Building a file server

[tpiddy]

Ok, so after filling up another 200 gig harddrive a week after xmas and throwing it in another open drivebay in a pc and sharing the drive, im thinking there has to be a better way.

So i ask for your help

Right know i have a

Pc with a 60 gig C and a 250 gig D for mp3's and it acts as my jukebox only
PC with a 20 gig C and a 120 gig D for kids movies and it is my wifes pc but also the share holds the kids movies
pc with a 40 gig c and a 200 gig D for DVDRips.
pc with 2 40 gig drives and it holds games (mame-sega-atari) its a mame cabinet.
pc with 2 40 gig drives and is my 2000 server that holds docs, pictures, commonly accessed programs, things like that.

So im thinking build one server, get a few large harddrives (or consolidate the existing ones into it) and access, movies-mp3's-pictures-data from it.

id still need the standalone pc's as they do serve their purpose, but i could start getting a grip on all these extra harddrives, and although all my stuff is backed up on cd's it would give me some central place if i wanted to incremental backup or something close. and having all these shared drives is kind of freaking me out also....

Thats the correct thinking right??

and will a 64 bit processor/mobo be necessary for just the file access???

Thanks

 

[AsusGuy]

Yes I think a server would be a great idea. Having that many shared hard drives on separate pc?s can be a pain.
I don?t think a 64bit processor would help a file server, a Xeon or Opteron processor is a good idea if you want a fast
High-end server, don?t buy too much power or to little, buy just enough power to keep it fast enough for you. If you just want basic file access don?t even buy a Xeon or Opteron processor. Get an Pentium 4 2.00ghz or up or AMD Athalon XP 2200+ or up.

 

[Kogan]

If your system will just be serving files, your main slowdown will be the hard drive speed. I've used p2 through p4 file servers and they all do about the same job at serving large files. Now to get a big increase in speed, you'll need some 10k rpm or faster SCSI drives. I'm not realy up to date on SATA, so I'm not sure how they compare to SCSI.

But anyhow, it doesn't take a lot of processing power to copy files over a network, so if that's all your server will be doing, a high end cpu isn't needed. If you will be running other applications (web servers, game servers, etc), then more processing power will always help.

 

[tpiddy]

Excellent, thanks

So I am also gonna run my p2p apps (emule-bittorrent) on this server as well as do some dvd work so I decided to go with the:

SOYO "SY-KT880 DRAGON 2" with a XP 3200 and the ASPIRE X-Alien Beige Steel Server Case with a gig of ram.

I can have up to 10 harddrives in this so this should be "it" for a while at least ))

so now the only confusion i have is

I will be purchasing a 400 gig harddrive and planned on it being IDE and buying a SATA 40 gig hdd as my C drive. Any thoughts on that. With 4 sata and 4 ide is it worth the 50 extra dollars to get the sata 400 gig drive?? or the 40 gig c drive also, Ill go check out some benchmarks, but you guru's probably know.

Thanks again

 

[tpiddy]

Well, I continued to hunt for info on the benefits of SATA and found a couple threads in different places that basically said there wasn't going to be any real noticable difference in speed between the two connections, at least until later generations of the drives come out, so im going with the Hitachi ide 400 gig drive...

 

[Homerboy]

I have over a TB of storage sitting in my basement on a central home server that all the workstations and A/V equipment access all day long. ITs a simple AMD 1600+ w/ 512RAM nothing more nothing less. You could run it on a P200 if you want. File access is nothing. I can stream video to 3 devices/PCs in my house at once from 1 HD (XVID video) with no problem or slow down at all. No need to overkill for a server that will sit and do "nothing". Take the money you'd spend on the the new server and build a kick-ass workstation and use the old PC parts for you new server.

Dont bother with SATA now. Just get some nice 8MB (or newer 16MB) cache drives and have fun. Central home server is the ONLY way to have a house set up. It simply rocks.

Edit: Oh yeah, get a nice RAID5 card to start doing backups

 

[Arcuivie]

If you wanna fork up the money you could get yourself a tape drive that'll back up the data every day/week/month, just incase your hard drives fail.

 

[networkman]

Originally posted by: Arcuivie
If you wanna fork up the money you could get yourself a tape drive that'll back up the data every day/week/month, just incase your hard drives fail.

Or get yourself a DVD burner and do the backups. Personally, I'm looking at IOMega's REV drive, but whatever your solution happens to be, investing in some kind of archival backup solution is a wise idea, because harddrives WILL fail eventually.

FWIW, you might consider getting a NAS(Network Attached Storage) device. Typically, they take up ALOT less space than a PC/Server, less power, and have a convenient Web/GUI interface for management. If you have to buy a larger drive(s) anyway, it might be worth looking into.