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Building a Budget Storage Server

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the long-term-storage-for-your-flicks-and-chicks dept.

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.

29 of 433 comments (clear)

  1. Whoa... by eurleif · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Self? by jargoone · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

    1. Re:Self? by swordboy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --

      Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  3. Last time I checked by bigjnsa500 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
    1. Re:Last time I checked by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Physicists get Hadrons!
    2. Re:Last time I checked by antifun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  4. Did I miss something ? by tmark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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 ?

    1. Re:Did I miss something ? by 23_Elders · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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?

    2. Re:Did I miss something ? by Jeff+DeMaagd · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Did I miss something ? by kiwimate · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

    4. Re:Did I miss something ? by guacamolefoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Lots of petrified grits
  5. Lame by sardonic2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Completely Stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Today's News: by JamesD_UK · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... 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).

  8. Mini-itx by herrvinny · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Mini-itx by Zak3056 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
  9. DRDB and or Linux Virtual Services by _LORAX_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

  10. just built something like this actually by StandardDeviant · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  11. he's right... by snooo53 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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?

    --
    The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
  12. Re:a tip by pmz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

    --
    Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
  13. My config... by tinrobot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

  14. Budget by herrvinny · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  15. Rename the article by bigjnsa500 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
  16. No RAID == begging for trouble by PSC · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  17. Having looked at it thoroughly.. by mindstrm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  18. Re:a tip by karnal · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Karnal
  19. Re:a tip by k12linux · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.)

  20. 1/3 disks, 2/3 bloated computer by billstewart · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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...

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  21. Re:offsite by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.