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How Much Ram for File Server?

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What kind of files are you serving???

Word Processing
Text Files
PDF's
Audio
Mulimedia

It makes a difference. Basically the size of the file and whether you are streaming media can make a difference. If you are talking about a database or SQL type server it might make a big difference. The larger the file and the more mission critical the files are the more complex it becomes. If you are only backing up work files it is not too complex. You still need an OS and you may need file security if multiple people access the box. I would not want such a device to have access to the Internet, or to be accessible from the internet unless you want the entire world to know your business.
 
piasabird- The box will be serving all of the above. The files aren't uber critical but my boss wants a decent degree of safety and speed.

nweaver- I have are three Hitachi Deskstars 250GB Sata II drives. Just picked them up at Zipzoomfly.

I am definetely taking you guys' advice into consideration. I have to do some research as I'm not familiar with what Dell has top offer nor with some of the terms you guys are throwing around (NAS, NIX OS, etc.).
 
Personally, if I were doing this, this is what I'd do:

Sempron or A64 + 754 board ($200 tops)
512 MB to 1GB ($50-100)
Linux or BSD
Software RAID

I would never use on-board RAID for anything critical. The biggest problem with on-board RAID is what happens if the computer dies 3 years from now, but the data is fine? You have to get another board with an identical on-board RAID chip. Your move towards fault toleraance has a HUGE gap in it if you use on-board RAID. If cost keeps hardware RAID out of reach, software RAID is VERY portable and performance is not bad if you have the CPU to support it (and you should since your CPU won't be doing anything else). This is as perfect an application of software RAID 5 as there is.

For your small office situation, I doubt the write speed issue with software RAID 5 will be a problem, you can still do 25-30MB/sec sustaained writes or so, which is only marginally slower than single disc writes (40-50range), which should be adequate since your clients will all have single drives and you expect 2 clients at the same time only rarely.

With one client at a time you really don't need RAID 5 much for performance, it becomes purely fault tolerance. This is because the client machine has to PUT the data somewhere, and that is most likely to be on the drive, so either the read/write speed of the single client drive will limit the speed of your transactions, or un-optimized gigabit will (totally un-optimized gigabit will generally only do 12-15 MB/sec, you generally need to work with the driver parameters to boost things up to the limit of the frame size, assuming you aren't going jumbo frames... and you shouldn't need to in this application)
 
Look on Dell's website, and checkout the Hot Deals forum. There might be a deal floating around.

*nix means a Unix or Unix-like Operating System. Like Linux or a BSD. Use whatever you know and can support.

NAS is network attached storage.
 
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