Server Basics?

[imported_Mike]

I want to make my own server, but know nothing about them really. All the ones you buy(dell, etc.) use scsi drives, which are faster, but are the necessary? I would be using an old pIII 700, and was thinking about quad ata drives? maybe put them in raid, but im a n00b when it comes to raid as well. Are there any sites/guides on servers? Or any help/suggestions from you guys would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[mechBgon]

What's it going to be doing, anything "mission-critical?"

People focus a lot on platform speed and power, when servers are really more about uptime, redundancy, and disaster-resistance. Everyone wants to hear about monster dual-processor board/CPU combos with staggering quantities of RAM; not so many people want to hear about $3000 tape-backup drives, high-caliber uninterruptible power supplies, and relatively-small-but-expensive SCSI drives that are built to run 5 years non-stop. 😉

If you're building a mission-critical system for a business, and don't really know what you're doing, you should probably keep your behind out of the hotseat and get an off-the-shelf major-name server, is my humble opinion.

 

[imported_Mike]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
What's it going to be doing, anything "mission-critical?"

People focus a lot on platform speed and power, when servers are really more about uptime, redundancy, and disaster-resistance. Everyone wants to hear about monster dual-processor board/CPU combos with staggering quantities of RAM; not so many people want to hear about $3000 tape-backup drives, high-caliber uninterruptible power supplies, and relatively-small-but-expensive SCSI drives that are built to run 5 years non-stop. 😉

If you're building a mission-critical system for a business, and don't really know what you're doing, you should probably keep your behind out of the hotseat and get an off-the-shelf major-name server, is my humble opinion.

this is just for my house...I have 4 pcs, the pIII id like to turn into a server so i can access all my movies/mp3s/photos/etc from it, thats all. Also on a budget 🙁

 

[mechBgon]

Oh, gotcha 🙂 Any PC can be a server in that sense. Throw your files in a folder, share it, and you're basically done. Win2000 would be a good OS for that purpose, with 256Mb to 512Mb of RAM. Your P3 700 will be plenty of CPU.

 

[Confused]

For something that isn't "mission critical", as mechBgon said, then a ATA RAID will do fine. a RAID1 will give you data redundency, using 2 disks. If you want more storage, use RAID0, but you'll be risking losing everything if a disk dies. The next best thing will require 4 drives, in RAID0+1, which be 2 disks striped (RAID0), then mirror those two disks to another (RAID1). This will give you data redundency, as well as higher capacity.

if you are willing to spend a bit on a decent controller card (rather than have to rely on your CPU to do the calculations) then you could go for a nice hardware RAID card, that can do RAID5. This will use 3 or more drives. You can use 3 drives, and have the storage capacity of 2, as well as the redundency. It works by writing half the data to one disk, then half to another, and then a "parity bit" to the third. The drives where these are written to will change too.

For example:
Disk
1 2 3
1 2 P
1 P 2
P 1 2

By doing this, if just 1 disk fails, then you can still get the data off the drives 🙂 If 2 die, however, then you're stuck 😉


Confused

 

[mcveigh]

for small businesses in my area I have built a few servers using their old coputers as a starting point. for example.
I recently used a asus P3B-F motherboard with a P3-550 cpu and 256MB of ram to become a small file server. it runs redhat 9 linux using samba. I put in a 3ware raid card and 2 40GB hd's in a raid 1 array.

backups are handled on one users desktop by local windows software.