Building budget server for a relative...

Lyfer

Diamond Member
May 28, 2003
5,842
2
81
Main task: basic webserving

rig:

Antec Chassis w/Smartpower 400W
Gigabyte AMD762 Dual CPU board (w/ onboard RAID)
Athlon MP 2400 Retail x 2
512MB PC2100 x 2 (this board supports 2gb of non-ecc unbuff)
Radeon 7000 32MB AGP (cheap and stable 2D)
Seagate Cuda 120GB 8MB cache x 2
Floppy/Basic 52X cd-rom drives


Total comes to under $1k shipped, another $140 for WinXP pro. Will this be adequate for basic webserving? Does it really need more than 1gb of ram? BTW I was thinking of setting up a RAID-0 array and telling him to get a separate tape backup which would should be alot cheaper than going with a more expiensive RAID setup.

 
Jan 31, 2002
40,819
2
0
You do not need that for "basic webserving".

Hell, I could probably handle a few hundred clients off a P3-500 Linux box with thttpd.

- M4H
 

paperfist

Diamond Member
Nov 30, 2000
6,539
286
126
www.the-teh.com
That's plenty fast for web surfing and if it wasn't for the video card it'd be a gaming rig. Can't comment on the RAID cause I don't know much about it. 512MB of RAM is good enough.

Kind of curious why you are going with a dual CPU board for web surfing. If I was building a rig for that purpose I'd go with a Barton 2500+, a nForce2 MB that has the nVidia GeForce4 MX onboard video and would just go with Windows XP home edition. The Barton 2500+ is like $10 more, the DDR333 is almost the same cost as the RAM you are getting and a nForce2 board with onboard video is around $100. Not sure if anyone makes one with onboard RAID though.
 

MichaelD

Lifer
Jan 16, 2001
31,528
3
76
Wow, talk about overkill. :Q

When you say "it's for webserving" is this Intranet or HTTP over an ISP connection at home? If it's the former, that's plenty powerful for anything under 500 users or so! If it's the latter, it's complete and utter overkill b/c you're going to be limited by your upload speed to your ISP. That'll be your bottleneck. A PII-266 could saturate the average upload pipe.

Nice box though. :) Are you planning on using the RAID for speed or data security? I'd say that choice also depends on whether it's intra or extra-net and how many users we're talking about.
 

bob4432

Lifer
Sep 6, 2003
11,720
44
91
what type of webserving are you going to do? static? dynamic? apache or iis?

if you use xp pro with built in iis, then you will be limited to 10 connections at a time, you will need to go with win2k serv iis, which has unlimited connectivity or apache on xp.

i am assuming mirroring raid? i think this is completely overkill unless you are going to do something i can't imagine. what type of connection to the net?

we need more info.
 

Lyfer

Diamond Member
May 28, 2003
5,842
2
81
Forgot to mention that it will be used for video editing also. He already has a decent Pinnacle Studio PCI solution that will be moving to this box. I mentioned to him about getting win2k serve IIS when he first asked me about this rig a few months ago, but he really wants to use WinXP pro (go figure). His connection to the web is a business DSL account with a pretty fast upload speed (1mbps or so).

Anymore comments welcomed.
 

AgaBoogaBoo

Lifer
Feb 16, 2003
26,108
5
81
Originally posted by: Lyfer
Forgot to mention that it will be used for video editing also. He already has a decent Pinnacle PCI solution that will be moving to this box. I mentioned to him about getting win2k serve IIS when he first asked me about this rig a few months ago, but he really wants to use WinXP pro (go figure).


Anymore comments welcomed.

In that case just go for a P4 setup. Like a 2.4C or 2.6C. It will handle the webserver tasks VERY easily unless he wants to host these forums ;)

The video editing will also be fast, maybe not as fast as the dual AMD, but in terms of price vs performance, I think intel would win in this

Oh yeah, for the HD setup, I'd go for Raid 1 or Raid 5, unless he CLEARLY understands the risk of Raid 0. I'm not saying it will fail the first day, so don't flame me, instead he should understand what hes buying. I'd also find the price of a Raid 5 controller and tell him how much more it will be and another HD.
 

AgaBoogaBoo

Lifer
Feb 16, 2003
26,108
5
81
Oh yeah, unless he needs IIS for a certain reason, use Apache. It takes a few more minutes to setup, but I think he'll be happier with it afterwards.
 

Lyfer

Diamond Member
May 28, 2003
5,842
2
81
What are some good RAID-5 controllers? All I would need is a third drive correct?
 

AgaBoogaBoo

Lifer
Feb 16, 2003
26,108
5
81
Originally posted by: Lyfer
What are some good RAID-5 controllers? All I would need is a third drive correct?

No clue, but the good ones can get pricy, I'd just go for a decent Raid 5 controller even if its a software one, because the amount he'll be doing things by the way you say it, I don't think he'll really need much speed. Also, I'd reccomend getting 3 or 4 80GB drives so the percentage of space gone to the Raid 5 isn't as much.
 

GGabus

Member
May 9, 2003
36
0
0
For IDE based raid 5 adaptec 2400a or a Promise sx4000 don't go for a software based controller, unless price is the controlling factor. As others have stated any basic box will feed the pipe unless you have a whole lot of users. I had a celeron 633 that could keep up with a 3.5Mb/384 connection, with very little cpu utilization. For encoding a P4 of 2.4 will get you good times ie: close if not realtime, depending on filters etc., DivX encodes. I'm currently using the Adaptec with 4 x WD 250jb, nets 700gigs of space. You lose the space of one drive in raid 5 for fault tolerance. Buy a spare HD or raid 5 is useless.