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

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: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: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.

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...