Turning a dell workstation into a decent server...

[NightFalcon]

Here's my situation and I'd just like to get some opinions from you guys... A friend of mine just gave me a Dell GX260 which he didn't need. I don't really need another workstation either (already have 6 😀 ), but what I could use is a better server. My current one, which I use as an e-mail and ftp server, is a very old PIII 1GHz with 512MB PC133 memory. It's running Win2k3, but with much difficulty.

Now this Dell GX260 is a P4 2.0A (by the looks of it... in the bios it's showing up as 400MHz so I take it to be the A version) with 1GB of PC2100 memory and a 40GB Seagate hard drive. Looks to me like fairly decent specs for a server, especially one that only 3 people use and even then almost never at the same time.

The quality, of course, isn't made for a server. Now my old PIII may not be fast enough, but so far it's been up for 93 days (current record for me 🙂 ). I've looked on the inside of this dell and that thing just won't do. First of all they don't use a normal heatsink on the CPU... Instead they came up with their own solution that has me a bit concerned tbh. The power supply looks fairly weak, the motherboard is not server quality, and so on...

What I'd like to do is put in a little bit of money and make a nice server out of this. Would rather stay under $300, but here are the problems... I could use my current Antec case (the one used by the PIII server right now) for the new server. It has nice cooling, plenty of space for hard drives and everything else. The problem with that is it'll need a different cooling solution. A new heat sing means new motherboard. The power supply is also not suitable.

Do you guys think it would be worth the money to get those parts, or do you think it's fine with what dell already has? Also, if you do think that an upgrade would be better since I'm aiming for stability of this thing, can you recommend some parts that are suitable for this config. Heatsinks, motherboards, etc...

Last question, this dell has a 40GB hard drive. I happen to have 3 more 40GB hard drives of my own. Because I want good data security, do you think I should look into paying another $50 - $70 and get a PCI to ATA raid card that supports 4 devices and RAID 1? I would love a hardware RAID 5 array, but I don't think I can afford that. With software that would put too much stress on the CPU, so I think RAID 1 is the best I can do.

I know that's a lot hehe... But just let me know what you would do in my situation 🙂

 

[cheesehead]

You might want to see if you can get a new heatsink on the motherboard, and add a new power supply. I picked up a cheap server case at a garage sale for
8$, and it should work fine for a computer of this type if you throw in amn extra fan or two. Thermaltake's SLK948U is an awesome heatsink, and at 35$ it's not ridiculously expensive either.
If you're desperate for speed, you may as well just get a new high-quality motherboard (GIGABYTE, ASUS, ABIT, etc. w/865G chipset?) with SATA RAID, and put in two SATA drives in RAID 1. Then, sell the Dell motherboard on E-bay, which would help pay for the new hard drives. Most motherboards that have SATA RAID will also let you RAID 2 of the 40gb drives as well, and put one on the remaining channel (if you wanted to sacrifice the optical drive, you could use all four).

 

[NightFalcon]

Well like I said, the case isn't a problem, I'll use my old one and it will work fine. By the way it looks, I don't think any heatsink will be able to go onto the dell motherboard, they got their own solution and it doesn't look friendly to any standards.

As for speed, I'm more desperate for stability. As far as speed goes, the boost well be enough just from a P4 2.0GHz and 1GB of PC2100 memory. SATA is not an option since all 4 of the 40GB drives I have are regular ATA and I definitely don't have the money to get SATA. I would actually prefer if the motherboard had built-in ATA raid so I could have hardware raid 1 on 2 of the drives, and software raid 1 on the other 2, but the motherboards that I've been looking at don't offer this.

Speaking of the motherboards, I've always been as asus supporter, and those are the primary ones that I've looked at myself... However, I wasn't sure as to what chipset would be best to suit my needs. Looking at all the latest ones, not all even support 400MHz FSB, so that's another issue.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: NightFalcon
Well like I said, the case isn't a problem, I'll use my old one and it will work fine. By the way it looks, I don't think any heatsink will be able to go onto the dell motherboard, they got their own solution and it doesn't look friendly to any standards.

As for speed, I'm more desperate for stability. As far as speed goes, the boost well be enough just from a P4 2.0GHz and 1GB of PC2100 memory. SATA is not an option since all 4 of the 40GB drives I have are regular ATA and I definitely don't have the money to get SATA. I would actually prefer if the motherboard had built-in ATA raid so I could have hardware raid 1 on 2 of the drives, and software raid 1 on the other 2, but the motherboards that I've been looking at don't offer this.

Speaking of the motherboards, I've always been as asus supporter, and those are the primary ones that I've looked at myself... However, I wasn't sure as to what chipset would be best to suit my needs. Looking at all the latest ones, not all even support 400MHz FSB, so that's another issue.

I've got a Compaq S6000z-something that only goes down when I tell it to - it was $300 or so. It's been running Small Business Server 2003 for a few months now flawlessly with 6 hard drives and 1GB of RAM in it. I'd personally just install your OS on the machine and get it working without bothering with the heatsinks and such.

 

[NightFalcon]

Well that's another idea... However, if I keep the Dell case, which I'll have to do if unless I want to get a new mobo and heatsink, the most Hard Drives I can fit into it is 2. That's what I have there right now.

How safe would it be to run a server on hard drives without any fault tolerance? If I get rid of the current raid 1 setup, then I might as well get raid 0 running with 2 40GB drives. Get the same 80 GB I would with 4 drives, much better speed, but also much less secure...

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: NightFalcon
Well that's another idea... However, if I keep the Dell case, which I'll have to do if unless I want to get a new mobo and heatsink, the most Hard Drives I can fit into it is 2. That's what I have there right now.

How safe would it be to run a server on hard drives without any fault tolerance? If I get rid of the current raid 1 setup, then I might as well get raid 0 running with 2 40GB drives. Get the same 80 GB I would with 4 drives, much better speed, but also much less secure...

USB powered cases are $20 ea. nowadays, and you probably could put more HDDs into the Dell if you bought a few $3.00 power Y-splitters and let them hang on the side of the case.

RAID 1/5 won't replace backups. I do RAID0 with serious backups. But now that 200GB drives are $60, it's not a big deal either way.

 

[NightFalcon]

Well back-ups are not on my to-do list, which is why I need good data security so that even if a hard drive should fail, I simply replace it and I'm good to go. This is a system that I configure and leave alone to run.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: NightFalcon
Well back-ups are not on my to-do list, which is why I need good data security so that even if a hard drive should fail, I simply replace it and I'm good to go. This is a system that I configure and leave alone to run.

Then script your backups. By depending on just RAID5 and believing that will keep data safe, you're making wild assumptions. Hard drives are so cheap that it's now practical to backup to another hard drive.

RAID only protects against hard drive failure, not OS failure, filesystem failure, RAID card or service failure, or user error.