My first server build

[Darvil]

I'm building a server mainly to host forums so I'm going for fast I/O and mucho ramo.

I'm at a path where I'm not exactly sure which direction I want to take.

I've created 2 different sets on newegg.

Before you take a look know that I already have a case for it and a nice raid card which will do raid 10.

I will most likely will be installing Centos 5. Still not sure if I want to go 5 or 4.4. Either way that isn't the problem.

Choice 1

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVe...WishListNumber=5226552

This one is the more stright up obvious one. Just one processor with the ability for me to upgrade to a Quad in the future. This is the "safe" bet I guess.


Choice 2

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVe...WishListNumber=5226872

Here's the 2nd choice. As you can see I had to lower the HD space a little to make it work. At this budget, I will have to go single processor first with the ability to add another processor in the near future esp when the prices goes down for the same chip. The problem is that I'm not sure what problems I will run into if I add another chip or even how well it'll run with 1 chip. In the wishlist I put in a Quad Core but I could also go with one of the other woodcrest dual core. I suppose there isn't that much benefit in SQL speed with a quad core yet (my guess).


What do you guys think? Should I just stick with Choice 1?

 

[cprince]

Do you really need the server motherboard? I think that you can get away with a cheaper mainstream motherboard that supports quad core. Also, you will need a faster hard drive or do RAID since the server will handle File I/O tasks. Get a slow CPU since the server won't run any CPU intensive apps.

 

[jkresh]

depending on what you are doing with your database (how big the forums are, how many people use it at once...) sql will benefit from more cores. The ram you listed for choice2 wont work, the board requires fb-dimms and you listed regular ddr2. As cprince said for what you are doing its likely that hard drive speed will be a major bottleneck so a nice raid 5 array would be good (though tricky with your budget), or maybe even a single 150gig (or 75gig) raptor since space doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

 

[Darvil]

Thanks guys.

For the HDs senario, I will be using raid 10. I have a very nice raid card already bought which isn't included in this budget. I will raid 4 160 gigs SATA drives. In both of the choices I have, there are 4 harddrives already.
I think the the I/O part of the section should be ok with a raid card. The specific raid card I have is the "daptec Serial ATA II RAID 2420SA 4 port PCI-X".

cprince from what I can see on newegg, it seems that regular motherboards don't have PCI-X slots. I need that slot to install the raid card. Maybe I'm not looking at things accurately.

thanks for the ram issue jkresh. I didn't even notice. Back to the drawing board for that.

 

[MichaelD]

Before we even get into the hardware configuration...

What is your internet upload speed? If you are hosting forums and your internet connection is an average home cable connection, ANYTHING going back to a Pentium3 550 with 512MB of RAM and an ATA100 hard drive will be more than enough. Really.

If you're hosting on an Intranet (local) or really do have a big pipe with better than a 5MB/s upload speed, then you're talking needing a real server with serious IO capability.

For example. Back in the day (7 years ago) I had an anonymous FTP server that I hosted on my DSL connection. I had an awesome 20KB/s upload speed.

My FTP server was a P3/550 with 256MB of RAM and a ATA66 hard drive. People would connect and just let it run overnight...or sometimes for 2 days depending on the file size.

My CPU usage never broke 25%, the hard drive barely did anything but my internet connection was 100% busy all the time.

For anyone hosting from home, your internet connection is the bottleneck, not your PC.

 

[Darvil]

Hi MichaelD

I work in a small datacenter so the connection won't be a bottleneck. I'm allowed to plug in a system at the work place as one of the benefit.

 

[TallBill]

That is a sexy perk.

 

[trOver]

Originally posted by: Darvil
Hi MichaelD

I work in a small datacenter so the connection won't be a bottleneck. I'm allowed to plug in a system at the work place as one of the benefit.

How fast is it?