Intel board for Server

[dneville]

I want to know which board is good to build a server. I need something that is reliable. No need to OC or have extras.

Thanks,
Dylan

 

[mechBgon]

Welcome to the Forums dneville You might consider some of the Asus NRL-series boards based on the Serverworks GC-SL chipset, like this one ($330 at Mwave.com): NRL-LS533 As you can see, it'll take a 400MHz-based or 533MHz-based Pentium4, it has onboard gigabit Ethernet, and lots of 64-bit/33MHz PCI slots. They also have variants for Xeons if you need a dualie.

If that's not on-target with your needs but you have a feel for what you want, rummage around in Intel's motherboard-finder thingie and see what it comes up with Hope that helps.

 

[dneville]

Should I need SCSI if I want to build a small Server for less than 10 users?

 

[mechBgon]

I think SCSI is a good investment because the drives are built to run 24/7 for five years, and therefore have high reliability. They also have high performance, and SCSI allows for very high expandability too (up to 14 drives per SCSI bus). Even with SCSI, it would be smart to use at least software mirroring, or else hardware RAID1 (Adaptec 29320-R or LSI Logic 22320-R can do that for a reasonable price).

You might want to make the partitions about 5% smaller than the maximum possible capacity, so that if you need to restore a broken mirror and the replacement drive is of slightly lower actual capacity (36.1GB versus 36.2GB, for example), you have a little wiggle room so you can reestablish the mirror onto the new drive before adding a second new one and pulling the surviving old one.

[ preach ] You should also ensure that there's a very good backup system in place, where a backup of the important data can be stored off-site (tape drive, usually) in case a pipe bursts and nukes the server, or the building burns down, or someone breaks in and :Q steals the server :Q. Seagate has some DAT tape drives in the ~$650 range with 20GB native / 40GB compressed capacity. If you need a recommendation on a UPS, the APC SmartUPS 750XL is sweet (we have a couple at work). [ / preach ]