007 you can't say that for today's IDE drives. I also added a DLT7 drive (anyone that spec's a server WITHOUT a backup solution is a hack.) to back things up daily.

IDE is great for consumer class stuff. I would NEVER EVER trust critical business data to any server running IDE drives and without a good backup system like a DLT drive.

Re:Last time I checked

[harryk]

While I didn't read the article, the 'more than 4' ide drives could have easily been achieved by using a add on PCI-IDE card. I've got the ACard, 4 channel there, plus the 4 channel onboard ide. gives me access to a total of 8 devices.

harryk

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the commands for restoring a drive?

raidhotadd

What happens when I update the kernel/raid software/etc.?

Never heard of a problem there.

What's the commands to quiet the bus for drive removal?

poweroff :-)

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux supports booting from RAID1 disks, but not RAID5.

Those $400 IDE raid cards can be far slower than software raid. I switched all mine from HW to SW and things work much better. They are easier to maintain too.

Re:Last time I checked

[Ledskof]

Linux Software Raid works nice. You can install the OS on it too. Or at least I have, MANY times.

I've never had any problems with it. I have a production server that has been running it for a year. I have a ResierFS MDRaid5 volume for storage. Some of the other stuff is raid0 and raid1, depending on my attitude for different mount points at the time. No problems with any of it on the storage level, ever. Even when I had to swap a bad drive out. The rebuild went faster than the hardware rebuilds I've had to deal with too.

So far my experience with software raid is that it is so configurable and flexible that hardware raid is just too asphyxiating. Oh yeah that plus I've never experienced a stability issue with it.

Plus, there's that beautiful EVMS package that makes volume management really fast and easy.

Griping about software raid should be specific to operating system, application, and method, etc.

Ask the HP-UX guys how solid software raid is for them.

Re:Last time I checked

[slaker]

Good IDE RAID is somewhat more expensive than that. It comes from a company called 3ware, and most of their products need 64bit PCI, something most PCs, even a lot of low-end servers, don't have.

Re:Last time I checked

[tigga]

Been using Linux SW raid in the 2.4 kernel series for a year+ now and it has worked like a champ,

Just a year??? And you giving advices?;)))

If your criteria for an adequate disk server include either (a) high performance or (b) long-term maintainability, then you should choose SW raid.

That's bullshit.

Software RAIDs have much more problems in maintenance and have special requirements to achive same level performance as hardware RAIDs. Software just have much more ways to crap on you than hardware. Usually you can't boot from software RAID or it's tricky. As for performance - consider, for example mirror on one SCSI channel. Software RAID writes two times data then hardware RAID. It easily could be bottleneck.

Not to mention that commodity, general-purpose HW is always cheaper to replace

I better buy something that does not need to be replaced at all ;)) Well, it's not possible, but you may lower frequency of replacement.. Hmm, I actually agree - I like commodity, general-purpose hardware RAIDs ;)))

HW raid was compelling in the past. ...
If you want a fire-and-forget dedicated box, go for it.

All my boxes fire-and-forget. I have much more things to do then tinkering with software when I can avoid it.

Re:Last time I checked

[sylvandb]

please find me IDE drives with a 5 year warrenty.

No problem. I'll provide all you need with a full 5yr warranty replacement with same or better drives. With a 5 year warranty they'll cost about 2x-3x the price of normal IDE drives, but that is still less than 1/2 the price of similar capacity SCSI drives. Don't be confused if the drives look just like what you'd buy elsewhere. If you buy from me they are actually 2x as good since you pay 2x the price.

Re:Last time I checked

[lgftsa]

My three Accusys 7500 modules are working fine, too. I've not had a drive fail yet, but I've faulted them manually during testing with no problems.

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

"While I didn't read the article"...

Then why the fuck are you posting? Sheesh.

After reading so many incorrect posts in this thread, from people who obviously hadn't read the article, I want to line you all up for a running group pimp-slap. Whack-whack-whack, right down the line. And then knee one of you in the nuts, just as an example for the rest.

I mod you all -1: Fucktards.

Re:Last time I checked

[dusty123]

Well - I cannot confirm this. To my mind Linux software RAID is SMP-safe. I have a RAID5 sw-RAID for myself on a dual P-II/266 which is up and running for ~ 1 year now without a glitch.

Moreover there is even ReiserFS on this RAID5. It's only 8GB and not very heavily used but I never suffered from data loss due to a software failure.

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, nobody will ever read this.

HW raid was compelling in the past. Now, with commodity hardware so cheap, and open, stable SW raid systems floating around, you'd be a fool not to prefer them in many situations.

OK then. Please describe how to do hot swap with SW raid only?

Re:Last time I checked

[Megor1]

Well first off I'm not sure why you would think the hard drive interface would have any impact on the reliability of the hard drive. Do you think SCSI drives require different iron for the plates? Are the heads different? I'd wager no, the difference would be in the circuit board that handles the logic for the hard drive, which should not have an impact on hard drive life.

If you really want a 5 year warranty for an ide hard drive you can always buy a Maxtor raptor, but really after 5 years in a raid configuration you might as well have replaced the hard drives already. You will be able to get way more performance and space at that time.

Re:Last time I checked

[|_uke]

If you look at the motherboard, I believe it has 4 ide channels.

If you look at this pic:
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/hirez.asp?f ile=/h ardware/building_budget_storage_server/images/04.j pg

You can see them in the following order:
1. Blue ATA Connector
2. ATA Connector(s) (Is that one, or two SATA Connectors I see?)
3. ATA Connector
4. White ATA Connector

The author is using an SATA drive for the system drive. This leaves an entire ATA channel for other things (cdrom and atc)

My motherboard for example has 4 channels. Two ATA and two SATA. Its very common now for motherboard manufactuers to include additional IDE ports, especially with 'raid' capabilities. (Generally done via a third party ide controller chip.)

Re:Last time I checked

[viper66]

Western Digital Raptor

Re:Last time I checked

[Anonymous Coward]

SCSI drive are made better. IDE drives are cranked out without much care.

Thus the difference.

you have never used SCSI or RELIED on SCSI. so you really dont know.

if it's important to you, SCSI is the only choice for storage and backup.

Re:Last time I checked

[harryk]

Blow me.

I was merely responding to the poster. He was obviously mis-informed about the availability of having more than 4 ide devices within a single box.

so, as you put it, since you didn't read the parent post, here's your pimp slap back. thwacka!

Re:Last time I checked

[harryk]

And not to mention that everyone that posted said the same fucking thing about using additional cards.

The article would have been a pointless read.

Did I miss something ?

[tmark]

In an article about building your own storage server, why are they spending so much time talking about irrelevant things like *video card's 3-d performance* (128 MB in a storage server ??), mouse and keyboard choice, and yet fail to even so much as mention (as far as I could tell) OS choice or software ?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[23_Elders]

I agree, that seemed much more like, "Watch us build an expensive PC with a lot of hard disks" than "Watch us build something useful for reliable network storage."

I am currently trying to put together a RAID 5 file server and they do not cover any topic of use to me in that article. For example, practical backup solution? They chose a DVD burner, why that over similar tape solutions? I would guess price, but it would be nice if they at least mentioned some of their considerations. Especially since it would take 112 DVD-R's to back up a terrabyte?

Also, aside from their DVD backups, they seem to have no data recovery plan in case a hard drive fails. I guess they aren't storing anything important on these drives?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[kayen_telva]

agreed. terrible "review". out of touch with its "budget" title. no mention of OS/software at all.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[ashkar]

There seem to be many similar problems in this article.

• A file server would be better off without a floppy or dvd drives. A cdrom drive would suffice and provide a small security benefit as well.
• A second ethernet port is definately needed in a production machine such as this, but why connect it to the internet. It seems that that would be unnecessary and possibly even dangerous firewall or no.
• His suggestions for memory and cpu are probably way too high. The gig of memory I guess I can understand, but even eight ATA drives shouldn't require a 3.0 P4. Someone correct me if I'm wrong here. I've never had more than four drives going at a time.

This article should have been passed around a bit more before publication and maybe these errors would have been fixed.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[jmt9581]

They did mention OS choice briefly:

This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.

After skimming the article, I have some questions:

• Why does it not make sense to put a journaling filesystem in an external box?
• Why not just use ext2 if they don't want a journaling filesystem?
• Do they mention their choice of OS anywhere else in the article?

To me, this read more like an advertisement for some of the latest and greatest in computer technology than a real article on building a 1TB fileserver from commodity parts. For example:

"For this application we'll use an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 128MB card to stay within budget. No one should mistake this card for a 3D powerhouse though; it is among the slowest 3D cards on the market -- fast enough for us, but slow compared to the other NVIDIA and ATI offerings. Most "servers" do with an integrated graphics chip like an ATI Rage XL or less.
Cost: $70 with free t-shirt or hat"

Why the heck would you need a fileserver to support "at least 1024x768 resolution" and have "good drivers?" Are you actually going to be using it as a workstation?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[tlk nnr]

Yup.
And they build a storage server without ECC memory. We had that - by chance we noticed that a memory chip generated single bit corruptions. We were busy for days comparing every file with older backups. And that was around 50 GB data, not 1 TB.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You are right. They are probably unbalanced gaming twits. Ignore them.

Few to no real servers actually need 3D, and 8MB is often judged to be plenty enough if you look at the boards designed for server use.

The only exception is if these people are making their every day system into a server, which may not be advisable for anything.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Cramer]

Indeed. In all of my "servers", they have the absolute cheapest crap-video card I can find simply to make the BIOS shutup -- which happens to be a 6$ video seven AGP video card :-) (The server at my feet has an S3 Savage 4 litterally pulled from the trash...)

(And the "appliances" I build at work have the video hardware -- ATI Rage XL -- disabled.)

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is silly to have RAID harddrives not using a journalling filesystem. Sure, your data is redundant if a drive fails, but if something corrupts the filesystem, you've now got 3+ drives with invalid data.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Megaslow]

I dont know... None of the servers I support even have video cards, keyboards or mice!

I think this guy doesn't know the difference between a true "server" and a PC providing services.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[daviddennis]

You missed this:

This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.

Of course I went through the whole rest of the article to see what OS they did use, and no dice. Maybe they're using Windows but don't want to be flamed by Slashdotters.

Seems to me RAID 5 would have given them better protection for just $250 more especially considering that the total cost of their system wound up over $3,000.

Their main argument against RAID 5 seems to be that if they don't use it, they can break out the drives and use them individually without reformatting; the information will simply be on the drives. But that means you couldn't stripe the drives at all, so you would have 5-250mb drives and not 1-1tb effective drive, which I thought was what they wanted.

Their final objection is that you couldn't expand to 2tb later since they only got an 8-drive case. I suppose this is because IDE cards can serve four drives each, so they would simply buy another IDE card. But they already need to, since they have a 110gb system drive. So they could hook up the fifth drive to that, and hook up the second array's fifth drive to it too.

So I think I'd seriously lean towards a 10-drive case and RAID 5. But that's just me, and it may expose my ignorance regarding hardware design. If you feel in the mood, feel free to tell me what I've left out.

D

Re:Did I miss something ?

[El Bigote]

My only question is why the hell does someone need a 128meg 3-d vidoe card in a server which is not going to have anyone sitting in front of it most of the time?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[value_added]

I don't agree on the "no floppy" advice. RAID drivers, for example, generally come on floppies. If one is installing Win2000 (again, an example), you'd be hard-pressed to set up the OS without being able to insert the floppy containing the setup drivers. And yes, while it is possible to rebuild an installation CD, it's not unreasonable to assume that's always possible.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[kiwimate]

In an article about building your own storage server, why are they spending so much time talking about irrelevant things like *video card's 3-d performance* (128 MB in a storage server ??), mouse and keyboard choice, and yet fail to even so much as mention (as far as I could tell) OS choice or software ?

Look at the banner on the pages -- "Home of the Hardcore Gamer". It's because they're gamers and know everything about tuning a system for games, but don't know the first thing about building a server. What they've ended up with is a mish-mash that won't serve any particular purpose well, except possibly as a rather decent PC for a secretary (except no secretary would want something that big at her desk).

As one reads through the article, what leaps out is that they're most comfortable when debating relative merits of 3D video cards and building uber-fancy custom machines designed for gaming excellence. Good for them, but this is far removed from building a server.

It's got a terabyte of utterly unsafe storage. No RAID, no nothing.

It's got a video card which is overkill for a server but which they disdain as a low-end 3D graphics card.

They've got one hard drive for the system and everything else as data, so they're not building a "high performance" system or else they'd have a separate drive for paging.

They haven't discussed the types of files they'll be storing at all -- will they be tiny text files, medium sized spreadsheets and documents, or massively large presentations and CAD files? This affects how you configure your system.

Their approach to planning for hardware failure is "we bought the better quality stuff so we don't have to worry so much about MTBF". No need for RAID or redundant power supplies. (Although oddly enough they've chucked in two NICs.)

Did I mention no RAID? Yet they've bought a 3D graphics card (overkill), a nice mouse (in case they want to do graphics editing or perform fast wrist actions on their storage server), a wireless keyboard, and a fun little LED display to tell them how fast the CPU fan is spinning.

Look at how they're future-proofing the system, by the way. They anticipate going through 2 TB of data every year. So every six months they're going to pull out the existing 1 TB of storage, plop into an external array, and put in a new set of disks. I wonder how long this system is supposed to last...

All in all a very odd system indeed. In fact, a pseudo-server built by gamers with no understanding of how to build a server.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Stephen Samuel]

agreed. terrible "review". out of touch with its "budget" title. no mention of OS/software at all.

Yeah. They did mention something about not using Linux because they didn't want ext3fs or reiserfs on their disks (or something like that). ah, shoot.. .here's the quote.

This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.

So it sounds vaguely to me like they've got 4x250MB drives with no RAID, an ill thought out backup system and probably running Wintendos because it's a more stable game^H^H^H^Hserver operating system... Then they wrote this article to justify it.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Cramer]

Because they are installing windows (xp home?) on it. I'd also recommend avoiding NTFS on removable media outside of a domain -- bad things happen when one NTFS volume ends up on a different "alien" system.

Rule #1: Servers don't have video hardware - period.

I never could get an answer as to why all the Sun Enterprise servers at Interpath had Creator 3d video hardware in them? Hello, that's a 2000$ waste. (and why do people install all of X11 on systems that will never X applications?) They were web and email servers.

Maybe I'm a purest. :-) Granted, I spent several years on a VT420 attached to a sparc5 clone and a 486dx50 w/o a video card (yeah, it beeped but still continued to boot.)

Re:Did I miss something ?

[GigsVT]

I've built many different storage servers, CPU is definitely not a limiting factor with most, unless you are doing software RAID5 and also running applications on the server.

I mostly use 3ware cards, with their hardware RAID5, or something from ACNC. The ACNC solution is nice, it costs a little more, but you still get to use cheap SATA hard disks, so the bang for the buck is still very high compared to legacy storage systems like SCSI.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Cramer]

Message from syslogd@gir at Fri Nov 7 13:02:53 2003 ...
gir kernel: MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal, correctable incident occurred on CPU 0.

Message from syslogd@gir at Fri Nov 7 13:02:53 2003 ...
gir kernel: Bank 1: 9400000000000151

*whistles innocently*

Re:Did I miss something ?

[WuphonsReach]

Hope they put a 500W power supply in that beast if they're thinking of putting (8) 7200rpm, power-sucking drives in it. (Okay, maybe a hefty 400W supply).

Anyone know if they included the cost of a Windows Server license in that $3k price? That alone should have jacked the price up to $3750 or so.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they aren't storing anything important on these drives?

From the tone and thrust of the article it would seem to be the usual dorm-bot fileserver: porn, warez and mp3's. One of their requirements was for the box to be usable as a "workstation", remember.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. They have no budget for a IDE RAID card (?) because they spent it on ... a ninja PC case, snazzy keyboard and mouse, and a graphics card. Whoopee do. That's not going to be very useful stuck in a room by itself, is it? They also go with a big-ass P4 which needs a big lump of heatsink with a high power fan on it. One of the first things I learned building PCs was fans mean failure. Get a joke processor (or as close as will do the job) and stick the biggest passive heatsink you can get on it. I've never seen one of those fail. Not being funny, but I sincerely hope nobody follows the advice given. Oh, and one other thing - why not get 5,400rpm drives? Yeah, they're slower, but it's going over a network and they're data files. they can wait a little, and the heat you don't generate it worth it, surely?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[guacamolefoo]

I agree, that seemed much more like, "Watch us build an expensive PC with a lot of hard disks" than "Watch us build something useful for reliable network storage."

My solution to building a cheap storage system was the following:

1. Buy old Netfinity 5000 on eBay.
2. Order 5 x 9GB SCSI drives from my trusty IBM parts guy (csaunders at itexchange.com)for $70 each.
3. Order basic RAID card for said box.
4. Install RedHat 7.1 from a CD in a book under my couch.
5. Install SAMBA
6. Run cron job to back up user data and relevant config files to an external USB hard drive attached to a windows box on the lan.
7. Take external hard drive to safe deposit box weekly. Get second USB drive out of safe deposit box and attach it to windows box at office to await next update. FWIW, I've been thinking about putting the USB drive that is in the office in a safe when the back up is not taking place. This is not for fear of fire or catastrophe -- I just don't want it to walk out the door.
8. The Netfinity server has the RAID 5 array configured for a hot spare drive so that there is failover operation if a drive quits.
9. Installed PowerChute software with a UPS to shutdown the box gracefully if power quits.

External USB -- $100 each (2) = $200 (got enclosures and cheap-o spare IDE hard drives from scavenged boxen)
SCSI Drives -- $70 each (5) = $350
Netfinity box = $300
UPS = $200 (I think)
Redhat 7.1 on CD in book under sofa = priceless

Total: $1,050.

Project results:
RAID-5 with regular offsite storage. Logical disk size is only 27 GB, but you can fatten this by using bigger SCSI drives. I didn't need mondo storage, so I saw no need to go with 36 GB drives, though you certainly could if you had more money.

I am currently trying to put together a RAID 5 file server and they do not cover any topic of use to me in that article. For example, practical backup solution?

External USB drives worked for me. Depends on how heavy-duty you need and how your office works. Perhaps simply connecting up two servers in different offices and doing mutual backups nightly for changed files might suffice. DVDs and CDs are an option, and tape is still useful.

Also, aside from their DVD backups, they seem to have no data recovery plan in case a hard drive fails. I guess they aren't storing anything important on these drives?

My data recovery plan (if everything pukes) is to buy a new chassis and drives and reinstall RH 7.1., connect it to the lan, and download old config files and user data. I think it would take a couple of days (mostly waiting on delivery of the drives and box). That time could be slashed if I were truly paranoid if I simply kept spare parts off-site. I'm just not that worried, however.

FWIW, our office is a small lawyer's office with about 10 people on our LAN. The data we need to store is not huge.

GF.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory is important for buffer cache and will speed up some operations tenfold or more. A faster processor only matters if you're not getting true hardware RAID - some cards hand off operations to in-kernel drivers instead of handling the operations themselves. Once your main cpu is stuck doing parity, you get dog slow performance.

The choice of floppy/cd/dvd drives will really be dependant on what else you are using the system for.

More network cards may be beneficial if you have the infrastructure to properly make use of them.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[daviddennis]

They didn't mention licensing, but they did put in a 510w power supply.

Maybe they're using FreeBSD?

D

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Licinius]

You can use the W2K CD for installation of drivers and formatting the HD.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

guacamolefoo wrote:
>
> Logical disk size is only 27 GB... The data we need to store is not huge

"Not huge"? How about "tiny"? My home directory is larger than your whole RAID "server".

Try 1000 GB for anything resembling an enterprise solution. Even on a personal level I wouldn't settle for anything less than a couple 120 GB drives in RAID 1. So please recalculate the costs and try again.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was "What an idiot! 5 x 9Gb in RAID 5 is 36Gb, not 27Gb! I must post immediately to point this out!".

Then I remembered the AC above me, who posted a comment before engaging his brain and reading utensils, and I thought "No! I am going to be an anti-slashdotter today, and re-read the post to make sure I didn't miss something".

Boy, am I glad.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're connecting it directly to a "firewalled internet" - I idly wonder if it's a warez server or something.

Why does it need a high-speed gigabit 'net connection?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most external drive cases have somewhere you can attach a security cable. It'll stop most casual theives, and if someone is serious enough to deal with a cable, they probably could just open the case (dremel + prybar) and lift the drive.

Since I'm a Mac fan for light servers *grumble about moving away from SCSI drives* I'd go for firewire for transfer. Also means you can get an iPod as an external drive thats is designed to survive impacts whilst spun up.

Helps when you're a Mac tech as well, bootable OS with *all* the drivers I need (Macs with native firewire only. So the last 4-5 years or so) recovery tools, plus storage for a chunk of data. Plus it's a decent MP3/aiff player :)

Re:Did I miss something ?

[oobar]

I agree completely. I stopped reading when the said that they were budgeting $70 and 70 WATTS of power for the video card, and they weren't joking. Come the fuck on, who spends $70 for a video card for a SERVER? I'm surprised they didn't come right out and say that they also bought RAM with pretty little indicator LEDs to let you know that it's workings, case fans with LEDs, cold cathode tubes for their case window, and other distractions. I bet they all drive Civics with 10" tachometers and coffee can fart pipes for their stock 1.6L engines and slushbox trannies.

Anyone that builds a "file server" with IDE drives, zero redundancy, and no provision for hot swapping failed drives is an idiot. Sure, you can build a high performance system with lots of disk space, but that doesn't make it a file server. Their entire insurance against defects and lost data is "These IDE drives have a higher MTBF rating than these other IDE drives." That should cause anyone with any actual file server experience to fall out of their chair laughing.

They spent $300 on the overkill 3GHz CPU, $70 on the useless video card, $350 on superfast RAM that's not even ECC, $160 for a keyboard and mouse, and $100 for a LCD display of how fast the case fans are spinning... But they balk at the notion of SCSI or RAID, for price reasons. Come the fuck on, give me a break. A real server does not need a keyboard, a mouse, or a video card, that's why god invented SSH. Nor does a FILE SERVER need superfast RAM or a superfast CPU -- even the fastest disks on Earth are going to be orders of magnitude slower than the slowest RAM you could possibly find. What such a server DOES NEED is reliable and redundant STORAGE, which they completely neglected.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[eyeye]

Never mind cost and the fact its unnecessary its actually detrimental, what fool chooses to pour another ~70watts of heat into a server if they can avoid it?

Re:Did I miss something ?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was "What an idiot! 5 x 9Gb in RAID 5 is 36Gb, not 27Gb! I must post immediately to point this out!".

Good idea -- for others, the calculations are the following:

5 x 9 = 45 GB

1 x 9 = drive for failover service, not used in array.

Leaves 4 x 9, and RAID 5 = drive size minus one drive, or 3 x 9, or 27 GB.

Re:Did I miss something ?

[guacamolefoo]

"Not huge"? How about "tiny"? My home directory is larger than your whole RAID "server".

Oooooooh. My home directory is bigger than yours! That is certainly nice to know. Perhaps we have different needs?

Try 1000 GB for anything resembling an enterprise solution.

I never said that our firm is an "enterprise" with "enterprise" needs. We are a small office. We have small office needs, but we wanted reliability on a budget. I thought that was pretty clear.

Even on a personal level I wouldn't settle for anything less than a couple 120 GB drives in RAID 1.

Then post your own proposal. FWIW, the server was bought a couple of years ago when the IDE alernatives were 40 GB and IDE RAID sucked (still is sketchy, IMHO).

So please recalculate the costs and try again.

No. If your needs differ from mine, fine. YMMV. All I posted about was what we did under our circumstances, which I mentioned. Our office is a small office. To elaborate on that, let me mention that we basically store only word processor and spreadsheet files on the server. 27 GB (minus OS files) does an awful lot of that. We haven't come close to filling it yet.

Sorry that you are offended that we are a weenie sized company with basic needs. If we were huge, we'd get a beaucoup server. As it is, we built for our expected needs, not to impress /. readers.

GF.

Insert standard joke..

[rf0]

Finally a place I can store all my p0rn/warez/dvds. But seriously why did they put in a 3D Graphics cards on a server. Surely any cheap AGP card even without 3D will do. Some basic ATI's are just $20

Rus

Re:Insert standard joke..

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't even really need a display. Just ssh in for a terminal interface. Or cook up a web admin page like a Snap server.

A fileserver is great in my home

[digitalgimpus]

I took a Beige G3/266MHz that I got for $50... put a 120 GB WD drive, ACARD IDE Controller, and Mac OS X.

An extra fan, to keep it nice and cool, and a 10/100 NIC.

Runs rather well. Smooth, reliable, and fast. For a very low cost. Mac OS X 10.2 comes with AppleShare, for Macs, and Samba for windows file sharing. Apache for a webserver, and PHP, Perl...mySQL.

You got whatever you really need.

I added webmin, for remote control. Makes it a bit easier.

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[setzman]

Interesting... May I ask what was the total cost after you added everything?

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Where did you get the $50 G3?

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[Anonymous Coward]

Answered my own question through pricewatch and posting as AC to not karma whore:

WD1200BB---$91

AEC-6280M PCI Ultra ATA-133 IDE Adapter for PowerMac---$97.95

Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar---$118

SMC1244TX 10/100 PCI CARD---$15

= ~ +- $375 total (shipping costs, etc...)

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[setzman]

Where did you get the $50 G3?

Probably a good deal on ebay. Looking on there now, they go as low as $54 before shipping, but he might have found one lower at the time.

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you're going to do is drop a very large hard-drive in a very old computer... I got my old PII/200mhz for probably the same $50-- and it came with an IDE controller. Debian GNU/Linux was free (not $100+ like your Mac OS X, assuming you used a legal copy). Oh, and mine had integrated ethernet on the mobo because it was an old corporate desktop. So while you and I spent the same $50 for the basic machine, the only extra money I had to spend was for a bigger hard drive. I bet you spent five times as much as I did for the same basic system. Even recycled Macs are more expensive!

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[TheCrazyFinn]

That Beige G3 has the same level ATA controller as your P200 (or was it a PII 233, no such thing as a PII 200). And has scsi to boot. And integrated Ethernet (But only 10MB, likely what you box has too)

The upgraded ATA card gets you ATA133 speed, which is a big boost over UDMA2 (16.6MB/sec), and the 10/100 card gets you 100MB full duplex ethernet, instead of the onboard 10MB controller.

He upgraded to get modern performance, while your PII is still poking along with it's shit-slow ethernet and IDE busses.

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[Anonymous Coward]

Ouch! Please forgive my ignorance of ancient Mac hardware specs-- I thought he/she was adding components just to get functionality, not improve existing stuff. And you're right. It's probably a P200 now that you mention it.

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[SteveHeadroom]

I found one in the dumpster outside my apartment. Works great!

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[ericdano]

Well, and then the cost of the Mac. I'm currently setting up an old 9500 with a G4 700 card in it to use as a server. Planning on plopping in 2 250 Gig hard drives using a Sonnet IDE card. Probably going to set it up using Software RAID. We'll see.......

Re:A fileserver is great in my home

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure this really qualifies as a server, but it fits the budget. I have a IBM PC350 486DX4-100, 32MB RAM, 270MB Hard disk. Currently running ClarkConnect 0.81 (based on RedHat). Been up for the last 71 days. Previous uptimes were nearly a year. Thinking about upgrading....Maybe a P166...128MB RAM.....two 4GB disks....

Lame

[sardonic2]

Article is lame when it comes to the important stuff. Its great he gave us the hardware to do it, but thats not the important part now is it? Software.... something that can do backup's to harddrive and then take backups and archive on tape. we went with tapeware because of price, but we cannot archive a current backup to tape, so that means we have 4 week online and no archive really (bad). Are there any open source solutions? I saw a couple but they look hard to setup and manage. Tapeware gives a powerful interface and makes it easy to backup from multiple machines... plus linux boxes don't need special server license (unless they have a tape drive) where any Windows 2000 Server box needs a server license.

Re:Lame

[JamesD_UK]

I currently use Bacula as my open source backup solution. Clients are available for Windows, Linux and Unix although I believe the server works best with Linux or Unix. It supports most hardware, including some tape robots (something that would be useful for 1TB of data!) and appears to be extremely flexible. It's done everything I've asked of it and more without complaint. Best of all the support from the author via. the project mailing list is second to none. The interface is through a console application although there's also a UI available (still a work in progress). There's also Amanda, you might want to look at that too.

Re:Lame

[syzygy_001]

if your a window's shop take a look at Retrospect

our Windows guy here has used it at the last few places he's worked, and it provides good backup and disaster recover, you can bun a recovery CD which will reinstall OS and then connect to the backup server and restore the box automatically to it's last (or whichever you tell it to) backup.

Got one. Did it cheaper :-)

[Space cowboy]

I built a similar system for the web rack (disks are bulky, compared to 1U motherboards). Gave me 1.5 TB of SATA hardware RAID-5 in 2U. All the other machines boot off it - much better use of space :-)

Simon

Re:Got one. Did it cheaper :-)

[Feyr]

i've always been wary of network booting. how does it do speed wise (for disk access and such) in a server environment (say, web server?)

Re:Got one. Did it cheaper :-)

[Space cowboy]

My attitude has always been that the bottleneck is where you have to pay attention. In our case, the bottleneck isn't the internal-to-the-rack (gigabit) network, it's the to-the-web network, which can be 100mbit, but rarely exceeds 30mbit. We can serve data internally far far faster than anyone outside can receive it over the web-network interface, so I have no qualms about separating the disk and the server.

All the machines have a lot of RAM as well, which helps with the cacheable stuff :-)

Simon.

Completely Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

No raid? Going to rely on the drive's MTBF? WTF. A raid controler is like 80$ MAX and one additional drive is like 250 or so. Spend the damn money. While you're at it. Invest in a tape drive. You're data is more valuable than the drives.

Re:Completely Stupid

[Sqwubbsy]

In the article, they point out that RAID will only help if a drive fails on its own, and not if there's a MB failure or some other badness.
And one of the points was they were going for a cheap offering. Adding more stuff means adding more $$$$.
Obviously, you're free to do whatever you'd like.

Re:Completely Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

$3000 isn't cheap and neither is a borked Raid-0

Re:Completely Stupid

[McSpew]

In the article, they point out that RAID will only help if a drive fails on its own, and not if there's a MB failure or some other badness. And one of the points was they were going for a cheap offering. Adding more stuff means adding more $$$$.

Okay, first off, what planet are you living on where solid state electronics are less reliable than hard drives with moving parts? Also, RAID is cheap, relative to the total cost of the system. These clowns spent almost $3200 building a storage system, but were too cheap to spend an extra $350 to support RAID 5? Yeah, that's freaking smart.

They're relying on the MTBF of the drives, but they forgot that your chances of failure go up with every additional drive you add to your storage setup. With four drives, you've quadrupled the chances that one of those drives is going to fail early. I don't remember enough about MTBF calculations and don't know enough about statistics to know what that does to your real-world MTBF numbers, but I'd bet that your real-world MTBF can be no better than one-quarter what it is for a single drive.

The people who wrote that article are serious morons. They completely misspent their money, if their goal was to build a storage server. For a storage server, what's most important is reliability and IO throughput. If you're on a budget, there's no sense in spending $500 on a CPU and motherboard and another $350 on 1GB of RAM. An Athlon and MB combo with 256MB or so of RAM could be had for probably the cost of their CPU alone. They could have then spent the rest of their budget wisely, by buying a high-performance RAID controller.

The problem is their idiotic dual-purpose requirement. Storage servers aren't workstations and vice versa. High CPU performance isn't a requirement for speedy file-serving: High performance hard drives and a high-performance caching RAID controller do that. Putting a gigabit Ethernet card in the server and hooking it to a switch with a decent bandwidth will do more to speed up your file fetches than putting a 3 GHz P4 on the MB.

Re:Completely Stupid

[WuphonsReach]

Very lame and very stupid.

They go on and on and on about how they researched MTBF numbers, then they shoot themselves in the foot by not using RAID1 or RAID5? Worse, they again, went with a single-drive for the system drive (where RAID1 would have been really cheap). So now we have 5 drives in the system, which cuts the MTBF by 5, with good odds that one of them is going to go belly up by the end of 6 months (taking a large amount of your data with it).

BTW, RAID5 controllers are more like $300-$400... not cheap as dirt, but if you're building a 1Tb server it's still inexpensive.

The article is garbage because they've failed to get the basics right (RAID + backup).

Re:Completely Stupid

[Sqwubbsy]

Easy there, cowboy. I'm not an apologist for the writer, I'm just pointing out what he said.
Heck, if you're spending $3K, what's a 10% increase to prevent failure?
I was also ticked about the lack of OS explanation other than "Linux won't cut it."
For what they ultimately achieved, you could get fairly comparable results with a well tweaked setup from mwave.com. (Which is basically what they did.)

Today's News:

[JamesD_UK]

... it's possible to buy a large PC case and fill it with a large number of drives that add up to a volume of storage that was once considered to be large several years ago. What's new here?

The article could have covered a little more than just the hardware needed to run such a setup, perhaps covering some sort of remote management interface for the storage? It would also have been nice to hear if they solved the problem of backing up this data on a budget too. (Ingoring the possiblilty of burning the data to DVD).

Mini-itx

[herrvinny]

Wouldn't a mini-itx system make more sense here? You're building a simple storage server, doesn't need to be massively huge. A 533mhz processor (the low end with mini-itx boards, I think) is plenty fast enough to run a simple storage server.

Video card? Why on earth would you need a $70 video card for a storage server! He should have gotten a motherboard with integrated graphics, so even if he needed to attach a monitor, integrated graphics would be more than enough to handle anything. What is he building, a storage server or a full fledged PC?

Re:Mini-itx

[JamesD_UK]

Why on earth would you need a $70 video card for a storage server!

Didn't the author mention that he also wanted the system to be available as a workstation for gaming as well as being used for storage?

Re:Mini-itx

[herrvinny]

Today we are going to be building a budget, high performance storage server.

That's the first sentence in the article. That's what I was working off of. Perhaps "high performance" is a euphemism for gaming, but I took it to mean that it should be a kickass file server, not anything else.

Re:Mini-itx

[wilper]

Well, in the specs he said he wanted it to be a workstation AND a storage server. However, he didn't want to run Linux on it because of lack of drivers (Which I presume rules out the BSDs as well.), so he'll probably end up running some form of Windows on it.

So he basically built a windows workstation with lots of disks, guess the other users on the network will learn to hate the poor man who uses it when he reboots after every change in the configuration in the server, depriving them of access to the files.

I would have gone with a dedicated server, hid it in some closet somewhere and left it alone, and bought another workstation for the money saved on the server. (Give or take a few $100.)

Re:Mini-itx

[Emil Brink]

[...]he also wanted the system to be [...] a workstation for gaming
Well put! *Applauds*. ;^)

Re:Mini-itx

[Cap'n Canuck]

Video card? Why on earth would you need a $70 video card for a storage server!

If the storage server is using windoze, then the sysadmin will be spending a lot more time on the console, hence the need for a good video card. Gotta protect the eyes!

Re:Mini-itx

[Zak3056]

He should have gotten a motherboard with integrated graphics, so even if he needed to attach a monitor, integrated graphics would be more than enough to handle anything.

Because if he wasn't blowing $70 on a video card, and $160 on his keyboard and mouse, he wouldn't be able to complain about how RAID would blow the budget.

His calculations for the power supply have SEVENTY WATTS budgeted for the video card, which, of course, forces him to spend $190 on the 450 watt power supply.

His motherboard has dual gigabit LAN, because "an extra NIC is essential for a server." Note, he doesn't say WHY he needs that extra gigabit NIC (fault tolerance? Performance? It looks cool?) only that he considers it "essential."

He has a hundred dollar add-on that "displays the latest stock-quotes and surf reports."

I feel dumber for having read this article.

Re:Mini-itx

[red floyd]

His calculations for the power supply have SEVENTY WATTS budgeted for the video card, which, of course, forces him to spend $190 on the 450 watt power supply.

To be honest, that one was one of his better choices. PCPower&Cooling supplies are probably among the best available. And considering that he wants to add 4 more drives, he needs the extra 12V...

Re:Mini-itx

[crucini]

The mini-ITX spec only calls for 55W of power, which isn't enough for a bunch of disks. Of course you could use a mini-ITX mainboard with an ATX power supply in some custom or semi-custom case.

As for the rest, I agree the author's goals are unclear.

stupid.

[Polo]

I don't think they used RAID. Drives aren't as reliable as they've been spec'd out to be.

I guess if they have everything important backed up on DVD and/or their data wasn't worth much, it'd just be a hassle... But when the system fails you end up with a big panic: running out to buy a new drive, then trying to get everything back up and running again.

I've built similar configurations and lost a drive (twice now!) and it's a big mess. At least with a separate system drive they eliminated one problem... if they lose the main drive they can reinstall and if they lose a data drive, they can at least reboot.

I would recommend raid -- at least raid 5 which would give them 3/4 terabyte and less headaches.

Budget != RAID ??

[Junta]

I really don't understand this, RAID costs $0 when done in software. Just because you get high MTBF doesn't mean a freak accident won't trash your data, RAID is really worth losing even 1/4 to 1/2 of you space in exchange. It may not be perfect, but it is a great first line of defense against failure.

Re:Budget != RAID ??

[SharpFang]

I really don't understand this, RAID costs $0 when done in software.

But then you wouldn't be able to recommen on Windows for that... And who would pay for writing an article that says "Windows is out of question"?

Re:Budget != RAID ??

[drsmithy]

But then you wouldn't be able to recommen on Windows for that... And who would pay for writing an article that says "Windows is out of question"?

Windows has software RAID...

Re:Budget != RAID ??

[olympus_coder]

Your cost per Byte just doubled... You need twice the hard drives for mirroring (not to mention twice the controlers). RAID5 has less waiste, but isn't as good for data security.

Of course, non of this protects you if your building burns down, sysadmin goes nuts, etc. That is what off site backups are for.

Andrew

Re:Budget != RAID ??

[pod]

Why? Windows 2000/XP has software RAID (0/1) and the Server editions do RAID 5 in software as well. I've used this in the past very successfully, and it works just fine, as far as software RAID goes anyways.

This is the biggest failing of this silly storage server project. No RAID, overpowered CPU and way too much RAM, and a 128MB 3D video card?!?! Someone's smoking crack, and, from the comments I've read so far, it isn't the /. posters.

Re:Budget != RAID ??

[Junta]

But I would say 750GB of single drive fault tolerant storage is much better than 1TB of storage that could all get screwed up by a single failure.

DRDB and or Linux Virtual Services

[_LORAX_]

If you want reliability you cannot just rely on ONE server anymore. Just get the cheapest boxes that meen the requirement and get *2* of them. Use DRDB and heartbeat to make the failover seamless. With these two cheap boxes you get 24x7 reliability at a 7-11 price. Raid, cooling, ... will all help in the one box senario delay system failure, but that box *WILL* fail. Two boxes can help not only with outages, but upgrades as well since the primary can be taken offline for upgrades without any upseting of the system.

The latest issue has reduntancy and scalability articles that go from 2 boxen to as many as you want.

http://www.linuxmagazine.com/

Re:DRDB and or Linux Virtual Services

[Salamander]

Just get the cheapest boxes that meen the requirement and get *2* of them. Use DRDB and heartbeat to make the failover seamless.

...except that the failover won't really be all that seamless, and performance will be in the toilet.

Re:DRDB and or Linux Virtual Services

[PapaZit]

I'm going to guess that you're not referring to the Digital Radio Development Bureau (Google's top hit for DRDB) and, in fact, are referring to DRBD, which is a distributed block device for Linux HA clustering.

My solution

[olympus_coder]

I salvaged a derilict dual P3x450, dug up enough 256meg sticks to give it a gig a ram and a salvaged video card.

For drives, I watch and wait until I need more space, then I add a drive, ussually whatever Fry's has on cheap. I use LVM to add it to my partitions. Of course, I can only add a total of 4 drives this way before I'm forced to by a off board controler (I'm at that point now).

The other downside is that there is no redundancy, but oh well. Redundancy is expensive.

Performance stinks as I violate the rules about one device per controler. Of course, I don't care because I'm accessing it over a 10mbit network (via the phone lines in my appartment). It is sufficient to stream video to 2 or more machines so no worries.

Total cost ~$500 worth of hard drives. Everything else was "free".

Andrew

Re:My solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is pretty much the same..

An old Celeron (P2 I think) 450, Slowly adding big drives to it. It has a 16Gb sys drive that was what I originally built my linux fw/router on and I added 120Gb drives as I needed.

Though I am also now at the stage where I will need a controller for more drives.

Its a quiet, cool machine that just sits in the cupboard, headless, along with my DSL modem etc...

Re:My solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The other downside is that there is no redundancy, but oh well. Redundancy is expensive.

Redundancy is *cheap*, your time spent rebuilding a broken box is *expensive*. (Not to mention the chance of lost work, re-loading files from backups... you did do backups? ne?)

Re:My solution

[AnotherBlackHat]

Of course, I can only add a total of 4 drives this way before I'm forced to by a off board controler (I'm at that point now).

Right now, most IDE drives over 120 Gig comes with a controller.
As anyone who builds servers knows, you end up with a stack of them pretty quickly.

Ask around, you can probably get a brand spanking new IDE controller for $0.

-- this is not a .sig

My budget storage server

[EmagGeek]

ECS Fully-Integrated motherboard
Athlon 1800XP, 256MB Ram
4x 40GB IDE Hard Disks
Promise SX4000 Raid-5 Controller
All in a micro_ATX chassis

Can't get much cheaper than $700 for a 120GB storage server with at least some measure of redundancy.

Re:My budget storage server

[Anonymous Coward]

And it works with a PC Chips motherboard and Promise controller?

Got a via chipset in there to match the rest of the junk?

-1 didn't RTFA

[TubeSteak]

4+1 = 5 (and add in the DVD+/-R/RW for a total of 6)

ATA-133 controllers
We added a PCI Promise ATA-133 controller so we can run our four Maxlines as all master drives. This will improve simultaneous access performance and allows for an easy upgrade to eight storage drives.

Cost: $30

Seagate 120GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA - 78%
A good hard drive but nothing to brag about, or at least nobody will care if you brag about it. It is a little noisy during operation.

Cost: $110

Maxtor Maxline II Plus 250GB PATA x 4 - 86%
A hard drive with potential, given its SCSI-like MTBF ratings and design for 24/7 applications. Having a hard drive fail is no fun, so if Maxtor has really built a more reliable drive any additional cost is well worth it. It gets extra points for presumed reliability. It is also faster than our SATA 120GB Barracuda.

Cost: $1,000

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

"We added a PCI Promise ATA-133 controller so we can run our four Maxlines as all master drives. This will improve simultaneous access performance and allows for an easy upgrade to eight storage drives."

Morons!

[phlyingpenguin]

Since when do you need a 3ghz processor and a gig of ram let alone a GeForceFX (yes he noted it's slow, not slow enough mind you) for a fileserver?

And why is he putting a keyboard/mouse in the picture? Oh he's putting windows on it... he forgot to buy a license for that! I'm not sure I understand the comment on it not being smart to put XFS/JFS/ReiserFS/Ext3 on a firewire drive... can somebody explain why that's not smart?

$3,100 dollars is REALLY steep for a machine that shouldn't cost anything more than the drives it serves data from.

Re:Morons!

[poot_rootbeer]

I'm not sure I understand the comment on it not being smart to put XFS/JFS/ReiserFS/Ext3 on a firewire drive... can somebody explain why that's not smart?

Because Win98 won't be able to recognize the partition, silly.

This article is not written for people who want a serious, reliable storage server. It's for home users who want to say "dude I've got a terabyte of storage on my network!"

How did we do?

[Anonymous Coward]

We needed a moderate amount of storage (print shop dealing mostly with 1/2 Color Offset and moderate color copy work).

We purchased 4 160GB drives and an Adaptec 1200 IDE Raid card. Yields 298GB as RAID 0/1. About $480.

How would you rate us? Good, bad, okay? Shoulda, coulda?

Re:How did we do?

[Anonymous Coward]

How would you rate us? Good, bad, okay? Shoulda, coulda?

That's the wrong thing to ask the Slashdot crowd. As everyone knows, nothing is *ever* good enough.

Re:How did we do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for a FUCKING Insightful REPLY.

Re:How did we do?

[crucini]

Sounds good. I infer that you have no backup. Would it make sense to have 2X RAID0, one for production and one nightly copied for backup? That way, a single mistake in the workday couldn't do substantial harm.

And, you coulda created an account. That way your posts will be seen by more people.

But does it Run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy makes no mention of what OS will be installed which is a critical factor when creating a file server.

just built something like this actually

[StandardDeviant]

Just yesterday I brought up a server here at work to server as a 1.0 TB-range backup server using 8x200gb WD 8mb cache drives strung off a 3ware escalade controller (raid5, two hot spares). The build process was suprisingly painless (used an athlon-based solution but that's relatively unimportant. you'll want 64bit/64mhz pci slots for things like the 3ware storage card, scsci card to drive a tape drive, etc. the cheapest board I found that could do this was ironically a dual CPU MPX chipset board from gigabyte, sub-$200), with a total cost for a total beast of a machine coming in at about 3400 USD with shipping and such. I'd recommend heartily the 3ware controller cards if you want to try something like this, they're worth every penny of their ~200-300 cost simply for the increased performance and reliability they bring to the table as well as the reduced hassle (the array just shows up as a single huuuuuge scsi drive to linux... always nice when /dev/sda is reported to contain something like two billion 512 byte sectors ;)). I went with a black aluminum Lian-Li case because it has enough 3.5" drive bays to hold all those drives, comes with lots of fans by default (as well as cooling a bit better than your average plastic / steel case due to the thermal properties of the material), and a monster 550w "vantec stealth" powersupply for reliability and the ability to sustain all the devices in the system. Debian stable installed with zero hassle and now I'm just left with the pain of fighting with backup software. ;) True, I'd trust something from Sun or similar more than this homebrew thing, but this is also a mere fraction of the cost of something from the commercial Unix vendors, so for the same total cost I could have multiple redundant servers... or more ale-and-whores money in the departmental budget. ;)

Re:just built something like this actually

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Translation:

I can build a bad-ass server, yet I can't break things into paragraphs to save my life!

Re:just built something like this actually

[StandardDeviant]

Morning coffee hadn't set in yet. ;)

he's right...

[snooo53]

While for a large business, $3000 must be dirt cheap.... for the rest of us it is WAY too expensive. I could either build a kick ass entertainment center for $3000 or their "budget" server.... I'll give you one guess to figure out which one I'd choose.

I've learned to be very skeptical of any of these articles on "budget" this or that, because they rarely are. To me, a budget server means less than $500. How about an article on how to build and configure a home network server for that price?

Re:he's right...

[Cramer]

An ok "budget" fileserver with 1TB of space can be built for around 1k$. And maybe even cheaper if you don't care what it looks like :-)

I built a 1.4TB array for about 2500$ two+ years ago. That was with 80GB drives. So, I know damn well it can be done much cheaper than this guys box. (We tested it as a full news server for a month. [click] yeah, you lose a lot putting a filesystem on it.)

Re:he's right...

[WuphonsReach]

First off, unless you're working with 50Gb files, there's very little reason to put all of your data on a single server. With multiple servers you can spread the load around a little bit.

A cheap 200Gb storage server would be:

$750 1Ghz CPU / 512Mb RAM / MB / Case
$100 RAID1 card
$500 2x250Gb IDE drives
$150 misc parts
$300 external 250Gb USB 2.0 drive (backups)
====
$1800 or so, going with smaller drives would drop the price to $1500 for say a 120Gb system, but the base component costs are fixed. Going with a RAID5 card and 5 drives would give you a 1Tb system, with hot spare for $2750.

A decent sized tape drive (50Gb native) is going to set you back around $800-$1300, plus $50-$75 per tape. You might be better off buying (3) external USB drives and doing a 3-generation backup strategy (keeping 1 drive off-site).

Re:he's right...

[deadgoon42]

I built a small Linux file/print server for about $250 for just the unit (I use a KVM switch, so add another $35 for that). It has a Celeron 850 ($35), 256MB of RAM ($30), a 60 GB IDE hard drive ($50), a CD-ROM for software installation ($45), a cheap motherboard with everything built in ($20), and a cheap case ($50). It's nothing fancy, but it's good for backups and printing and playing with linux. One of these days I'll post a little FAQ on my web page about it, and if it gets slashdotted I'll be very cross indeed.

Re:he's right...

[Carnildo]

You're paying more than you need to there. Unless you're doing software RAID (and any RAID card should be able to do hardware RAID 1), you don't need more than about a 400MHz CPU. Those can be had dirt-cheap on ebay.

Re:he's right...

[DAldredge]

What KVM switch do you use and does it distort any at 1600x1200@85Hz?

Re:he's right...

[cornjones]

I used a belkin omni somthing 8 port had no problems at that res.

ej

Re:he's right...

[DAldredge]

Thank!

Re:he's right...

[snooo53]

yeah, heh, in retrospect I suppose I should've made that "$1000 or so, depending on how much space/data security you want"

I guess I'm just used to being able to dig around my room for half the parts I need instead of starting from scratch :)

PS. Nice job on the array!

Re:he's right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course according to the article you don't really want RAID. Stupid article.

Re:he's right...

[Cramer]

I'll look around for the pictures of it before it was in a case. And after. It was sold to a company that handles processing for insurance forms -- it's their fileserver. (We rolled it out to a Chrysler LeBaron, loaded it in the back seat, and they drove it back to NY. [I'm in NC.])

Re:he's right...

[deadgoon42]

I use a generic KVM manual switch I picked up at a local retail store. You can catch them on ebay all the time for real cheap. I have a crappy monitor anyway, but I don't notice any resolution problems at 1024x768. it is strictly ps/2 and vga and I noticed that the MS Blue Optical mouse won't work with it for some reason although my Logitech Optical Wheel mouse does work with it.

Re:he's right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a problem with random advertising coming up on your monitor when it's connected to that KVM?

Re:he's right...

[Necr0maN]

because running X on a server at 1600x1200 is important... including GeForce FX card to make opengl screensavers look nice.

Re:he's right...

[DAldredge]

No. Because I run X at 1600x1200 on a GeForce3 Ti200 on my main dev box and I am in need of a inexpensive KVM switch that works. My P815 only has two inputs and I was just curious.

Any thing else?

Re:he's right...

[cornjones]

nope. i am home now and looking at it. belkin omniview pro 8-port (F1D108-OSD)

I have lcd now so I can't do 1600x1200 anymore but I don't never had any problems when I used my old sony monitor.

Never had any random advertising stuff. Don't see how the kvm could affect that. between my linksys firewall and googlebar 2.0 I don't get much advertising beyond the standard banner ads.

ej

Re:he's right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a problem with random advertising coming up on your monitor when it's connected to that KVM?

Damn! Beat me to it! Wish I had mod points... Mod parent funny :)

test

[Anonymous Coward]

test

article overdone

[hummer357]

I thought the article was about a storage server? this is a high-end gaming rig!

they slam in a Gig of ram, use gigabit ethernet (for a home server?), and last but not least, a high end video card??

I guess that a storage server really doesn't need that kind of stuff... maybe one of those mini-itx cards with half a gig of ram, a good power supply, and a decent pci raid card from 3ware or somehting?

they're probably running windows on that machine too...

talk about being cost-effective...

Tradeoffs?

[nonmaskable]

I wish this article had discussed tradeoffs; for a fileserver, how much processor, memory, etc. do you need to do the job well and how much is waste (like the 3d card).

Of course, I'm using NFS so their answers might not have been too helpful.

Interesting?

[jargoone]

Somebody didn't RTFA...

At the same time, we wanted this server to act as a workstation with as much capability as the other systems attached to the storage server.

Re:Interesting?

[AchmedHabib]

And I guess it will be running Windows.
Why is it that they(windows people) likes to mix their machines. "a storage server AND a workstation". I guess that they can live with limited/less uptime.

Reminds me of a former job I had, where the W2K notes server / mail gateway also was CD-burner and the database server also was the admins internet downloading machine and just a few times it went wrong, and it needed to be rebooted.

Re:Interesting?

[liquidsin]

Yeah, but that's just stupid. For the "budget" system they built they could have made seperate machines. I don't know that I want a terabyte of *my* data stored on some twits workstation without RAID, or even a decent backup system (DVD for 1Tb??)

Re:Interesting?

[Skynyrd]

Somebody didn't RTFA...

Somebody couldn't RFA. It's slashdead.

This article has some "WTF"'s in it

[ducomputergeek]

First off, you don't need a 128MB vid card for a server. Most have 2MB intergrated RAGE ATI cards. Old as dirt, stable, and works.

Next, what are you uses? I mean most small business work groups I have seen might store larger Powerpoint, excel and other files. It takes them a while to fill up dual 160GB hd's in a raid 1.

Still, for our company we purchased 1.6TB Xraid's from apple with Fiber cards. Why? well we are doing a lot of work with FCP and need the quick access times that come with fiber vs. ethernet.

Still over 2k less than an Apple G4

[Anonymous Coward]

with only 720GB storage

My config...

[tinrobot]

Built a storage server two years ago, it's run like a tank since I put it online.

Dual 800MHz PIII in a Supermicro Motherboard.
Cheap-O video card
Gigabit card
40 GB system drive.
6x80MB Maxtor drives (5400 rpm)
Escalade RAID-5 card.

I chose 5400 rpm drives for several reasons:

A) A little bit cheaper
B) Used half the power of the 7200
C) Runs a lot cooler
D) Higher MTBF

Every drive that has ever failed on me has been because of heat. I put several fans in the case to make sure the drives don't overheat. So far so good (knocks wood)

Re:My config...

[EvilNight]

Silimar setup here.

Tyan Tiger MP Mainboard, 1GB DDR266
Dual AMD Athlon MP 2200+ CPUs
old Matrox Millenium AGP card I had lying around
20GB OS drive, backed up to the array occasionally

3Ware 4-port Escalade card (w RAID-5 setup)
4x WDC 250GB Special Edition drives (gotta have that 3-year warranty)

And a Cremax ICYDock 5-in-3 Hotswap Cage, because you really do want to keep these things properly cooled, and the hotswap cages just aren't expensive anymore.

This setup was so successful at home that I've duplicated it (with greater capacity of course) for some of our company backup servers. Oh, and God Bless 3Ware. That is some top notch hardware. They've restored my faith in RAID after DPT destroyed it.

It does keep my room quite warm in the winter.

Re:My config...

[Cyno]

Same reasons I chose 5400 rpm drives. I got 4x200GB 5400 rpm Maxtors in a AthlonXP 2600+ system I built last year. 550GB of software RAID 5 encrypted storage online for less than $2000. It can easily stream DVD quality video to every room in my apartment at the same time with its 12MB/s network bandwidth. More than enough bandwidth for the average home. But I'm starting to look for more storage capacity since it overflowed last month. Now that I've tasted the fruit I have over 700GB of important data. :P

I'm thinking I need around 2TB to make it through next year. That's probably a conservative estimate.

Re:My config...

[htmlboy]

Every drive that has ever failed on me has been because of heat. I put several fans in the case to make sure the drives don't overheat. So far so good (knocks wood)

for drive cooling without a specialized cage, i've been really happy with the antec sx1040 (among other antecs). both of the internal 3x1" drive cages have an 80mm fan mount at the front to direct air over the hard disks. right now, i've got a 15k rpm drive in the top and bottom slots of each cage with the fan pushing air through the middle and the drives are barely warm to the touch (before the cooling, they burned my fingertips).

having experienced the before & after, i don't see myself ever putting important and/or hot drives into production without dedicated cooling.

whether my personal server needs 15k rpm raid10 is another matter...

Video Card, Mouse, and Keyboard

[Dasein]

I was surprised to see video cards, mice and keyboards covered at all. Then the author spends literally two sentences on the IDE controller.

This seems more like a general-purpose machine that happens to have a lot of storage. Why's that a big deal? Maybe I should have written up my Dual AMD, SCSI RAID development/gaming box -- nah. Why spend time on something that's really not that interesting.

How Funny

[WndrBr3d]

My company just recently invested in a mass storage solution, since it's obvious that mass, redundant storage on SCSI (>300GB) isnt a cost effective option for a small office environment. We took the easy way out and purchased the following:

Dell PowerEdge 1600SC Server:
Xeon 2.0Ghz
512MB RAM
18GB U320 15k RPM (OS Drive)
32x CD-RW/DVD Drive

We chose this server because it has both PCI33, PCI66, AND PCI-X slots on the bus, supports up to SIX internal hard drives and has two 5.25" drive bays.

For the mass file store we chose Maxtor 300GB 5,400RPM 2MB Cache Drives. You have to remember this is not going to be an active file server but more just a file repository and source control/backup server for a small office (10 Clients).

Our Mass Storage Solution Is:
3Ware 7506-8 RAID Controller
4x Maxtor 300GB Drives

We're going to put the Maxtor Drives on a RAID5 and since the 3Ware is a Switching HARDWARE 64-Bit/66Mhz PCI RAID card for IDE Drives, performance should be stellar.

I think all in all the entire solution ended up costing us around $4,000 for parts and systems, BUT, we also got OS (Win2k 5 CAL) and a 3 Year Dell Warranty on Parts.

I think $4,000 for a 900GB Hardware RAID5 on a Xeon server aint too shabby :-)

Re:How Funny

[jmkaza]

a file repository and source control/backup server for a small office (10 Clients).
we also got OS (Win2k 5 CAL)
Sr. Systems Director, e-Selex.com [e-selex.com]
San Diego, CA

You admit you're using five more clients than you bought CALs for AND said where you work!
Look out the window, the BSA commandos should be rappelling in shortly.

Re:How Funny

[advocate_one]

I knew ms-windows files were starting to bloat in size, but 300GB for a small office of just 10 users???

I was network admin for a small Tech Authorship company that had some 50 machines (15 of which were Macs for the graphic artists) and we made do with just 30GB total for file serving. All data that had been finished with and the customer had signed off on was rigorously archived off onto both tape and archive quality CDR. We upgraded the server some 6 months before I left and splashed out for an extra 30GB, but we were still rigorous in our archiving system. That server was running Novell Netware 4, just kept on a running and a running... never ever gave me any problems.

Re:How Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just an ignorant reply. Apparently to you the number of users is what makes for the amount of data.. not say.. oooh.. THE COMPANY AND ITS BUSINESS TYPE.

ass.

Re:How Funny

[advocate_one]

I've got bad news for you AC... Graphic artists have some of the largest data sets going... and we were producing hyperlinked parts catalogues on CDs as our main output... very data intensive.

Re:How Funny

[eggsome]

I agree, I am one of the IT people for a large not-for-profit organization and we have been running on a NetWare 3.12 server for about a decade.
There is only 2gb available to users for their data - granted we have started to run into space problems but that is about all we really/I> need.
We are upgrading to a RH7.3 at the moment (~170gb on RAID5) but it's not like that is going to be used up for quite some time.

Budget

[herrvinny]

Total $3,140

Okay, I just looked at the article again. $3,000? Damn. I wouldn't mind having that budget...

Seriously folks, if you think you need $3,000 to build a server, then you're out of your minds. I don't want to be modded as Flamebait, but anyone here at /. (including me) could build a server for less than half that, and I would bet that for storage activities, it would be equivalent or faster than this moron's PC.

Video Card? Keyboard? Mouse? No. Shouldn't even be there. Yeah, sure, during initial setup, connect a secondhand monitor, mouse, etc (who doesn't have a spare monitor lying around? I have one 10 yrs old lying around somewhere and it still should work). But after initial setup, after you install and configure Linux/Apache, Windows/IIS, FreeBSD/whatever combos, forget it. After that, you should be able to telnet or remote admin the server.

I'm going to issue a challenge. Alexis Dang (the author of this piece), if you're listening, here's a challenge. Give me $1500 and I'll build you a server that can beat your server in storage related activities. Not video games, not music, not Paintshop testing.... just pure storage. Hell, give anyone on this board $1500, and they can beat your "server" upside down.

Re:Budget

[Carbonite]

Give me $1500 and I'll build you a server that can beat your server in storage related activities.

If you're that confident why not post the specs and prices of your $1500 system. Use the best price from Pricegrabber or any other site you'd prefer. I'm not doubting you, I'm just interested in seeing what you come up with.

Re:Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, challenge ANYONE:
Write up the specs, prices and links for a reliable 1 or 2TB storage server for $1500
Don't forget OS and config info.

No reward money - just the brag rights to come up with the best moded solution, and the gratitude of the readers out there that will go out and build one ASAP

Dang!

Re:Budget

[gl4ss]

yes it's really funny how much money they had, and still called it a 'budget' machine.

it's a server done with a hefty budget..

heck, if i had been doing it(long term file storage server on a _small_ budget) i would have mooched off some p200mhz(or similar) machine, slapped couple of big hd's into it and if i really had money to spend and needed insane space buy couple of (s)ata expansion cards for it and some more hd's, then just slap some linux distro that i wanted to use that day and use samba(or whatever was preferable). video cards/keyboards/crappy mouses/whatever are usually available as scrap(along with that mooched off p200) so they don't really matter that much(though, why would i bother with the monitor taking space unneededly?).

of course being cheap relies a bit on whatever they were planning to do with it(though, i'd suppose most people it was focused for would be just needing a home storage server).

but come oon, the article seems mostly written as a joke(or bragging), at least it seems so. like, mx700 mouse for a fileserver? gfx5200?? cordless desktop pro keyboard??? 1GB Corsair XMS PRO low latency ram???? does the guy realise that he is buying? "Pentium 4 3.0GHz Retail box
Not much to say, a workhorse Intel CPU...A better deal following the recent price drops from Intel."??? WORKHORSE?

what he has built is a fast pc with nice amount of harddisk, certainly it's not a "budget storage server", there's absolutely no 'affordable' parts in it.

"NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 - 78%
The slowest 3D card in the GeForce FX line, but enough for our purposes. You don't always need to have the fastest video card.", damn right you don't! you don't even need a 3d card! the reasonable solution would have been going with a motherboard with built-in, or mooching the gfx card from some older, unused computer. the whole article just smells 'pose' instead of function. after this: "One thing that does distinguish the APC is that it looks cool enough to sit on your desk instead of under it. Another advantage of APC is the readily available replacement batteries." i don't have much to add. like, when you're doing a budget server that should go in a closet somewhere is the first thing you think of it how cool it looks?

Re:Budget

[duffbeer703]

It is a "budget" server as compared to similar offerings from Dell, IBM, etc.

I agree that the article is trash though. The guy spends more time talking about how to choose a mouse than how he choose the IDE controller.

But consider the source. Since Firingsquad is a gamer news site, they cobbled together a server out of whatever free shit vendors mailed in to them... hence the nonsense about how Logitech makes the best keyboard in the universe.

Re:Budget

[paul_pick1]

Video Card? Keyboard? Mouse? No. Shouldn't even be there.

Me, I'd agree with you but the author states (quite clearly) that this box is to be a capable workstation:

we wanted this server to act as a workstation with as much capability as the other systems attached to the storage server

Re:Budget

[AnotherBlackHat]

I'm going to issue a challenge. Alexis Dang (the author of this piece), if you're listening, here's a challenge. Give me $1500 and I'll build you a server that can beat your server in storage related activities.

Hmm... I think this might actually make an interesting contest.

How cheaply can you build a server that meets some arbitrary set of performance numbers -
say, 1 terabyte of storage, able to saturate two 100baseT ethernet ports, and a MTBF of 2 years.

Given that Fry's is selling 250 Gig drives for $160 (after rebate), I'd bet someone could do it for under a $1250. Maybe even under a $1000.

-- this is not a .sig

Re:Budget

[cornjones]

hmmm.... i'll bite. just grabbing some quick prices from pricewatch i would say:
65$ - M811LU Socket A DDR MB with Duron 1.1Ghz (1100Mhz) 200FSB CPU & Fan (don't know anyting about the board but it has video/sound/lan built in)
63$ - 512MB PC2100 (figure 512mb should be plenty for our file server but more wouldn't be amiss)
18$ - Mid Tower ATX Dual Front USB (USB 2.0) opt., 8bay, Case only (mainly for the 8 bays)
28$ - 600Watt EXTREMO power supply Dual Fan Aluminum Super Silent (600 should be plenty)
12$ - 4 X 80mm Sleeve Bearing FAN FOR CASE W/4PIN CONNECTOR (not sure if i can even fit 4 but the more air circ the better. )
18$ - LanReady - 32bit PCI 1000/100/10Base-TX Gigabit Fast 1000Mbs Ethernet NE2000 Adapter (gigE is a must.)
4$ - KB 107-Key Standard PS2 Keyboard
2$ - Generic ps/2 mouse white
7$ - 1.44 Floppy Drive 3.5inch NEW beige w/faceplate
16$ - Cyberdrive - 56X Internal IDE CD-ROM Drive
35$ - Image Western Digital - 20.0GB EIDE 2MB 5400rpm Ultra-ATA/100.

Ok, So there is our base system. That comes in at $268. (this wouldn't be a bad system for the 'rents)

Now we do our storage.
Everybody seems to be on there knees for 3Ware so we are looking at either 4 or 8 drive solution
For the 4 drive:
245$ - 3Ware escalade 7506-4LP, 4 channel udma raid adapter
For drives we are looking at
732$ - 4 X MAXTOR 250GB EIDE UDMA-133 HD 5400 RPM on the higher but reasonable end
and
324$ - 4 X IBM/Hitachi 120.0GB EIDE 5400Rpm 2MB,8.9ms for a cheaper option

So that gives you about 750gb w/ raid 5 (500gb w/ one spare) on the high end, 240gb (160gb w/ one spare) on teh low end.

if we go w/ the 8 drive setup
373$ - 3Ware escalade 7506-8, 8 channel udma raid adapter
For the drives we are looking at:
1464$ - 8 X MAXTOR 250GB EIDE UDMA-133 HD 5400 RPM on the higher end
and
648$ - 8 X IBM/Hitachi 120.0GB EIDE 5400Rpm 2MB,8.9m for a cheaper option

this gives us 1750gb (1500 w/ 1 spare) or 560gb (480gb w/ 1 spare).

So our final numbers:
4 drive machine:
1245$ gives us 750gb
837$ gives us 240gb
8 drive machine:
2105$ gives us 1750gb
1289$ gives us 560gb

The prices all come from pricewatch.com and should include shipping. some massaging may be necessary depending on your location and vendor choices. The raid sizes come from RaidCalc (http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/Raid Calc.asp)

I didn't include a monitor on these but you can get a compaq 15in for 64 bux if you need it.

Use your favorite free OS w/ samba/mac share or your stolen copy of windows and you have a nice weekend project.

mmmm... toys

back to work

Re:Budget

[Idarubicin]

Hell, give anyone on this board $1500, and they can beat your "server" upside down.

Indeed. If you want to spend the full $3000, build two of your $1500 boxen, and then you have a complete backup.

Re:Budget

[tigga]

Seriously folks, if you think you need $3,000 to build a server, then you're out of your minds.

Performance, reliability, price - pick two of three. I usually go for performance and reliability. In other case it will be I who have to fix or upgrade it.

Re:Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

For perspective my cost for my storage/apps server I am just putting in for the company is $99 000AUD (abt$50 000USD) This includes o/s software, ups, 2 servers and a san box with 5 147GB Disks, tape library.
Price can escalate when you want redundancy and expandability.
If you want "zero" down time it costs $$

Yes we could have done it cheaper using , we couldnt because of

At the other end of the scale we have 5 BSD servers doing various things that cost all up about $4000AUD

I can hear the nerd roar now "r u crazy? I could have done it for $50"

Re:Budget

[droyad]

At least one person with their head screwed on. Some people need to get into the real world.

how the hell is the "budget"

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell is this a budget server? Why does a server need an nvida grafix card? Stupid. Why does resolution even need to go over 1024x768? Jez. Make sure to run the 3d pipes screen savor non stop too, to suck performance from the thing. And why oh why does it need a 2.* ghz proc. That's just buying without thinking. It' s storage server. It doesn't need a kickass CPU. It just needs nice drives. Get a 1.7Ghz celeron for 60 bucks or a 2 ghz p4 if you hate celeron for 100 bucks. This server ain't budget at all. Its a gaming pc built by gamers, not real sys admins.

Yep. I have one too

[The Tyro]

but I admittedly went a little over the top...

- Raid rack-mount server chassis (space for 8 drives)
- 3ware RAID controller (great linux support)
- multiple 120gb drives in RAID-5
- dual-athlon MB, bunch of RAM
- CrystalFontz LCD running LCD4Linux
- Samba, Postfix, etc.

It has enough extra horsepower that I can run a counterstrike server along with providing network services, primarily huge storage, for all my other machines. It's full of high-bitrate oggs (reripped everything; it took weeks, even using Grip's auto-rip feature). Oh, let's not forget the high-quality DivX.

Apart from giving me room to grow, it's made me a huge fan of dualies. I've never worked on a machine that's as snappy and responsive.

Wow

[jargoone]

So you spent

IDE controller... $20? (being generous here)
Mac OSX.......... $129 (you DID pay for it, right?)

Congratulations. That $159 difference could buy you another whole fileserver. Not one like you built, rather an Intel/AMD running Linux.

Re:Wow

[kwerle]

Mac OSX.......... $129 (you DID pay for it, right?)

Actually, assuming they only have < 5 OSX systems in their house, they probably bought the "family pack" for $199. So the /system cost for the machine could have been as little as $40.
For a supported system (good, easy software updates) and an OS that's a pleasure to use, I'd say the money was well spent.

Re:Wow

[jargoone]

(good, easy software updates)

*cough* Debian *cough*

and an OS that's a pleasure to use, I'd say the money was well spent.

This is a fileserver, right? Do you actually "use" it? I would imagine not, if it's a G3/266. OS/X would be downright painful to use on that. And why bother with the GUI overhead for a server anyway?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow

You're an idiot. Maybe someone was just happy to pick up a $50 Beige G3 and wanted to make something useful out of it?

I mean, seriously. It's a classic G3. Pre-Blue&White.

It's a six year old model that runs the latest OSX.

Maybe there's more to this hobby than scraping together low-cost Lintel boxes.

Re:Wow

[TheCrazyFinn]

OS X is quite fine on that hardware, especially if you turn off the GUI (Which ain't needed on a server anyways). Yes, you can turn off the GUI on OS X. It's a one-line change.

Re:Wow

[kwerle]

This is a fileserver, right? Do you actually "use" it? I would imagine not, if it's a G3/266. OS/X would be downright painful to use on that. And why bother with the GUI overhead for a server anyway?

Fileserver, netinfo server, http server, mDNS server.

The fileserver "just works" for AFP, samba, and NFS. The netinfo server is a great bonus, as is the mDNS server.

Most of these things would be .. not hard to do with Debian. NetInfo would be hard.

The GUI is only useful for some admin and config purposes - I wouldn't suggest that the machine is truly usable for day-to-day. What's more, the login page doesn't cost CPU or RAM worth mentioning (just like an X login screen). And if it really bothers you, boot in console mode.

Are these things (mostly) possible with linux (debian, or whatever)? Yup. Would it be cheaper? Yeah - maybe $100, even. Would it take more time to set up using linux? For me it certainly would. Would I gladly spend that $100 to get the bonuses of OSX? You betcha!

Would it be worth doing if you didn't run other OSX boxes on the LAN? Nope.

More of a file server than storage server

[TubeSteak]

I wouldn't call anything without redundancy "storage". Personally i would've skimped on the processor and DVD+/-R/RW. Skipped the graphics card and splooged for a RAID 5 card & an extra HD. Otherwise you just have a bigass file server.

Re:More of a file server than storage server

[BubbaTheBarbarian]

An external DVD=R/RW that runs on USB2.0 or Firewire would be a better archiving choice. It might be slower then an internal, but it would still be plenty quick and it would give you additional bonus of being able to be used on move then one box.

Re:More of a file server than storage server

[TubeSteak]

you're right, but that automatically adds $50~100 to the price. (if by slower you mean it can't burn a dvd at 8x. They're plenty fast enough to do 4x dvd+/-R)

Why not use external drives?

[Hektor_Troy]

Okay, so external drives aren't as cheap as internal drives, but they are a lot easier to cool (40 cm fan for instance), easier to swap if needs be, easier to expand the capacity (just plug in yet another drive into your FireWire-bus).

Not sure how easy it is to raid those though ...

Re:Why not use external drives?

[htmlboy]

Okay, so external drives aren't as cheap as internal drives, but they are a lot easier to cool (40 cm fan for instance), easier to swap if needs be, easier to expand the capacity (just plug in yet another drive into your FireWire-bus).

at my last job, my boss needed more space for video work on her mac and bought a stack of 4 external firewire drives. within a year, 3 of the 4 40mm fans had died. it could just be my bad experience, but i've found the smaller fans to have rather pitiful life spans, be it in video card cooling, north bridge cooling, 5.25 drive bay cooling or external hard drive cooling. the one exception i've seen is an original fan on a pentium 200's heatsink that's still going strong. my point is that i wouldn't recommend putting too much stock in the long-term cooling capacity of those little fans.

Here's a real budget storage server

[Yo Maing]

I built an ftp server which holds almost the same amount for about $500 cheaper:
Rackmount hot swap ide chasis: $699
Athlon 2500 CPU: $99
Athlon a7n8x motherboard: $89
Used video card: FREE
8 120 gig IDE drives: $1000 (cheaper now)
500 watt power supply: $150
Memory: $200
3ware 8 port Escalade RAID card: $350
Total: ~$2600 with hot swap IDE, hardware raid, and rackmount
Spend a little bit more and up the capacity to 3 terabytes.

Re:Here's a real budget storage server

[crombie]

Nice rig. Like the case. Why do you need an extra 500 watt power supply? Did you remove the one that comes with the case?

How are you doing backups?

Isn't the esclade a 64 bit pci card? I don't think the a7n8x supports 64 bit, correct?

Re:Here's a real budget storage server

[compwizrd]

The escalade will work just fine in a 32bit slot.

Re:Here's a real budget storage server

[Yo Maing]

I don't back it up - it is a music server :) I bought the 500 because of the Athlon chip - 300 is pushing it, especially on startup. Cheap insurance.

Why didn't you think of this!?

[Mulletproof]

Linux!!!!
Feel free to mod me up now.

Interesting concept of 'budget' and 'server'

[madaxe42]

I'm sorry, but i fail to see how this is a viable server solution, for anyone! I have over 5.5TB of storage on my fileserver (read pr0nserver), at home, at a total cost of under 2000. I've used cheap Siimage chipset based raid cards, and a variety of 250GB ide hdds, all purchased from eBay. The mobo is a generic via board, with 6pci slots, and no agp (why the hell would I need agp on a fileserver?!), with a slighlty overclocked 600MHz P3. I've got 100mb ethernet through the house, and, accordingly, a 100mb NIC in the machine. Other than that, that's it. It's got no graphics card, no peripherals, and the case is just a full tower server case, with a bumch of 5" fans hardwired into the PSU. I use 3 x 350W power supplies, each of which isn't used fully. The machine runs gentoo, and automagically emerges the latest whatever every 24 hours. I run samba-tng for the windows shares, and apache, for a media management system i'm working on. Anyway, enough of me showing off ;)

Re:Interesting concept of 'budget' and 'server'

[legoburner]

I think you are the winner!

Do you have any photos of your setup online? What is the average price per hdd that you buy and how many HDDs do you have in your setup in total?

Do you have a seperate case for some of the HDDs or are they all stuck in the one full server case?

Also are you aware that 3*350W = 1/kWh = 24/kWh per day = (roughly) average household electricity usage

Re:Interesting concept of 'budget' and 'server'

[HardCase]

Also are you aware that 3*350W = 1/kWh = 24/kWh per day = (roughly) average household electricity usage

The wattage numbers on a power supply are a rating, not the amount of power that they use. Power supplies aren't like light bulbs. The total power usage in watts, during normal operation, is less. It doesn't take much energy to keep a hard drive moving...it's the starting that requires more power.

-h-

Re:Interesting concept of 'budget' and 'server'

[Anonymous Coward]

And not only that, but 350 watts at 12 volts is ... 35 watts at 120 volts, which is how the electric company provides, and bills you.

Rename the article

[bigjnsa500]

They should rename this article:

"How to build a budget file server without knowing what we're talking about"

3 grand is on a budget? What happened to raising from the grave an old AMD K5-166, throw some big IDE drives and you really got a budge file server.

Linux not a good choice?

[Ridgelift]

From the article:
This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box. Since we anticipate going through 2 TB of data every year, this setup allows for that flexibility without a significant cost penalty

I just flat out don't understand this statement. Can someone shed some light on this?

evms

[Anonymous Coward]

just built a pretty 1.1T evms mashine. Runs smoooooth with 8x160GB Seagates. Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on ... /dev/evms/.nodes/md/md0 1.1T 452G 592G 44% /mnt/raid I would suggest to anyone plannig to build a file server to use EVMS. Great stuff (espacially for expanding the storage size) My filesystem choice of course is reiserfs

Just don't hook it to the internet.

[emil]

OS X 10.1 users are still waiting for a patched SSH.

While Apple includes server software in OS X, Apple is not excited about you actually making use of this software (they would rather that you buy OS X Server), so it will constantly be a thorn in your side.

I've thought about OS X server applications, but...

• I don't care for their support policies
• Apple likes to use support to cut OS functionality (itunes)
• /etc/passwd is a rump, and the c library pulls from an Apple licensing daemon, which makes me uncomfortable
• The FS also makes me uncomfortable (non-UNIX-native OS9 FS, journaling is a 20% performance hit)
• The "repair filesystem permissions" maintenance gives me the willies.
• Apple doesn't seem to be jumping up and down about any sort of standards compliance (POSIX, UNIX98, etc.)
• There is a lawsuit between Apple and X/Open (OSF) about Apple's claims that OS X is "UNIX." X/Open says that it most certainly is not. Apple should license and certify.
• Prebinding/optimizing Objective C applications has become a voodoo rite.

It seems like a good deal at first, but look before you leap.

Re:Just don't hook it to the internet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mommy, make him stop!

and assuming one works for free ...

[aoj]

that looks like a fun home project but I would start here when looking for a small office server Penguin Computing Relion Servers

Why OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you could have used yellowdog instead and saved some money and gained better performance (on a g3 yellowdog runs much a href=faster than OSX).

What OS?

[kg4eyf]

Is it just me, or did they leave out the operating system. That seems like a fairly important component to me. The briefly mention than linux is a bad choice (which I do not understand) but no other meniton is made. If they aren't choosing linux, then what are they using, and are they paying for it? I don't see it included in their budget!

Re:What OS?

[jeffhot]

Yes, this seems like a huge oversight to me too. Especially when comparing it to offerings from Dell and Apple, who surely include a Server OS with their hardware. It's not like you can just throw Microsoft Windows Server 2003 into the mix without affecting the budget. I know that XServe from Apple they are referring to comes with an Unlimited Client version of OS X Server. MS Windows Server 2003 is $999 for only 5 Clients, and $3999 for 25. Now compare this build it yourself to the Xserve! There reasoning for saying no to Linux was the formatting of the hard drives into any common Linux format would reduce compatibility when the drives were eventually moved into External FireWire enclosures.

Re:What OS?

[tigga]

The briefly mention than linux is a bad choice (which I do not understand) but no other meniton is made.

Those guys are gamers. And this box also supposed to be game machine. Guess what OS have a lot of games written for it (and processor is Intel) ;))).

OT: How are the Promise cards?

[EvilStein]

I have heard that their RAID 5 controllers are a bit iffy at times - how's yours working out?

What OS is on the box? :)

Re:OT: How are the Promise cards?

[EmagGeek]

2:40pm up 81 days, 47 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

That answer your question? It's on a RH7.3 box. I've had zero problems so far. They released a driver for RH9 after receiving a scathing letter from me about their lack of support - so at least they're current now.

I have a 256MB stick of SDRAM on it... it's not bad at all...

Re:OT: How are the Promise cards?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I didn't bother experimenting, and paid the extra $100 for an Adaptec controller. It also comes with 64MB... sure, it's a pain to upgrade, and expensive, but good enough for most home uses.

Re:OT: How are the Promise cards?

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

What Adaptec SCSI Raid controller would you guys recommend on Redhat 8/9??? Most of what I read tells me that Adaptec support stopped at 7.1.

Any other cards worth my money?

Re:OT: How are the Promise cards?

[EmagGeek]

Why are you limited to Adaptec? Most people like 3Ware cards for their vigorous driver support (they give you the source)... Nothing wrong with the Promise card either..

Re:Yep. I have one too

[bill_mcgonigle]

3ware RAID controller (great linux support)

We have several 3ware RAID controllers, of multiple generations. On several occasions, they have dropped a drive and reported a degraded raidpack. The linux tools don't successfully fix it, so you have to go into the BIOS and start a rebuild. Slowly, the rebuild happens (dragging down the machine considerably while that goes) and then everything is fine for another month or so.

So, the drive is OK, the card works 30 days out of the month, as do the cables.

Has anybody else seen/fixed this problem with 3Ware cards? Their support line just says, 'rebuild the RAID pack', but that's not why we have RAID in the first place.

Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting (to me at least) to hear what other people are doing for file servers. I have a 333 MHz AMD running RH 6.2, Samba, and netatalk, with two 40 GB Maxtors (mounted at /home/share and /home/mp3s) and new/changed files get copied (via cpio in a cron script @ 4am) to a sigle 120 GB Maxtor--poor-man's raid :-) Just have to clean out the 120 every so often since it won't delete files that are no longer on the main filesystem.

And to those who would post "who cares?", please don't bother. If you don't care, then don't read. Obviously, some people are interested. Would you like asshole non-geeks to come here and post "who cares?" to every single story? No? Then STFU.

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[Macgruder]

Compaq Proliant 3000, PII/333, 512Mb RAM running RH 7.3 with the SMP kernel (planning on upgrading to a dual PIII/450 as soon as I track down a Rev 2 motherboard) 3x 18Gb SCSI in a hardware RAID 5 mounted as /home, 1 4Gb SCSI for /tmp, /var, and swap, and 1 9Gb SCSI for / and /usr. 40Gb DLT tape drive for backups. APC SmartUPS 1400 for backup power

(got it cheap from e-bay, under $100 including shipping)

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[ericdano]

I have an old Tyan Dual Pentium Motherboard. I think it's a Tiger 100, running 2 Pentium IIIs at 450 with 512 Megs of RAM. In June I bought an Adaptec 2400 RAID controller off Ebay. Set it up to mirror two 40 gig drives. Works great.

The OS of choice is FreeBSD 4.8 right now. Runs a email/web/fileserver.

For my work, I'm thinking about using an older Powermac 9500 to set up as an iTunes server. Since I'm a musician, I have a TON of MP3s ripped from CDs and obtained off Emusic (before they switched their subscription thing :-/). Anyhow, the other teachers would love to be able to access my 150+gigs of music, and having it on the network (yeah, imagine a music store that has a network......) where they could pretty much pull up any song.....pretty cool.

SO, that server is going to be a 9500 running OS X 10.2.8, with at least 2 250 Gig hard drives either Mirrored or Stripped using OS X's software, and I'll be backing it up via Firewire drives using something like Retrospect 5.1 or FolderSync or something. Haven't gotten to that point yet!

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[WNight]

Have you considered using rsync? I haven't used it much, but it's supposed to be made for this. It also has a 'delete file on secondary system when delete on primary system' option that sounds just like what you want.

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[Lysol]

Ah yes, all excellent. I love the home network.

Currently I have a few of the Shuttle boxes that run 1ghz p3 and 1.4ghz celeron & a white box generic Tyan 1.2ghz Athlon dually.

The p3-1hgz does my personal domain hosting - web (tomcat/apache), mail, openh323 gateway, ut server.

The celery does mail and public ssl egroupware portal for my home biz.

The dually is running rh 9 w/software raid across 2 ata-100 drives. It handles all my MySql stuff as well as the main repository for all my machines backups - it's on an the internal net. Once a week nightly backups are dropped to tape and once a month, the backup dir is wiped. So I always have at least 1 week of backups on tape, which I'm quite happy with. This is also my CVS server too.

All my development is mainly done on me 1ghz Powerbook. I also have a excellent 80gb Seagate Barracuda (fluid bearings) in an external firewire enclosure that has all my mp3z & mov/divx's. Sometime I just drop it on the dually and it mounts it up and shares it on my network, but most of the time I keep it local. My Powerbook is also dual head w/a 17" 760V Samsung LCD. Great monitor for the price.

My last machine is a kick ass little Shuttle box with a Athlon XP 2000+ and Maxtor ata-133 20gb drive. It's dual partitioned w/XP and Fedora. I use the Fedora side to develop for another Linux server that is just easier vs. doin it on my Mac. The XP boot is for Starcraft & UT. :)

All the machines have 1gb of ram except the two Intel Shuttle boxes. Everything internally is connected via a DLink Fast Ethernet switch. My external net is just a cheapie FE switch which is all bridged together via a even cheaper little broadband 'router'. It has dhcp, firewall and other things built it and has worked pretty well for me. My connecion is 1.5 down and 786 up DSL. No cable here. There's also an Airport Base station on the wall that provides wi-fi for family and friends when they drop by.

I've been running networks for many years outta my various cribs. The biggest and baddest was when the whole boom was goin on. I had a startup w/some friends and I had 9 machines in a closet of my studio apt. This included 2 big (1 size down from rack mount) UPS', a Dell quad Xeon 550 server (scsi 10k rpm drives with raid 5), 512mb ram and hot swappable everything - 4u also. This was out big app server. I was also running 2 RH 5 dns servers, 1 RH 5 mail server, 1 RH 5 ssh server, 3 dell p3-500 2u apache servers and one failover app server (Weblogic), 2 NT SQL 7.0 servers with full replication. I also had a separate tape backup box that was just a p2-350. Ah, the good 'ol days. After a bit we sold the company and I went traveling to Europe never to have another rack in my closet again. :)

Anyway, I love home networks and my two big obsessions now are: quiet and huge storage. I thought the article was kinda lame when I go to the video card and mouse part - something my servers have never really had or needed (cept maybe the nt junk). One thing I found higly annoying is when RH 9 required a mouse to install. I didn't like that much, but no big I guess.

So I have yet to find the magic bullet machine that will hold a 1TB array for cheap and for quiet. But maybe some day. Could it be that now that there's 5400 rpm 2.5" drives that that could be the thing??? Low power and quiet..

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[crucini]

I care. No need to get defensive. Have you considered using rsync? It's --delete option will delete files that don't exist on the sending side.

And why don't you create an account so more people can view your posts?

Re:Thread idea: what do you have at home?

[Anonymous Coward]

OS-X 10.2x supports only G3 or G4 processors, the best you can do on the 9500 would be OS-X 10.1x. I've run OS-X Server 10.1x on a pair of 9600s and it ran fine, but now I'm running AppleShare IP, WebSTAR, Retrospect, MeetingMaker and FileMaker Pro Server on the pair and OS-X Server 10.3 on a Graphite G4 - I like 10.3 server very much over 10.2 - much better admin and much better widndows support

I just feel we can do better than this?

[jago25_98]

This is kinda all common sense, doesn't seem to be anything here that I can't do, or any lateral thinking.

Shame there isn't a way to cut the computer out at all and just have dedicated hardware, no software. But then of course this turns out to be more expensive.

I just feel we can do better :)

Ugh - do not rely on said bad Article

[onyxruby]

Do NOT follow this articles advice - it's bad and here's why:

This is NOT the article you want to read for finding out about building a budget file server. They barely mention RAID at all, instead opting to spend money on things like a $70 video card and advising using said backup server as another gaming system. They talk about buying things like an 8 port Gigabit Ethernet switch that don't even have anything to do with a backup server. Word of advice, take that $200 for the switch and spend it on a 3ware RAID card. Your building a file server - not a network. For pete's sake they tell you to build a file server and not use RAID.

They stuff the case full of 5 hard drives, a floppy and DVD drive, but then don't even use an aluminum case. They actually tell you to pull out drives when they get full with "old" data and stick the old drives on top using USB 2.0 or Firewire. You are then supposed to buy a new set of drives to which they suggest doing this twice a year. No mention of rackmount cases at all, and there is no mention of a practical backup solution. Their backup solution consists of using a Pioneer DVR-106 4x DVD+/-R/RW. One sentence is spent telling you why they picked the drive, and two about the bloody color! This drive can burn 4.7 GB at a shot, to backup the proposed 2 Gigabytes would cost you $310 for a 500 pack of 4x DVD-R's on pricewatch (most economical purchase there). Nevermind the time spent making 436 backups.

No RAID == begging for trouble

[PSC]

If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive.

(Shakes head and bangs it violently against concrete wall)

MTBF and RAID is about entirely different things. The R in RAID stands for REDUNDANCY. You can have a MTBF approaching infinity and you would still have no redundancy.

Mirroring does NOT just double MTBF. It folds two probability functions. With RAID1 not only have both disks to die for data loss, but both disks have to die at the same time! (Or in fact, during the recovery window.) With a MTBF of 1.2 mio hours and a recovery window of maybe 5 hours, this really makes the difference.

Using non-RAID IDE disks, especially on a server, no matter how small the budget, is just playing russian roulette with your data. With at least 5 chambers loaded. It's wantonly negligent. It's unprofessional. Don't do it.

(As a side node, the MTBF is an utterly useless bit of information. It is determined by e.g. running 10,000 disks for 10 hours, with one disk failing. That is one dead disk in 100,000 hours of operation, so MTBF is 100,000. It's a bit like saying that if one woman can make a child in 9 months, 9 women can make a child in 1 month. Reality just doesn't work like that.)

Re:No RAID == begging for trouble

[advocate_one]

"(As a side node, the MTBF is an utterly useless bit of information. It is determined by e.g. running 10,000 disks for 10 hours, with one disk failing. That is one dead disk in 100,000 hours of operation, so MTBF is 100,000. It's a bit like saying that if one woman can make a child in 9 months, 9 women can make a child in 1 month. Reality just doesn't work like that.)"

I've got some bad new for you... no one can afford to determine MTBF that way anymore especially with very short "time-to-market" and the lack of product to actually test... it's all based on the design of the assembly and the use of statistically valid historical data on individual components and assembly methods used to create that assembly.

It's possible to design failure right out for the "designed" life of the component leaving purely random things left such as cosmic rays just happening to strike the firmware chip and messing up the drive control software etc., but the bean counters keep messing things up by using the lowest priced supplier and also changing the engineers design to make it cheaper on components and assembly methods.

Outsourcing your assembly line to the lowest priced labour may look great on your initial bottom line for a couple of quarters, but those chickens will come home to roost as your support side caves in under the warranty repairs and your company's rep for quality goes down the tubes.
Problem is most of those execs who cut corners etc. are never around when those chickens do come home... they've got themselves headhunted into another position and company on the strength of those initial savings...

Re:No RAID == begging for trouble

[onyxruby]

On RAID losing multiple disks. I had a HP RS-10 Drive Array drop two disks on me inside of a few hours. A nasty lightning storm hit the plant, and I headed in early just in case. I managed to get one drive swapped out with the hot spare and had just finished rebuilding the array when drive no 2 went out. I robbed my other RS-10 in order to salvage the first array. Needless to say I had the replacements overnighted asap and Liebert out that day. My IT lead (in another state) wondered why I had reprioritized her schedule on her and stayed put through the operation.

windows 2000 proposed that

[Anonymous Coward]

You could have your system disk mirrored RAID 1 in soft, which I did with 2 scsi disks.

And the the software raid failed, and the two disk didn't even talk to the card...

No more software Raid.

Get Hardware Raid, those people have to do it right, for you can return a raid controller, but not the failing bits of the soft you use...

A Budget!!??? A point?

[westyvw]

I have many different storage servers, at different locations. They have no clue on how to build on the cheap. They mention no Linux (or BSD) and thats just plain stupid. They put a video card in a server? WTF? You dont neeed one at all, all admin access should be with an xwindow on a main computer.

Slashdot, News for Nobody. This was the lamest article I have read in awhile.

What are you talking about

[SuperKendall]

This is a fileserver, right? Do you actually "use" it? I would imagine not, if it's a G3/266. OS/X would be downright painful to use on that.

First of all, with a decent video card OS/X would be just fine on that... but as you said, it's a server so you really don't need to use it much.

And why bother with the GUI overhead for a server anyway?

What overhead when you're not using it? You could probably just kill off any windowing processes that were taking up background usage. But from my experience if the computer is just sitting there you have no overhead to speak of, beyond a bit of RAM - but then it's mostly a fileserver so who cares?

Linux not a good OS choice

[mrneedles]

It was mentioned in the article that Linux would not be a good OS choice for this server, specifically that it makes no sense "to put XFS/ext3/RiserFS drives into" an external box with a Firewire or USB conncetion.

Sure the access times are slower going over USB/Firewire, but why in particular would a native Linux FS not make sense, and why would an alternative (ostenibly NTFS or FAT32) make more sense?

Also, there was no mention of the cost of the OS, so I guess Windows is really out of the question. Would they choose FreeBSD or something? Would UFS be any "better" for this purpose?

Dumbasses They are

[TheCrazyFinn]

Wow, I can't begin to describe the number of silly design decisions they made.

Good choices on the Drives, Case and PSU, and the LCD is a nice touch. Teh backup solution is OK as well.

But the MB, CPU, RAM, Video Card, ATA Card and OS were all idiotic. And they don't need a 120GB System drive

MB: They'd be much better off with a Good server board with ECC Support and 64bit PCI slots. Get a 64bit GigE card if your board doesn't have one on-board.

CPU: Doesn't need more than a P3 1GHz.

RAM: Spend that cash on ECC, not fancy DIMMs with das blinkenlights. You don't need the speed, but the Error Correction may save your ass.

Vid card: 4MB Rage Pro. Anything else is overkill. Only idiots and cheapskates use their servers as workstations.

ATA Card: Put all that money you saved by buying a $60 P3 instead of a $300 P4 and a $10 video card instead of a $70 one into a nice Hardware ATA Raid card, complete with RAM.

OS: either Windows Server 2k3, Linux or FreeBSD.

System Drive: 40GB 7200RPM job.

Now, put the 4 shared drives into one Stripe set, and do proper backups, instead of this silly shit that is 4 individual shared drives. One nice big share is a better idea, and just buy a couple of frikkin external drives for offline storage. Use a decent filesystem (JFS, Reiser, NTFS) to gain reliability and performance.

Now, DVD-R is going to be OK for incremental backups (And the system drive, which should stay empty anyways) but if you care about your data and failure, buy a good SCSI tape drive and do real backups.

Re:Dumbasses They are

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you read the article? Part of the design of this 'server' is that it can also be used as a workstation. Hence needing the video card, and the processor.

"Only idiots and cheapskates use their servers as workstations"

Yes, and only cheapskates skimp out on a video card and processor, when we're talking about a system that needs to last for more than a year or two.

Re:Dumbasses They are

[TheCrazyFinn]

As I said, they're dumbasses. You don't use the server as a workstation. It's a server, use it as one. If you need another workstation, buy one of those.

It's a fileserver. CPU power is a moot point. If it's on the shelves, it's overkill, spec something decent, but 1GHz is probably even overkill for what they are doing.. And Video doesn't matter at all, you'd be fine with a 256K ISA VGA card, if your server actually had an ISA Slot. Frankly, as long as you have decent bandwidth on the PCI bus (read 64bit slots, since this is a GigE application) a 450MHz PII is fine. Shuffling files is not CPU intensive, even with IDE. On a budget, Good drive controllers are a much better investment than fast CPU's. I chose the P3 because good P3 server boards are abundant and cheaper than good P4 server boards. Get a deal on a nice s478 board with 64bit PCI/PCI-X slots and ECC Support, by all means drop a P4 in, but even then, you're wasting your money if you spend 10% of the server's price on a CPU for a fileserver.

Sure, if you're spec'ing out a $15,000 server, buy all the CPU you can, it really don't affect the price much, but at the low-end, it does. And he'd probably get more traction of of a low-end Xeon than a high-end P4.

Having looked at it thoroughly..

[mindstrm]

I can't figure out why these guys thinkg a DVDR is a backup solution
a) Likely to fail
b) Look how much time, and how many discs it will take to back up 1TB.

The realistic backup solution for stuff like this is: stuff like this.

Back up to a set of hard drives. Seriously. The cost/MB is still the cheapest out there, and it's more flexible, and heck, way faster than tape.

Poor article... clear lack of RAID knowledge

[WD]

If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive.

So you are skipping any of the benefits of RAID just because you picked a drive with a higher MTBF?? Pretty naive, if you ask me.


Another possibility was RAID 5, which allows 5 drives to act as 4 drives.

I don't even know where to start here. RAID 5 doesn't require 5 drives, as the above statement implies. You can create a RAID 5 array with as little as 3 drives. And a RAID 5 array doesn't "act as" a number of drives. A RAID array will appear as a single drive to your OS. In the case of RAID 5, you'll have n-1 amount of storage, where n is the capacity of a single drive.


Something else to consider is that a RAID array would use more power than our current setup because the drives are run simultaneously.

The difference between an idle and active drive is one or two Watts. RAID or not, your system is going to draw about the same amount of power.

I'm sorry, but I couldn't make it any further in the article.

DO NOT TRUST THE ARTICLE!

[SharpFang]

If you want to store your budget, put it on bank account, buy a piece of real estate, some art or something. Every geek will tell you what will happen with your $3000+ if you invest it in a system with top-notch gfx cardhuge harddrive, 1G RAM and such stuff. Wait 3 years and you will lose like 90% of the price! Servers are NOT a good thing to store your budget!

Budget Server... waiting to be rebuilt.

[Anonymous Coward]

Budget is as simple as the .com bust! Considering that I have in my possession 70 25 gig drives with 7 "10 drive" raidcans and matching pci card. Granted, these drives are old, but that is over a terabyte.

It is interesting that each raidcan needs a pci card. I bought a motherboard with 7 pci slots, built on video and LAN. I never even had thought that they existed before. Oh, and for those who are going to ask... ide.

Also, the coolest thing about these raidcans... linux drivers:-)

From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Not too long ago, terabyte storage was reserved for government labs like Sandia National labs, Lawrence Livermore labs, or science fiction.

I didn't know that. That's just absolutely amazing. It's just as if computers just keep getting faster and faster and getting more and more memory.

Just think, in the future we'll have processors that run at something like TEN Gigahertz! Think what you'll be able to do then.

Where is the ECC memory?

[chunkwhite86]

If it's a server, isn't data integrity a higher priority than sheer performance? Why aren't they using ECC memory modules? Price is not an issue - I have a dual Athlon MP system which supports ECC and I'm running 1.5 GB of PC2100. The 512MB ECC modules were only like $112 each.

Plus they complained about not having front-panel firewire and USB! WTF? This is supposed to be a server isn't it? Not an iMac!

And my final rant - An NVIDIA FX video card? Are they smoking crack? A Matrox Millenium PCI card is all you need in a server. GeForce FX is the last thing I would ever imagine to find in a budget storage server.

Re:Where is the ECC memory?

[WuphonsReach]

What's the make/model of your motherboard? I've had a hard time finding Athlon-based ECC motherboards.

Re:Where is the ECC memory?

[chunkwhite86]

It's a Gigabyte GA-7DPXDWP. It's a really great board and all features work well with Linux.

Tyan also makes dual athlon boards that support ECC memory, but don't waste your time and money on those - IMO they are garbage (I've been through two of them).

Make sure you turn on ECC support in the BIOS. It's OFF by default. There are several choices, but you need to set it to "Check and Correct" or "Check and Scrub", something like that.

3 GHz P4? = $300

[Gothmolly]

What are the Intel fanboys thinking? My Athlon 2600 cost $90.

I'm New Here

[New Here]

I'm New Here

Re:I'm New Here

[E.S Taog]

You must be new here.

Dangerous

[SomeOtherGuy]

Talk about working without a net. I mean, why call it a file server -- sure it will serve files...But it will not do anything about redundency or recovery. Thus it is just a Desktop with lots of standalone drive space. The whole file server moniker should be reserved for machines that not only collect and serve your data -- but also protect and back-up your data. No raid, no mirrors, no tape backups -- no nothin. And some good the 3d graphics card or MTBF will do you when one of the drives goes south taking your data with it.....(Well at least you may be able to replace it under warrenty with a new EMPTY hard drive and play a mean game of Unreal Tournament or something....:)

Never had that problem

[The Tyro]

I'm using three different controllers, all 6000 series and up. One runs under windows (shoot me), and the others run under redhat. I make it a habit to use the latest firmware and drivers from 3ware's website (easy download), and I have not had a problem yet. I use very generic ribbon cables scavenged from a multitude of machines... nothing special there. The drives are all of identical sizes (for their respective arrays), but of various brands.

Dunno... anybody else have some insight?

NAS

[Rooterbaga]

Picked up a Dell Powervault 705N off ebay for $300 and added 4 x 120gb @ $135 drive (CAN).

So for under $1000 got a headless Raid 5 NAS.

Oh..I see..I can't play games on it.
Should have spent the extra $2000.

Maybe I missed the point....

[HardCase]

It wouldn't be the first time. But that was a lot of money for a "budget" server.

I have a storage server here at home that I built from a Sun Ultra1 that I bought on Ebay for $50. It's got ~800MB of RAM and two 100Mb NICs and two wide SCSI controllers. I bought 12 18GB 10krpm SCA drives and 80 pin to 68 pin adapters, three el-cheapo four device external boxes and put the works together. The drives cost something like $18 each with the adapters, the cases were ~$30 each. I had the cables and terminators sitting around, but three cables and two terminators should be under a hundred bucks. So, 216GB for about $450. A half a terabyte for about $850. A terabyte for $1650. The system runs Aurora Linux, yes, it uses software RAID, but I've used Linux software RAID for years with no trouble. And I've run this old Sun stuff for a long time, too...with no failures. No, it's not world class power, but it is world class engineering.

Just to be fair, twelve 10krpm drives are noisy. And I suppose that that the four boxes take up more space and may use more electricity. And it probably could have been done cheaper with PC compnents and fewer large IDE drives. But based on my personal experience, I think that the way I did it was a good compromise between price, performance and reliability. Your mileage may vary.

I could have bought a single 250GB IDE drive for less money, but then I'd have a single point of failure...no thanks. And I'm with everyone else here who wonders why in the world it took $3000 to build a "server" if "budget" was the goal. Of course, I think that we all know that they weren't really building a server ;-).

Cheap Firewire + RAID multi-drive enclosure....

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could buy a cheap firewire-based raid enclosure for multiple drives... I'd be willing to pay $400 for one that'd hold 4 drives in a snap...

Re:Cheap Firewire + RAID multi-drive enclosure....

[bhima]

Sure but NAS I think would be better even if a bit more...

This is budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

You want budget? I bought a pair of Maxtor 40 GB HDs, a stick of 256 MB of RAM and stuck them in an old P150 with Windows 98.

That thing is used by a workgroup of about 6 for storing just about everything they need with their business. (They're using at most 10 gigs.) Every night, a batch file starts XCOPY to backup all files that have changed during the day from the main disk to the backup. Every little while, I burn CDs of everything with the snappy little script I wrote.

Total cost at the time (two years ago?), probably 500 bucks.

That's what I call a "budget storage server".

Here's one!

[_ph1ux_]

I am sure you could get a great deal on this one

Article Text

[aardwolf204]

Here are pages 1-3. Please reply if you have the rest.

Today we are going to be building a budget, high performance storage server. So what exactly is a storage server? We'll first go over the technical requirements and operational goals for our system, then move onto the design and assembly of the system.

First we need to discuss why we need a storage server. It is useful for a workgroup environment, where there are multiple users that need to share data across a network. In addition, it facilitates backup of data since the storage is centralized. Where cost is an issue, it is much cheaper to build a robust server with high levels of reliability than to submit that level of reliability and performance to all the network nodes.

At the most basic level, a storage server needs to be able to hold a lot of hard drives. To accomplish this, we could go out and buy a network attached storage device, but remember this is a budget system. Our goal is to maximize the functionality, reliability, and performance of the server, while keeping costs under control. It sounds like you could just add a bunch of hard drives to any networked PC and call it a "network attached storage device," but if you want it to be reliable, you have to think about cooling, power, and anticipated usage. So, if you're only interested in building a hardcore gaming PC, you'll still want to read this article to see our thoughts on cooling and power.

We wanted a server that would serve only data files and not program files. This would limit our network bandwidth and maximize performance. At the same time, we wanted this server to act as a workstation with as much capability as the other systems attached to the storage server. Our minimum storage requirement would be one terabyte. Not too long ago, terabyte storage was reserved for government labs like Sandia National labs, Lawrence Livermore labs, or science fiction.

Another consideration specific to storage is expandability; how we will cope with increases in storage requirements over time. Some network attached systems are great in the first year, but as needs expand, you basically have to double your initial investment to double your storage, by duplicating your initial purchase. The technology that you bought the first time does nothing for your future expansion, this is something that we tried hard to prepare for.

Let's start with discussing what we need to have and then build around that. First the hard drives.

A storage server should have a hard drive for the operating system and an array of drives for the shared storage. We feel that the most important feature for a storage hard drive is reliability. We went with IDE drives because of their superior price to performance ratio, as compared to SCSI. In our case, we don't even need the bandwidth of the SCSI drives - quantity rather than blistering speed was important. With respect to SATA or parallel ATA, both are more then adequate for our needs.

With these needs in mind, we chose the Maxtor Maxline II Plus 250GB 7200rpm 8MB buffer hard drives. These drives are rated at 1,200,000 hours MTBF as compared to 600,000 hours for standard consumer drives. This does not mean that you can run your hard drive for 137 years, but does imply that it is more reliable than a standard desktop drive. Maxtor has advertised this drive as one designed for 24/7 applications, this is in stark contrast to the old line of IBM drives that did not recommend continuous usage. Currently 250GB is the maximum capacity for 7200rpm drives. The only other IDE/SATA drive with a similar MTBF rating is the Western Digital Raptor series, but the max capacity is still only 36GB, with a 74GB version coming soon.

We will use four of these drives for a nice and even one terabyte of storage, with a server design that will allow for an easy addition of another 4 drives for a peak of 2 terabytes. But, when we are ready for a storage upgrade there will likely be even higher capacity hard drives on the market, further extending

Re:Poor article... clear lack of RAID knowledge

[Quill_28]

I agree with most of what you say, I believe you know what you are talking about but in the case of
RAID 5, you'll have n-1 amount of storage, where n is the capacity of a single drive.

That doesn't make sense,
capacity of drive *( # of drives - 1) makes a little more sense. Assuming all drives are the same.

I read yours and actually it just doesn't make sense though I know what you are trying to say. :)

Article never really explains

[0x41]

Alexis builds a budget storage server and explains why you can't take a random desktop and add a bunch of disks.
Funny, the article never really explains why you need all the super-super parts that he uses to build the server, except for the reasons like the UPS looks cool on your desk. Whoever wrote this really just took a budget and blew it on a bunch of cool parts to build a kick ass server, but would have been out of a job if he did the same at my IT department for wasting IT budget and time.
-$0.02

And we're backing this up how?

[vasqzr]

Anyone can build a PC and fill it with 300GB IDE drives. Big deal.

A few problems:

#1, if you've got BIG files (read: audio/video) or a quite a few users, it won't be fast enough.

#2, It's not a real SAN device. Where's the SCSI and Fibre channel? Can you plug it in to multiple servers?

#3, How do you plan on backing this up? a stack of DVD-R's? A bunch of 80GB tapes?

It may have a lot of storage space, but...

[natefanaro]

... how long will it take before it's rendered useless due to slashdotting?

Come on, put a page on that server it and post the link on slashdot!

What you REALLY need for a reliable server

[swordgeek]

> PII-200MHz, just because you can probably find one around.
> RAID controller, and a RAID array. How can they even USE the word reliability when they have no redundancy???
> Dual power supplies.
> ECC RAM.
> Dual network cards. They almost got this right, and then put them on different networks. WTF??!!!
> No extra video card. (get a motherboard with something cheap built in)
> Reliable OS. If you're going to use an MS OS , you'd better make sure that all of your equipment is on the HCL.
> Good backups. I can't get far enough to see if they have a backup scheme or not, but I doubt it.
> A clue. Half a clue. 1.3% of a clue!!! ANYTHING more than this author had!

Oh man, what an utterly bad article.

DELL NAS is better

[killmeplease]

For Half as much storage as the article is listing, Dell has a NAS that is bulletproof. These Dell NAS systems are much better because they are RAID 5 and will not break down. And the price is $1200 less. Of course you do not get the same amount of space, but it is rare to see a company use a terabyte every 3 months or 6 months as the article states. I think this is a great option for most companies.

SYSTEM SPECIFICATION
PowerVault 725N (System Identifier EEBHWT0W)
Dell PowerVault 725N: 2.0GHz Pentium 4 Processor, 1U

System Price $2,508.00
Dell recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(R) XP Professional

Memory: 1 GB DDR SDRAM
Hard Disk Drive: 120 GB EIDE Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
120 GB EIDE Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
120 GB EIDE Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
120 GB EIDE Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
Misc: Bracket
Documentation
C1, Cable
Shipping Material
Documentation

Budget fileserver

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a good budget config:

1. 2 x Xserve Dual 1.33GHz Cluster Config - $2,382 each
   1. 256MB RAM
   2. 60GB ATA drive
   3. gigE
   4. Mac OS X Server 10.3 with 10 clients
2. 2 x Apple Fibre Channel Card with 2 copper cables with integrated SFP's - $494 each
3. Apple Xserve RAID - $9,449
   1. 14 x 180GB = 2.52 terabytes
   2. dual non-redundant RAID controllers
   3. 2Gb Fibre Channel
4. ATTO FibreCenter 3400D 2Gb Hub - $1,569 (don't need real switch in budget scenario)

The Xserve RAID can sustain roughly 130+MB/sec write throughput on the RAID-5 set

Since we're on a budget, choose the cluster config of the Xserve's with only 10 client - can upgrade to unlimited version for $500.

No storage kept on each head - instead, boot off the RAID. If a head dies for any reason, change the LUN masking on the RAID controller and bring up the second head as the first head. No physical changing of cables necessary. Add a PDU with web management for complete remote operation. Downtime is roughly 5 minutes after admin launches the admin Java application (and the web browser for the PDU). This is budget after all.

This system can server up roughly 2 terabytes on two separate volumes (or do software RAID 0 to combine them) over a variety of network protocols - AFP, NFS, SMB, WebDAV, ftp, and whatever else you can slam into the open source core. It can also be a member or server of a variety of directory services including LDAP, NT PDC, NetInfo, NIS.

Includes network based remote management as well as serial port access for integration into existing console access servers. Solution is easier to manage than most UNIX (including Linux) setups.

Price competitive against similar Wintel setups, especially as the number of clients go up. Server is good for 50-150 clients depending on client performance demands.

Add software and hardware support contracts, rack system, UPS(s), gigabit switch(s), etc.

Price is a bargain $16,770 (ClubMac mostly). Compare against $25k+ systems with similar resiliency, manageability, and performance

offsite

[lseltzer]

I basically agree with you, except that backup to hard disks doesn't get you offsite backup, unless you use removables and buy a lot of them. Expensive, although it would be fast.

Re:offsite

[mindstrm]

Totally correct.

Actually, I thought I included the word "onsite" in my post.. I guess I erased it.

Depending on the scale of your operation, removables can still be significantly cheaper than tape.

Re:offsite

[ivan256]

Tapes are guaranteed to survive a bumpy truck ride off site, and the time you accidentally drop it. You also don't have to worry about wether your tape will spin up after sitting unused on the shelf for a few years. You get no such guarantees with a hard drive.

If your data is worth anything to you, or you have any interest in archiving, hard drives are a poor choice for backups.

Re:offsite

[crucini]

I wonder if you can devise a reliable system where two employees alternate taking a disk home, so there is always at least one disk off site. For example, Alice brought in her disk today, and Bob left his home.

The backups could be encrypted so that if the employee disks are lost or stolen there's no harm done.

Re:offsite

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends on the archiving.

For weekly backupos, sure, tape all the way. For rolling backups (document management, massive databases) hard drives are the way.

In terms of the actual syste, you are really just putting another set of disks in there in another RAID 0 slot, which again is something you can do with SCSI rather than IDE. Or fibre storage/firewire for smaller (below 2 terabytes) data.

And a server with a *single* processor. Jeez......

Tape still competitive

[wirelessbuzzers]

Back up to a set of hard drives. Seriously. The cost/MB is still the cheapest out there, and it's more flexible, and heck, way faster than tape.

Last time I checked, CDs were about 30 US cents on the gig (ok, say 50c for good CDs). DVD-Rs were about on dollar to the gig. Hard drives were about 80c on the gig for cheap ones. Tape was also about 50 cents on the gig.

The equalizer is the cost of the drive. CD drives are dirt cheap; if you back up to hard drive, the drive is the media; but if you amortize the cost of the tape drive over, say 100 terabytes (not so unreasonable given the durability of tape drives), you bring up your cost to maybe 55 cents on the gig for tape. Granted, if you back up only 10 terabytes, it's no cheaper than hard drives.

So, if you're a large company that makes lots of backups, tape is still cheaper. If you're an individual without too much porn/mp3s, CDs are the way to go; if you're in between, go ahead for hard drives.

Re:Tape still competitive

[red floyd]

The equalizer is the cost of the drive. CD drives are dirt cheap; if you back up to hard drive, the drive is the media; but if you amortize the cost of the tape drive over, say 100 terabytes (not so unreasonable given the durability of tape drives), you bring up your cost to maybe 55 cents on the gig for tape. Granted, if you back up only 10 terabytes, it's no cheaper than hard drives.

No, the cost of the tape drive is not necessarily the equalizer. The equalizer is the cost of the operator sitting there and swapping CDs/DVDs, as opposed to getting a tape solution that can hold your typical incremental backup on a single tape, that can be dropped in at COB, and removed in the morning.

Re:Tape still competitive

[mskfisher]

The 4x DVD-Rs that I bought just recently from a brick-and-mortar shop were about $56 for 25, or $0.52/GB.

I know you can get them cheaper online... and if you want to go for a slower recording speed (I don't) you can get them about half price.

Tape may be more convenient for large backup jobs, and maybe I'll use it eventually... but for now, DVD is looking pretty good for home applications.

Re:Tape still competitive

[Cryptnotic]

I bought some generic 4X DVD-R's for $35 for 25. They work fine. That's $0.298 per gigabyte.

Re:Tape still competitive

[mskfisher]

The only thing I'm nervous about there is archival quality... some research is suggesting that generic white-label CD-Rs are starting to go faster than their name-brand counterparts.
[info, discussion]

Re:Tape still competitive

[Cryptnotic]

True, that is a serious concern for large companies. However, for your average porn/mp3/divx/warez archive though, it's fine.

Re:Tape still competitive

[mskfisher]

Yep - I just want to catch it before it starts to get bad, so I can transfer it to my next-gen storage media. :)

I've had enough hard drives go that I'm completely sick of losing data... I'm considering a RAID 5 array, but I still need to do backups in case of catastrophic failure.
So... yeah.

Re:Tape still competitive

[wirelessbuzzers]

No, i meant that the cost of the drive can make tape more expensive than HD, not that it can make it cheaper than CDs. The no-disk-swapping thing is obvious.

+5 hit it on the head

[Anonymous Coward]

I think your post sums it up quite nicely. Poor guy who wrote this article is getting bashed on slashdot...but seriously. fileserver != workstation, and never should be. ESPECIALLY NOT IF IT RUNS WINDOWS!!!!

Don't forget redundancy!

[gukin]

A few years ago, I needed to put together a fairly heavy duty samba/NFS server setup. The important issues were reliability, and cheap (in that order.) I went with a couple of P-4 (after watching the TomsHardware video of the athlon going poof), three 40 GB WD drives (per system) and a total of 3 NIC's per system (we have redudant LANS). I created a 3Gb / on each disk, a swap partition on each disk and a RAID 5 (software) 75 GB MD. I also used heartbeat so that the two systems would be "Highly Available" see linux-ha.org for more HA stuff.

Then for the backup up stuff, I just rsync the primary box to the secondary twice a day. Worked great . . . until I lost TWO disks on one of the boxes. I was able to run on the secondary until I replaced my disks AND backing up 55 GB of files only took 2.5 hours. NOTE: I had 455 days of uptime on the primary when it crashed because of the bad disk. It DOES make sense to occasionally verify your box CAN reboot.

Re:Don't forget redundancy!

[htmlboy]

I went with a couple of P-4 (after watching the TomsHardware video of the athlon going poof)...

ok... so exactly how many times have your heatsinks fallen off the chip during operation? there are plenty of valid reasons to go with a p4, but that's not one of them.

Recommendations for external drive arrays?

[JimmytheGeek]

I've been looking for a chassis to host 6+ scsi drives and connect via an external . I'd prefer a rackmount enclosure. Just about everything I've seen is either another server to maintain (got lots of those) or at least a populated chassis. I have the disks, and if I didn't could get them cheaper than the "solution" vendors.

What I want is to plug hot-swap drives into an applicance that connects to the 68 pin ultra2 external channel. Dual (individually adequate) power supplies would be nice, along with adequate cooling.

Anybody found what I'm looking for?

Re:Recommendations for external drive arrays?

[Tassach]

EBay is your friend. The market is flooded right with server-grade storage chassis coming in off lease, most of it rack mount.

You can get the bare chassis from the vendor of your choice for under $300. The problem with buying a bare chassis is that you'll have to find the hot-swap sleds seperately, which can be a real PITA, depending on the model. You can get fully populated arrays for under $1000, which even if you throw the drives away is probably cheaper than buying the sleds individually.

For the $3000 the yutzes in the article spent, anyone could pick up a fully populated storage array plus a pair of dual P3 servers. I'd much rather buy 3 year old enterprise-grade server hardware than to cobble together a bunch of OEM parts.

Re:article text

[ckaminski]

Good thing, because it is! :-)

USB2 and Firewire vs xATA and SCSI

[rsd]

Can someone explain (or link) how does external HDs connected thru
USB2 or Firewire performs against conventional xATA and SCSI?

Are they reliable? Do they work well with linux?

I have seen articles about hacking firewire to connect HDs on MacOS X, but no word about its performance.

Re:USB2 and Firewire vs xATA and SCSI

[WuphonsReach]

I've seen external USB 2.0 drives do anywhere from 1 megabyte/sec to as high as 3.5 megabytes/sec (2-2.5 would be average). Internal IDE drives (ATA/100) usually perform at a rate of 3-15 megabytes/second (6-9 Mb/sec would be average). SCSI drives are faster yet.

Those numbers are based on a sampling interval of 120 or 300 seconds (the number of bytes transfered during the past 300 seconds a.k.a. sustained transfer rate). I have a testing tool that creates 4Gb or 8Gb data sets on the drive and then does sequential/random reads. The data sets are large enough to overwhelm to disk cache or system cache, which gives me better sustained throughput numbers.

Budget Server my ***

[bluekanoodle]

This is a stupid waste of money. :)

Try one of these

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/c ategory_slc.asp?CatId=330

Add another grand for drives and it still could be done rackmount with hardware RAID for around 2 grand

Re:Yep. I have one too

[WuphonsReach]

Off-hand, I'd question the power-supply. But I'd hope that you're running a large enough power-supply to handle the amount of drives and that you have it hooked to a line-filtering UPS. Does this only happen when the system is under heavy load?

Are the drives individual cooled? A slightly over-heated drive might respond too slowly for the controller.

Is it the same drive all the time? The same cable? Are you keeping a written log of what died and when so you can spot the pattern?

a real budget server all right

[rock_climbing_guy]

It's /.ed. Nice work, people.

Another stupid bit

[rhizome]

Well, this is where I stopped reading:

Another possibility was RAID 5, which allows 5 drives to act as 4 drives. An additional parity track is written on each drive, so if one fails, then the other drives can recover the lost data. This is available through software or hardware. This is a great solution if you do not plan to upgrade your maximum server capacity. When the time comes to replace a drive with a higher capacity drive, you will be forced to replace the entire array.

Right. The thing reads more like an excuse to play with some SATA drives they got for review or something. At any rate, the article presents some seriously flawed and amateurish design decisions under the guise of "budget" architechture.

"with practical application"...

[Jo_2521]

applicable for whom?

If, accidentally, you're system administrator of some sort and you actually believe this article, then you're fscked. Really.

From the article:
"If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive."

MTBF: Mean time between failures. Mean time. Mean. As in, "it should run this time". "Probably it won't fail until it has run for that many hours". "Maybe it will last that long".
Not as in "this hardware drive is the ultimate perfection".

It doesn't get better when the author declares, how useless RAID 5 is, but it shows one thing: This guy really hasn't got a clue what he's talking about.

Even better: The backup/restore solution.

So, back to the practical application: Who the hell is this arcticle for? The private user doesn't have the money nor the need for Gigabit Ethernet ("budget server".. muahaha), and in Business this system obviously fails.

I'd love to see this guy set up his "Budget Server" in some company. Then an hard-disk headcrash. Just imagine this guy having to explain why the contents of his $3000 dollar-machine are impossible to restore. MTBF. My ass.

It's in the CPU selection

[slimy_dude]

Following the recent price drops, the Pentium 4 3.0GHz (800 mhz bus) is the same price as the 2.8GHz last month. The marginal cost between a 2.8 and 3.0 is about $60, but to go from 3.0 to 3.2 is about $120.

To me, this comment epitomizes everyone's complaints about this article. The the-marginal-cost-of-cpu-performance-starts-to-sho ot-up-here logic has nothing to do with their application and can be used to justify almost anything.

Hot-Pluggable FireWire Array on a Budget

[BoydWaters]

http://www.newegg.com
part #N82E16817145316 External firewire enclosure $ 50 each
part #N82E16822152011 Samsung 160GB hard drive $105 each

http://www.pccables.com
part #70924 FIREWIRE HUB 6-Port $ 35 each

With the six-port hub, we set up a topology such that we have one
hard disk per port, minus one port which goes to the host
computer. Then we have five disks per hub in the array; if one of
them fails, we can pull it off-line without touching the cables for
the other drives, since they all go to the hub.

So it is $155 per 160GB element of the array, plus $35 for the
hub, amortized over the five disks (35/5=7) is $162 for 160GB.

At RAID 5, we have (N-1) effective storage capacity, or 4*160=640GB
for $810.

Since most every firewire host adapter has two ports, we can have two
of these hooked up to the computer, for a total of 1.3TB of RAID5
on-line for about a dollar a Gigabyte.

It's a bloooody mess, with twelve power-supply bricks, but it is
remarkably cheap for a hot-swappable personal server.

Note that we can scale this topology if we want to; we could
implement RAID 10, by adding elements to each of the hub ports in a
daisy-chain fasion; FireWire supports up to 63 devices... for a
personal server, I don't anticipate saturating the firewire
bandwidth. We would implement RAID 10 or other 2-D RAID topologies by
means of combining RAID with Logical Volume Manager (LVM) -- a RAID5
array per hub, with each element of the RAID5 array being an LVM
expandable volume. You would have to add to the LVM in "slices" of
five disks, or otherwise keep the RAID5 elements the same size...

Actually I'm not sure that this last point is meaningful; I would not
plan to do such a thing. But it is worth noting that I can
dynamically attach other devices to the firewire array by connecting
to the spare ports on the back of the disk enclosures.

Re:Hot-Pluggable FireWire Array on a Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed I think firewire for a medium scalable storage node is a really good option. Daisy chaining will effect performance somewhat, but as you say the firewire bandwidth is pretty fat anyway.

By my reckoning, you can actually use 62 of those 64 possible f/w device ports which, using something like Lacie 300G f/w attachable boxes gives you 18T.
Thats not bad scalability, enough to last you 9 years at the consumption rate given.

Beyond that I suppose you would have to go with ethernet disks/NAT , but in that market the price hops sharply from $1/G to about $2.50/G

"like lightbulbs..."

[simpl3x]

i was just reading about one of two companies who retrieve information from failed drives, and how one should purchase drives from different batches, because when one fails they all fail. whenever a light fails on my car, i replace them all, because the others are going soon, oddly hondas were the most consistent (the others would be gone in days!). interestingly enough, one of the firms maintains a grief counselor! damn i can't find it...

Re:"like lightbulbs..."

[pmz]

different batches

Perhaps, but they should still have the same firmware and model number. If a bad day at the factory creates a few hundred drives with an barely-in-tolerance part or something, it is understandable to attempt to get different date-codes. However, I suspect this is easier said than done (what vendor organizes a warehouse by manufacturing?).

Also, this is why we have manufacturer warranties. A blatant manufacturing flaw should be found within the five years that good drives have. I would never put a 3-month or one-year warranty drive into a server. These short warranty periods indicate very well the manufacturer's confidence where the durability/warranty tipping point is.

whenever a light fails on my car, i replace them all, because the others are going soon

This is probably more statistical myth than anything. Mechanical devices' failure rates do increase in time, but I'd bet that it's impossible to predict a succession of failures. Light bulbs are cheap enough that it doesn't matter, though (I'd take the opportunity to see if using LED replacement bulbs is worthwhile, anyway).

1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[billstewart]

They spent about $1000 of that cost on disks, and were too cheap to spend an extra $250 for RAID, but they spent $100+60 on a really cool keyboard and mouse and $100 for a really cute front-panel display.

They spent $300 for a Pentium-3 and $200 for a high-end motherboard and $350 for the fastest most expensive memory they could find, when a "budget server" could do just fine with a ~$100-150 2GHz CPU+motherboard and $200 for 1GB of average-speed memory. (Their motherboard does sound good, though.) After all, the bottleneck here is the disk drives and network, not the CPU, though even on a budget server it's probably worth having the 1GB of RAM for caching and for staging CD or DVD burns.

The $190 power supply seems expensive, but that may be realistic for a system that can expand to 8 drives. If you've got a UPS, you may not need as high-end a power supply, and a "budget" system might get away without it, but since they were too cheap to buy a 5th drive for RAID they're probably much more in need of highly reliable power. And their 3GHzP4 CPU and overpowered-for-a-server video card use too much power and put out too much heat - you can easily save 50-75 watts by making better choices, and probably 100. You could save even more by using a motherboard with built-in 2D video, but most of those don't have the high-performance networking support yet.

Also, they didn't have a price for an operating system :-). That means that they're planning to use Linux, which is another reason not to waste power or cooling or money on a gamerz video card...

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[AnyNoMouse]

I'm not going to defend them too staunchly, as I agree with most of your points, but the OS was discussed (if not priced) in the article.

They specifically said they wanted Windows as the OS for the same reason they didn't want to use raid. They wanted to take the full hard drives out of the machine and put them in external USB 2.0 HD enclosures so they could easily access the data later. They elimatated Linux as a candidate as they wanted to be able to use the enclosures on their Windows desktops.

Personally, I would go with software raid 5 using Linux and ReiserFS and back old data out to DVD or possibly even external firewire/usb2.0 drives dedicated to the purpose.

Heh... I still can't believe they put a GeForce 5200 in that thing...

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[zx-6e]

Actually, I think the $100 for the LCD display is worth it, especially to give you info like load, environmentals and performance if you run a headless server.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[dusty123]

Completely right.

I especially don't get the point for buying an expensive 3D video card and a wireless mouse for a fileserver.

Moreover they did not seem to bother buying ECC RAM what would clearly increase the overall stability of the system.

The case they chose seems not very "genius" to me - compared to something like the YeonYang YY-0221 Server.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think the $100 for the LCD display is worth it, especially to give you info like load, environmentals and performance if you run a headless server.

Yeah, sure. IF. But these guys put a GeForce 4 class video card in the thing, and mentioned the DVI requirement. So they're not running a headless server.

The whole article sounded somehow 'wrong' to me. They claimed to be building a budget storage server, but that's not what they built.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[TuxGrep]

Exactly. And I run a 7-disk raid5 array budget server on a (quality) 300 watt PSU for two full years now. Their power estimates (and the bad choices) are off by and large.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[Necr0maN]

they're gamers, what did you expect?

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[Necr0maN]

And since when can't you use usb2 drives with linux? That stuff works fine here.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem wasn't using a USB drive with Linux, but with using a ext2 or some other native Unix/Linux file system with Windows. They wanted the drive to be portable to their gaming workstations.

True, you could use Fat32, but a) they probably didn't know that and b) it's not exactly the best filesystem in the world to use anyway.

Of course, this is all pretty irrelevant. It's a flimsy excuse and the rest of the system is hardly a budget file server anyway.

Re:1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer

[Anonymous Coward]

So what? I'm a gamer too, but I know how to build a goddamn server.

I expected what the title of the article led me to expect.

Re:Poor article... clear lack of RAID knowledge

[SuiteSisterMary]

If you have five 36 gig drives, and you RAID-5 them, you'll wind up with one big drive of (5-1) * 36 gigs of space; 144 gigabytes, in this case.

If you have three 36 gig drives, and you RAID-5 them, you'll wind up with one big drive of (3-1) * 36 gigs of space, or 72 gigabytes in this case.

My setup

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a couple file servers setup to share (and also replicate partially) my data for my Home LAN. They are all in a rack, and so I wanted a solution that wouldn't require many extra parts - mainly for thermal reasons.

I got a couple Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboards and bout the only thing they are missing is built-in video. These motherboards are great for rack environments because they have two built-in NICs: 1 Based on the nForce chipset and the other is a 3COM, so they guarantee a decent amount of compatibility with whatever you are doing. I got a couple Athlon XP 2000+ to go with it, and 1GB of ram for each of them (no, not ECC unfortunately). The only thing I really had to worry about was putting a video card in each of them, so I only made sure I got AGP card, so AFAIK it won't clog up the system bus as much as PCI video. In addition to the normal IDE, these motherboards also have SATA raid controllers (I believe they only do RAID 0 or 1) which have decent capability for being built-in. They also have built-in surround sound, but honestly I haven't even touched these yet, and don't think I will for a long time.

These systems are setup on Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 respectively, and they are replicating data via DFS. I don't replicate everything I do, but mainly the important stuff (user folders, etc). I know these systems dont have ECC and other features which are common in servers, but as I mentioned before it is for my home LAN and I don't necessarily need all that. I set these up maybe a year ago, and it sure cost a hell of alot less than this RAID setup in the linked article. I definitely recommend the Asus motherboard to any AMD fan who is looking to build the server in a desktop/tower or rack system (probably 2U at the least). Good luck.

Hah I was just building one today...

[DeionXxX]

I just started building a File Server for all of the Raw Data for this site. Except my budget is a little less than theirs. I was planning on building a 1TB Raid 1 system 1.... 500GIG on onboard RAID Controller, 500GIG on PCI Raid controller. I am going to put a low end Athlon XP and a decent Mobo with prolly 256 DDR. Also I'm putting in 2 Gigabit Ethernet cards so our editors can have access to them quickly.

I still don't know if we need Tape Backup because if we lose a movie, we still have the actual DV tapes, so I guess thats a good enough Tape Backup.

--D3X
NeoX3.com: The One site you'll ever need for XXX

SCSI/ATA compromise

[Sloppy]

One thing I would like to try out some day, when building a big RAID, would be a compromise between ATA cheapness and SCSI lots-of-drives-on-one-PCI-slot goodness.

There are adapters that turn a cheap ATA drive into a SCSI drive, roughly in the neighborhood of $100 apiece. If these things work well, then one may be able to put a whole bunch of cheap+100 (which is still pretty cheap) ATA drives on a SCSI (160 or 320 or whatever) channel, instead of adding a bunch of ATA cards and using up all the PCI slots.

Yeah, yeah, ATA sucks, whatever. I have actually had good luck with cheap ATA drives (better than my SCSI experience in the 1990s, for sure) and besides, you RAID 'em based on the assuption that yes, they will die. And when one dies, you pay chump change to replace it. (And when they don't die, then you smirk and say, "That's because I'm ready for it. What would be the point of them dying?")

Another good thing about this approach is that SCSI makes it easy (compared to ATA) to use external enclosures. I'm party convinced that a lot of my good and bad drive experiences have been related to cooling issues. (My expensive Micropolis SCSI drives roasted inside my Amiga 3000 case, but my Coolermaster and Lian Li cases are doing a great job of keeping my cheap Maxtors comfortable.)

Anyone have any experience with building RAIDs of SCSI-adapted ATA drives? Can they transfer at Ultra160 (or 320?!) speeds?

Re:SCSI/ATA compromise

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... think about this for a moment. The best IDE drives I have seen are 133MB/s, how could they compete with a 10 or 320 drive?

Re:SCSI/ATA compromise

[Sloppy]

An Ultra320 drive can't actually read/write data anywhere near 320MB/s. (Mechanically, drives aren't anywhere near that fast.) 320MB/s is just the bus speed. The faster you can talk on the bus, the less time you tie it up, so the sooner the host can talk to some other drive in the array.

Theoretically, an ATA/SCSI adapter could read a sector from the drive at 133MB/s into a buffer, then write it to the SCSI bus at 320MB/s. Such buffering would add a little latency, but would be insignificant compared to the latencies that already exist with mechanical drives.

Of course, I don't actually know that's what the ATA/SCSI adapters do. That's why I'm asking about them. :-)

SCSI hard drives don't require that much power.

[Anonymous Coward]

Big mistake in the article. They mention the SCSI hard drives require huge amounts of power to turn on. This is correct but what they failed to mention is that it is trivial to make them spin up one after the other. Seems that the authors of this article arn't too familiar with SCSI.

Of course, they forgot a few things

[Boarder2]

Looking at other network attached servers from either Dell or Apple brings a cost of $4360 for a 2.6ghz/400fsb P4 Dell Powervault for a one terabyte server and $5024 for a 1.33GHz G4 X-serve with 720GB.

What they forgot, is that included in (at least the Dell) price is the Operating System, AND Next day on-site support for a year, and parts support for 2 years after that initial year.

Maybe their "gaming" server would work for someone at home, but not a real buisness. Then again, a home user would probably just slap a couple large drives in their old K6-2 300 box and call it good.

Wow

[sharkey]

Another possibility was RAID 5, which allows 5 drives to act as 4 drives.

Man, I was way off! All my tektbooks and HOW-TOs have been lying to me.

Cat5e Cabling?

[bobdole_2047]

Did anyone notice that they went to great lengths to make sure they could get full gigabit ethernet, and then only used Cat5e cabling? Cat5e cables will only give you a max of ~350-500 Mb/s, depending on the quality of the cables. If you want full gigabit ethernet over a copper medium, you have to use Cat6. What a waste...

Apple XServe arrays hooked to x86 linux boxes

[caseih]

We recently purchased 2 apple xserve arrays totalling 4.5 raw terabytes of data for a price that none of the storage venders could match. We have the arrays set up to do two different luns, each radi5/1 with a hot spair (Raid/5 and then mirrored). All using 180 gb ide disks. We currenty use Panther Server on XServe boxes to serve nfs, samba and afs, but the cool thing about these arrays is that they are standard fibre channel. You can hook them to any box and any OS that can handle fibre channel. The hardware arrays simply set themselves up as scsi luns. The admin software is java based and runs perfectly under linux. I think anyone looking into a storage solution for windows or linux should consider the apple arrays even if they have no intention of ever using Mac OS X or mac hardware.

My 1TB Media Server

[meehawl]

I built this out of cannibalized parts last January 2003. I suppose by now you could probably double the media storage for the same cost -- there's a lot of rebates for PATA drives around.

Supermicro P6DBE (1997 vintage)
2xP3 600MHz

Adaptec 1940UW SCSI
Software RAID 1
x2 36GB Seagate SCSI drives
(web server)

1GB ECC PC100 RAM

x1 WD1600JB PATA drive
(apps)

Promise SX6000
Hardware RAID 5
x6 WD1600JB PATA drives
(media server)

ATI Rage Pro
(it's a server!)
Antec 1040SX Case

Antex True480 - 480 Watt PSU

Basically, all I bought new were the drives, the case, and the PSU. Total cost below $1300. Serves several thousand visitors a day, peaked at 30K hits for a while following a Slashdotting. CPU usage peaks around 20%. Using J River's Media Center, I've tested it serving 6 simultaneous 720x480 DIVX streams to clients over LAN and WAN with no problems.

These chumps spent 3 times what I did, and they don't even have disk redundancy. Who let the dogs out?

Someone Else's 2TB (!!!) Media Server

[meehawl]

After I read this I definitely think this may be the greatest Media Server setup currently in existence :

I got 8 Maxtor 4A300J0 drives @ 5400. Picked them up from CompUSA for $239 during a mail-in rebate thing they had going on last month.

I'm running RAID5 so I loose 300GB to parity, but like you say, given the 2TB limit, that worked out pretty good. Btw, windows report my dynamic shared volume at 2,099,996,200,960 bytes, so it looks like I overcame the 2TB limit somehow.

I boot from a seperate drive that contains just XP and apps.

I ran some test on my RAID5, and here are my numbers:

Sequential Read 74.4 MBytes/Sec
Sequential Write 29.2 MBytes/Sec
Random Seek + RW 4.5 Mbytes/Sec

This was when I was running the 3ware in a P3 800 board. If we round the sequential read to 80MB/s (640Mb/s) out of the raid, barring other bottlenecks (PCI bus and Ethernet I/O) I should be able to transfer:

32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or
23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or
106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or
71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or
2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or
444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s)

If the 3ware card is plugged into a 64bit/66MHz PCI slot, and you have integrated Gigabit Ethernet that doesn't ride the PCI bus, you just might be able to dump 640Mb/s to a 1Gb/s switch and then feed clients from there.

I haven't really had a chance to stress test the system yet since I'm still waiting on my 1Gb/s switch, but things run real well over my current 100Mb/s switched network (3Com Superstack II switch).

I'm seeing maybe 3% network utilization when streaming a DVD to a client, I would not anticipate any problems with a half dozen streams which would be the most I could ever imagine streaming at once.

When moving 50GB across the 100Mb/s connection, network utilization goes to 75-80%, but cpu remains less than 5%. And it does not affect the ability of the server to stream lossless audio and/or video to a htpc client.

The 1Gb/s switch will be shared between the server and the workstations that I use to rip from. The media clients (htpcs) will remain connected to the current 100Mb/s switch which in turns connects to the 1Gb/s switch.

Yes, MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones.

I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients if I don't want to fetch the airpanel and control it that way.

It should be noted that you can't remote desktop directly to one of the clients if your intent is to launch something on the local display. The thinsoft folks I mentioned earlier well sell a single license client to allow remote desktop access to a single client while preseving the local session.

I like the ATI cards myself. Since the server isn't normally connected to a monitor, it just got some old AGP card in it, a Voodo5 I think. I run a Pro-9700 MP-1 in my main htpc, and a 9200 in the htpc connected to a rear projector via s-video. I'm not pleased with the s-video of this card, and have been told ATI aren't know for s-video quality. Anyway, likely not a concern in your case.

I don't have any regrets from going the XP route vs. linux or 2003 server. My environment is very stable, and I haven't had any hardware conflicts/issues.

I'm running a 2.8Ghz P4c with a Zalman 7000Cu heatsink and Kingston Hyper-X PC 3500.

Re:Yep. I have one too

[bill_mcgonigle]

Does this only happen when the system is under heavy load?

No, sometimes in the middle of the night when they're idle.

Are the drives individual cooled? A slightly over-heated drive might respond too slowly for the controller.

Yeah, blowers right on the drive mounts (5.25" bay)

Is it the same drive all the time? The same cable? Are you keeping a written log of what died and when so you can spot the pattern?

It appears to be random in those regards, excepting the controller, of course.

Real Budget Fileserver

[AetherGoth]

I just built a budget fileserver of my own - total proce $600 (including shipping). It probably could have been about $500 if I'd really shopped around a little more and looked for places with less expensive shipping (that came to $100 total). Specs:

Asus nForce 2 motherboard w/ Athlon XP 1800
4x IBM 60GB 2MB 5400RPM HDDs
3x HDD cooling units
256MB RAM
Decent case, FDD, extra case fan, etc.
RH9 w/ Software RAID partitioning

I don't need 7200RPM 8MB HDDs - You'd need a pretty damn high-usage server to actually require fast drives. The slower drives are more reliable, and of course cheaper. I wanted 4 drives so I could RAID them for reliability purposes, and I chose the 60GB drives because they offered the best price for the capacity I was aiming for. You could get 80 or 100 GB drives without significantly adding to the price.

The motherboard was obvious - it eliminated the lack for a graphics card, even if nForce is rather poorly supported under Linux. As for RAM, again - I'm not playing Quake on here - I rarely use more than a few percent, even with only 256MB.

All in all, the price is excellent, I get my RAID with ample (for my purposes) storage space, and speed is not an issue in any respects, so I don't need to worry about it. The case is extremely well-cooled and the system is robust in general.

What a waste....

[Vrallis]

Here's how my storage server 'grew up':

Stated off as a K6-2/450 w/256MB after I upgraded my main system. I added four 80GB Maxtor's to it running on an (original) 3Ware 6400, doing RAID-5.

I eventually upgraded my main system again. The fileserver became an Epox 8K7A+ w/Athlon 1.4Ghz and 512MB RAM. The drives stayed the same. It also inhereted my old GF2Pro, since I upgraded. Overkill, but I needed video, and had no other use for the card.

Then the Epox finally started popping caps (remember the stolen capacitor electrolyte formula?). Fortunately, Epox was kind enough to repair it (about $28 spent on shipping total), despite being out of warranty. I held back the CPU for it's return, but I needed the system up and running.

So, I picked up an NF2 board with onboard video, and grabbed an XP1700. I dug up some spare RAM I had around and made it an even 1GB. Again, same drives. The Epox, 1.4Ghz proc, and GF2Pro went into a new system for my sister.

Next step?

Next step, if I ever have money again (bah!), will be much more dramatic. I'll probably move to Opterons, and I may do so for the fileserver as well as my workstation, as my fileserver does FAR more than just that. I'm looking at the newer 3Ware SATA controllers, at least 8, maybe 12 ports. I'll get the best 'bang for the buck' SATA drives out at the time (currently, I think it's the 250GB Maxtor mentioned in the article). I'll do RAID-5 again, but maybe plan in a hot spare this time.

But Intel? Why are people still wasting money on this rubbish? Three hundred bucks for a CPU? I could have built an equivalent or superior AMD system, getting the MB, CPU, and maybe even memory all for what just the Intel CPU cost. What a waste of money.

Backing up to disk

[Anonymous Coward]

Backing up to disk is fine for one on-site backup. If you need to restore something right away, and from not long ago then the data's right there on fast disk.

But how about restoring from a month ago? Six months ago? A year ago? Are you really going to have dozens of **sets** of disk drives sitting around?

And what about off-site storage? Are you going to be shipping dozens of heavy, bulky disk drives off site every day? And plugging and unplugging all those IDE or SCSI connections is going to become a pain very quickly.

It's just completely impractical except for **one** recent on-site backup. Tapes for everything else.

The real deal

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a GIS shop, we have about 20T of storage in house. Recently we've been running the following configuration for desktop production (linux boxen of course). And yes, we do critical path production on these machines. You can safely bet your company on a configuration like this.

Case: Antec SLK3700
Motherboard: Gigabyte MPX board
Processors: 2400MP x 2
Memory: 4x512MB Crucial registered
Video: radeon 9000pro
Network: Intel pro 1000MT dual port gigabit
Storage Controller: 3ware 8506 4 port
OS drive: Maxtor 120GB 7200rpm
SATA drives: 4 x 250GB Maxtor maxLine PlusII Raid 5
Power supply: Antec TrueControl 550.

Price tag on this system is about $3k.

Buy a 120x120x38mm Antec fan for exhausting heat out the back. Take off the bracket an use 2 fan screws to hold it in.

The case needs to be modded a tad to fit the big board in.

Avoid using WD at all costs with 3ware. We tried with PATA drives and got absolutely horrific (less than half the maxtor) throughput.

We've had problems with the Antec power supplies overheating a LOT (not enough to crash a system). I just don't think they can handle the constant massive load we throw at these boxes. I'd suggest getting something beefier.

With the included 120mm fan up front the drives stay surprisingly cool even after hours of constant 100% raid operation.

Re:Budget - mod up parent -

[Anonymous Coward]

Good rough and ready research - kinda what we've all been saying is possible for actual budget solution.

bsed on 1T

$1500-$2000 gives a decent budget/home storage box

$2000-$3000 puts you in the serious/quality league with raid, proper components, cooling etc.

Systems in the $3000-$4000 range are pro storage boxes w/ backup solution.

All IDE solutions peak out at 8 drives (aprox 3T by current limits). Scaling locally could use attached USB or ethernet disks.
On a larger level, for scalability you could go with lower cost servers but have many redundant ones with a net-raid/block level system in place (my fave), or start a hugh speed data network locally on one main site using fiber channel stuff.

Thats my rough and ready one paragraph summary of budget storage anyway. Your cost of $1500+ feels about right for the commodity deal.

Storage Server? No, little B0bby's 3733t PC

[crucini]

This isn't an article about building a storage server. It's an article about building a kewl PC that's overloaded with disks. The author implies that two disks will run off one cable, which is death to performance in an IDE storage system. But that might not be a problem, since:

Something else to consider is that a RAID array would use more power than our current setup because the drives are run simultaneously.

So, only one drive will be accessed at once? Sounds like a single-user PC, not a storage server.
And then:

There is an SPDIF header on board, but the cable is not included. Inaddition, more and more manufacturers are providing comprehensive software bundles and high performance accessories, such as rounded hard drive cables. These are all accessories that we would need to buy anyways.

and:

There were a few things we didnt like though, for one, it didnt include any front USB, firewire, or audio ports. These ports really do improve a usability of a system especially when the back of the case is hard to reach.

Sound like a storage server?

The article doesn't start by defining what it wants to accomplish. 1 TB of capacity, OK, but what levels of data transfer and downtime? There are mixed signals:

In our case, we dont even need the bandwidth of the SCSI drives quantity rather than blistering speed was important.

... and later:

This allows for a full gigabit of Ethernet bandwidth without taking away from PCI bandwidth, with a maximum rate of 266 MB/s which is over 2000 megabits/sec, enough for full-duplex gigabit. We see this as an essential feature for a storage server.

Since the author doesn't know what level of performance he's aiming for, he has no basis for choosing the amount of RAM, CPU, and disk formatting strategy.

So it should be important to note that simply turning on the RAID option does not guarantee the safety of your data. Our solution is to run the drives in a standard configuration.

IOW, RAID isn't perfect so I didn't use it. What's a "standard configuration"? Separate mount points for all disks? That can work, but ripples through to the applications.

This is also the reason Linux was not a good choice for our system -- it doesn't make sense to put XFS/ext3/ReiserFS drives into a USB2.0/Firewire external box.

Why? Since the three FS's mentioned are journalling, my first thought is that you're concerned about saturating the link bandwidth with journalling data. Is that it? Tough to analyze without some throughput numbers. If that's it, why not use ext2?

So what OS will you use? Let me guess - Windows XP. Because it has the most games.

My Budget server...(built approx 6 months ago)

[jriskin]

Requirements (in this order)
#1 Cheap
#2 Bulk Storage
#3 Reliability

This is what I paid at the time...prices may be better now...
1. 7 120Gig Drives $100 each $700
2. Enermax 465Watt power supply $85
3. Cheap case lots of bays $30
4. 800Mhz Duron+MB $FREE
5. 3DFX Voodoo 3 card $FREE
6. Crappy old Keyboard + Mouse $FREE
7. Extra fan $5
8. Random CDR $FREE
9. 100Mbit Ethernet $FREE
10. 20Gig boot drive $FREE
11. Additional IDE Controllers $60
12. OS Slackware Linux $FREE

Total Price $880 + (some tax, some shipping) ~$950

I run software RAID, get about 15-20MB/sec read and about half that writing. Totally fit my needs, totally cheap...The only thing I am probably going to do differently next time is spring for the cheap 3Ware 8 Port RAID card (under $300 on pricewatch).

Full of BS this is. Believe it, you must not.

[TuxGrep]

OMG. This article is wrong on a lot of things or makes really stupid claims and / or decisions. I could not believe my eyes.

First, the decision not to use any kind of raid. What are these guys smoking ? Didn't someone tell them this fact alone is simply inexcuseable ?

Then they really get going with the "assumed" power specs. Djeez. 15 watts per drive ?? It's not even close to 5 watts. Then, 70 watts for the videocard. Hey, what do you want to do with your fileserver, run UT at 200 fps ? Instead, slap in an old cheap 2D card and use less than 10 watts...

Then, by virtue of using an external firewire drive they conclude "we deem it smart to NOT use linux" WTF claim or logic is that ?

Further, ANYONE who takes the MTBF figures of harddrives at face value must have their heads examined. Who, in his right mind, will believe that a drive will sustain a period of a mere 10 years 24/7 use AND DEPEND ON THAT ? Much less, 20 years or the utterly laughable 137 years. Besides, by using 4 drive they effectively cut the expected MTBF by a factor 4. By using 8 drives the expected MTBF plunges from the theoretical 137 to 17 years.

Then it goes on. They choose not to use SATA !! Now that we finally have a better interface, one that does not suffer from all the problems of ATA (interference, short cable length, manageability)
they are not going to use it. What idiots !!

This article is SO full of holes one could drive a truck through them...! I smell BS.

Where's the Operating System???

[justzisguy]

It appears that they are choosing to use some flavor of Windows as their operating system. Did anyone see their choice? Obviously they can't toss Windows ME or XP on there. So say we throw Windows 2003 Server on there. Still not my choice, but as long as they remember to update it, it will probably work reasonably well (at least until their non-ECC RAM corrupts their data or their non-RAID drive fails).

Last time I checked, Windows 2003 Server was $1100 for only 10 licenses! Configuring a GNU/Linux server is certainly beyond these people so we better give them an XServe.

Re:Raiden's budget server

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm.. why is his "server" an intel box running windows? It's not a server motherboard. Why is a storage box concerned about having ANY video card, much less a 3D one? Why does it need a wireless mouse, etc. It's using non-hot-sawp IDE drives with no RAID and no workable backup solution? It's using a hokey hand-modified el-cheapo case?

Real servers come from Sun and the like, but if we want to talk about adapting more general purpose systems into servers, I can detail two I have made:
a.) Took a Sun Qube 3 400MHz K62, already designed for server use, already with the LCD screen (and buttons, that DO something, so you don't need a keyboard or mouse to shut it down or change the IP!)... this was like $300? Added some memory and two massive drives, basterdized the OS to Redhat 9. Put in a firewire card to access external storage for backups. This was less than $1000 total for 600GB of storage. It's smaller, runs cooler, (looks cooler), uses less power, and I am sure well work about as well for networked storage. The only real advantage his has is the GB ethernet. With the money you saved on this Qube, you could have ... _THREE_ of them... or.. perhaps a whole lot of external firewire drives. (and you could use firewire as the network to the clients if you desired).

b.) Blue G3 mac. The blue G4 mac is a 400MHz PPC g3 machine. It's well more than fast enough to be a storage server. I think I got this used for.. $200? I upgraded the memory to 1GB easily and cheaply. (Note: Why is this guy using "performance memory" for something where the hard drive and network will be the bottleneck?!?) The machine has 2 IDE busses, and I replaced the CD-rom drive and Zip drive that came with it with hard drives. There is a boot drive, a swap drive, and two RAIDed user data hard drives. I added a SCSI card, and several RAIDED SCSI drives. I added a GB ethernet card as well. Installed debian, set up Software raid, turned on NFS... walla. This machien cost around $1000 in total, mainly for the hard drives, and it is, I am sure, plenty fast enough for running NFS and samba. I also removed the video card from this machine. Again this machien has an additional level of reliability (RAID) that his doesn't, costed a lot less, and probably looks nicer. It comes with firewire and USB ports built in for external storage, and has an external SCSI port from my card.

Servers A and B from above also run RSYNC between them to keep data backed up, but with the money we saved, we could easily buy some external drives, or a tape backup machine and plenty of tapes.

Re:Linux not a good choice? ext3 on external disks

[Anonymous Coward]

I also wondered what the hell he was talking about.

I use exernal drives, and almost all of them are ext3 or JFS formatted. (I tend to use JFS on the much larger drives).

I would guess either:
a.) He means because he wants to move them around and mount them up on windows machines.
b.) he wanted to mention linux to sound leet, but avoid actually using it. Since he doesn't seem to know anything about SW raid (like the fact that you CAN SW raid a 100gb and a 200gb disk with no problems, just use a 100mb partition on the second disk, and use the "extra" capacity for something else....), I can only assume that this is the case.

It's like watching monkey's learn to walk

[ThoreauHD]

These nice kids are obviously great at gaming gear. But, as others here have posted, they know dick about server configuration.

OK, 3000 dollars later they have what?

1 Terrabyte of destructible data, with glowing 400 dollar ram sticks, and a 3D video card so they can freeze their server when the GL sticks to the screen like a burnt muffin.

It's like a ricer trying to build a BMW. Lots a flailing with nothing as a result. Here's the gear they should have used:

AMD Athlon XP 3200
Kingston/Crucial ECC RAM
Any motherboard with-
2 spaced 64-bit PCI slots(Tyan/Iwill)
USB 2.0 with NEC chipset
Dual Gig NIC's
3ware 7506-8 Parallel IDE RAID card
Same Maxtor Maxline II 250 GB drives
RAID 0+1
Multiple case fans as well as decent bearing PCI cyclone vacuum fans(keep 1 slot away from active cards).
Linux with Reiserfs/XFS depending on file size.
Samba/SSH/SFTP
Fast, Secure, Suculent

That setup hits a little over 2K. No flashing lights, but you can drop that bastard off a building and you won't lose a years worth of data because your an ignorant tard. And as Martha says, "That's a good thing!(tm)"

What class of backup?

[mindstrm]

Offsite multi-year storage? Agreed.

However, MOST small and medium sized businesses don't even do offiste backup. They back up to a server somewehre in the buildling, and that's that.

Tapes are not as reliable as you think; I've had more than my fair share of DLT tapes go bad. Further, they don't last that long on the shelf.

If we are talking about long-term archival storage for financial records, as required by law in many places, that's a totally different issue than making sure you have a backup of the last 2 weeks of incremental data in case someone erases something.

Re:What class of backup?

[ivan256]

Tapes are not as reliable as you think; I've had more than my fair share of DLT tapes go bad.

Therefore you may as well use an even less reliable medium? I'm sorry, but if you're backing up to drives, and you want to keep even just a few weeks of changes you're going to have to swap disks. Drop a disk when you're going to swap it in for a restore and you're done. There's no way around it. It's a fatal flaw in the "hard drives for backups" system. You'll learn the hard way eventually.

Re:Mini-itx - I did that

[RatBastard]

I have a 533Mhz Via Mini-ITX motherboard driving my file server. Here's what I built:
MB: Via 533Mhz Mini-ITX
Video: Built into MB, crap, but who cares?
NIC: 100 Base-TX built into motherboard
RAM: 1x 512MB DIMM
Storage:
- 1x 20GB Maxtor hard drive for the OS
- 2x Maxtor 120GB drives plugged into a Promise Ultra 66 PCI IDE controller, mirrored
Case: Some old piece of crap mid-tower ATX case
PSU: PC Power and Cooling 300W

It's not uber-leet, but it gets the job done. The system also has a minimum of fans: on for the PSU and one for the drives. Neither the CPU nor the video have fans.

My needs were for a reasonably large capacity (yeah, 120 MB is hardly "large" anymore), reasonable responciveness, low-as-possible power consumption and noise.

I wouldn't use this thing in a production environment or as a mission critical system, but for a home file server feeding files out to four/five client systems it works fine. (And yes, I am planning to put a backup system in there.)

This attrocity tha these idiots specced out is a sad and pathetic joke.

Avoid Panther?

[meehawl]

part #70924 FIREWIRE HUB 6-Port $ 35 each

Nice idea, bring back the old star topology for storage! I was trying to decide between external Firewire or external SATA. e-SATA has 3x the performance of FW400, but doesn't offer such convenient topology. What's the contention delay like in such a hub with all channels blasting at once? Has anyone benchmarked?

Is there a chance that installing the latest Apple OSX 10.3 could corrupt the firewire data? I read it has issues with external firewire drives.

MTBF

[junkgoof]

Trusting Maxtor drives to work long-term because of some marketed MTBF is insane. I don't know what it is but Maxtor drives always seem to flake out on me. I returned three of them this year after they toasted to unreadability (seems to be one of those things, people always get failures with one brand or another... I've never had a non-Maxtor fail in a PC (a few Seagates in Sun boxes but they were 10+ years old)). There is a reason Maxtor led the rush to one year warranties. I miss the days when 5 or even 3 year warranties were standard.

My totals

[D1gitalNightshd3]

ah ... yeah. Here's another for comparison.
Summary:
480 GB (almost 1/2 TB) for $880 ... reused old SCSI drive for system drive, acquired 1GB of old PC133 RAM, and got 4 160GB drives for $77 ea. with a deal from Staples for use in a RAID5 array.
Here are my totals:

129.00 - Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Processor 1.8GHz (Retail Box)
55.47 - GigaByte GA-8LS533 Mainboard (Retail Box)
4.00 - shipping ;)
99.00 - Anatec Case
79.00 - 500W Power Supply
61.00 - MICRON 256MB PC133 ECC CL2 168PIN DIMM
142.79 - Promise FastTrak SX4000 Four-Channel ATA RAID 5 Host Adapter
309.76 - 4 x INTERNAL 160GB 7200RPM (ea. $157.44 w. $80 rebate $77.44)
------
880.02 - grand total

Re:Lame -- MTBF

[Anonymous Coward]

Assume 5 yr MBTF, which many quality drives are rated. 5 drives to start, with 4 more each year as they add space. In 4 years they will have 17 drives, with one failing on average once every 105 days.

Now consider that real-world says drive MTBF is often unrealistic. In 4 years with a 3 year MTBF, drive failures will occur once every 63 days.

This doesn't even consider througput issues, volume sizing, file retrieval, etc. Not well thought out at all.

Re:he's right... large business?

[iamhassi]

While for a large business, $3000 must be dirt cheap.... for the rest of us it is WAY too expensive.

And I'm sure there's tons of large business admins that frequent firingsquad.com...

They really missed the boat here, the article doesn't apply to any of their regular readers.

Re:Budget - mod up parent -

[pueywei]

All IDE solutions peak out at 8 drives (aprox 3T by current limits).

What's stopping me to just add a second 3ware card and another 8 drives? 64bit and/or 66mhz pci of course.

Having a GigE card (~100MB/s) and a raid card (~100MB/s) on the same 33mhz 32bit pci bus (~133MB/s) doesn't make sense to me.

Two interfaces to connect to LAN and Internet?

[jbordall]

I may be reading the article wrong but I am getting the impression that the author intends to connect the server to both the internet ("behind a firewalled connection") and the LAN. Firstly, what business does a file server have on the Internet? Isn't that what VPNs are for? Secondly, even hot-swapping a network connection from internal to external and vice-versa can expose your Windows box to an exploit and then bring the exploit into the LAN (much less connecting the box to *both* networks simultaneously.) Naturally, the other problems w/ this system such as lack of redundant storage, lack of backup, dismissing the use of Linux as an OS offhand, huge cost, etc.

They misunderstand RAID

[jamie(really)]

If you believe the numbers, running a drive in RAID mirror will double the effective MTBF, we have done that by choosing the Maxline series vs a standard consumer IDE hard drive.

RAID isnt about increasing MTBF, its about not having to bring the system down and not losing data when (not if) a drive fails. When one of their four drives fails, they will have to stop the system and restore from an old backup. It takes a while to restore a 250Gb drive. And of course all the data since the last backup is gone.

Then there's the fact that they have four seperate drives, while with RAID you get one big one.

RAID controllers, especially the Escalade one, do a much better job of managing disk writes than your onboard IDE controller. For server usage you will see a much higher response for multiple users using RAID. No reference is made to the different behavior of drives in a server compared to workstation drives.

They remark that RAID wont protect your data because the PSU or motherboard can fail. Ok, I have never had a motherboard fail. That doesnt mean that they don't, it just means that their MTBF is way beyond discs. I have had a PSU fail, but not in a way that damaged the computer. You could consider dual PSU solution. Or a post-psu UPS (i.e. where the battery is between the PSU and the motherboard), as opposed to, or in addition to, a traditional pre-PSU UPS.

But then, the whole article is something of a joke. A $3000 budget server with the most expensive RAM, CPU, Keyboard and a bloody LCD panel??? I dont know what planet they are on but for $3000 I built a dual P4 XEON box with a Promise SX6000 pro raid controller. (I buy escalade now, I might add). And a $160 Keyboard for keyboard and mouse? What's it need a keyboard for? For $160 you can buy a 4 port KVM switch and use a keyboard you've already got. Or spend $5 on a basic one.

They use one gigabit port to connect to the internet. Why not connect both ports to a capable switch and get 2Gb/s?

BTW, I tried low-end Seagate, Maxtor and WD, and finally found that Samsung Spinpoint drives survived the longest in a RAID box.

Correct

[RMH101]

You buy spares for your RAID array. Unless you're doing it for fun at home, if it's mission-critical then you've already thought this all through, gritted your teeth and written the cheque.

no it isn't...

[RMH101]

...it's geared towards someone who wants a box in the corner that they can point at and say "look at the server we built" without worrying about life, stability, hotswap components, functionality or any of those other annoying little requirements usually associated with server-class stuff.

Fileserver DOES NOT equal a desktop with big disks.

Informative? Give me strength

[RMH101]

And when your l33t motherboard goes pop in 2 years, what do you do? You can't buy that exact model anymore, so you get the nearest. Plug your drives into it's onboard RAID controller, which promptly craps out leaving you with a dead array. Fine for serving data when your data/uptime doesn't matter, but there aren't many calls for a server like this. At least, not more than once.

ridiculous

[Mazzie]

that is the most ridiculous article i have ever read.

they spent over $300 on parts that they could have purchased for under $100, and $100s on parts that aren't even necessary, all the while skimping on drives?

i thought they were building a storage server, not a gamer and pr0n surfer's wet dream

What kind of tapes?

[Ayanami Rei]

Helican scan/8mm is unacceptable.
If you're using a reliable linear tape tech (like SDLT or LTO) you're spending 75 to 90 cents per gig again.

Whaddya gonna do... I recommend a tiered scheme using backup to swappable hard drives or NAS for near term, and optical media (small data sets) and tapes (large data sets) for long term.

For some reason...

[Ayanami Rei]

they wanted to be able to backup the filesystems (byte-by-byte copy) to the external drive, but be able to access it from ANY machine (not just linux boxes).

Doesn't really make much sense to me.

Plus if they had two brain cells to rub together..

[Ayanami Rei]

they'd be utilitzing their four IDE channels with SW RAID 0 striping and then the 5400 RPM doesn't really become a bottleneck anymore.

Dumbasses.

You are arguing a non-point.

[mindstrm]

Hard drives are not good for off-site backup, I already acknowledged that. At least, not the kind you want to tote to a vault.