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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.
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.
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
Their definition of "budget" is $3,140? Someone give me their budget right now!
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...
Since they couldn't afford RAID, what about software RAID? Way faster than normal IDE operations.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
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 ?
I took a Beige G3/266MHz that I got for $50... put a 120 GB WD drive, ACARD IDE Controller, and Mac OS X.
An extra fan, to keep it nice and cool, and a 10/100 NIC.
Runs rather well. Smooth, reliable, and fast. For a very low cost. Mac OS X 10.2 comes with AppleShare, for Macs, and Samba for windows file sharing. Apache for a webserver, and PHP, Perl...mySQL.
You got whatever you really need.
I added webmin, for remote control. Makes it a bit easier.
Article is lame when it comes to the important stuff. Its great he gave us the hardware to do it, but thats not the important part now is it? Software.... something that can do backup's to harddrive and then take backups and archive on tape. we went with tapeware because of price, but we cannot archive a current backup to tape, so that means we have 4 week online and no archive really (bad). Are there any open source solutions? I saw a couple but they look hard to setup and manage. Tapeware gives a powerful interface and makes it easy to backup from multiple machines... plus linux boxes don't need special server license (unless they have a tape drive) where any Windows 2000 Server box needs a server license.
No raid? Going to rely on the drive's MTBF? WTF. A raid controler is like 80$ 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.
... 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).
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?
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.
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/
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
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
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.
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.
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. ;)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
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?
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
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)
Total $3,140
/. (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.
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
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.
"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.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
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.)
--- The light at the end of the tunnel is probably a burning truck.
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.
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....:)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.