Please check my hardware choices for a low end server

[jhu]

how about a used computer? they're certainly a lot cheaper and you only have 10 people to support.

 

[jose]

Stick w/ Tyan.. Get a single Opteron 246 $460 and 2 - 1gig memory sticks and the Thunder K8W

The K8w has 64bit/133mhz slots which the tiger doesn't have..

Also get a power single rail psu, dual rail psu's are not good for dual cpu mobo's..

Getting the 246 now w/ 2 gigs will probably be all you really need. Later you can get another 246 w/ 2 gigs of memory.

It's better to use larger dimms , rather than populate w/ smaller dimms.

Right now I have a customer w/ a poweredge that has dual 700's & 2 gigs of memory & raid5 scsi.
They are running an enterprise database "Unify", firewall, samba, squid.

They can search 150000 records/second. It takes 3 seconds to bring up 1300 out of 1.86 million.

This is on an old dell server.

As far as hd is concern, platter speed in not everything. A Atlas 10k4 will kill a 74gig raptor in a server environment.

I'd get a LSI320-2 w/ some 36g scsi hd's.

This will last you a very long time. Also getting 1 fast processor gives you the upgradablity in the future to add a second w/ addl. memory.

Personally I'd triple check the motherboard recomended memory modules and go w/ that..

Regards,
Jose

 

[jameslwhitfield]

"As far as hd is concern, platter speed in not everything. A Atlas 10k4 will kill a 74gig raptor in a server environment. "


After taking a look at these benchmarks, we have a very clean outcome: on all cases, the speed of the rest of the system has nearly nothing to do with the speed of the hard drive. This makes the job of comparing hard drives very easy! It means that we can use nearly any benchmark to compare drives, since the rest of the system does not play a role. Of course, everything so far has been interesting...but was just a prerequisite to the rest of the article! The next step is to see how SCSI compares to SATA in performance.

Results

Frankly, I was surprised by the results! They show that SATA has a performance advantage! 10K RPM Raptor SATA drives appear to be on par with the performance of even a 15K RPM SCSI drive, and with NCQ, SATA even holds a very significant lead!


http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=19

 

[jameslwhitfield]

What about a GIGABYTE "GA-7A8DRH" with a couple 15k SCSI attached (36gb).

I would probably also have a sata drive for extra storage solution.

 

[ribbon13]

I think I did best you could with your budget already...

Two 36Gb 15k.4's would be $600... and stick with Tyan, unless you won't get fired when the server goes down.

 

[jhu]

how computing intensive is a 10 person network? is a dual opteron with 4gb really necessary?

 

[ribbon13]

While leaving room for business expansion? In two years that 10 could increase tenfold.

Which is why i suggested a single opteron on a tyan board with pci-x with 2 gigs corsair. All it would take to bring it to dual opteration is another processor.

 

[Markfw]

You need an EPS Power supply for they Tyan duallies/ 24 pin + 8 + 6. Antec true power 550 EPS is what I use. here for $122

 

[jose]

Here's some server benchmarks, the raptor is dead last compared to these drives:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...2=264&devID_3=221&devID_4=267&devCnt=5

Your best bet is just get a real server mobo (Tyan K8W) w/ one Opteron w/ 2 - 1 gig memory stick and a Scsi i/o sub system.. Later you can upgrade to a 2nd opteron w/ 2 more megs of ram.

Regards,
Jose