Would this be a good and cheap option for building a storage server?

[Inspector Jihad]

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I need more storage...would this be ideal? I was thinking of using NASlite+ or freeNAS.

 

[Madwand1]

What a nice price! I see a few limitations though:

1. Only 2 SATA ports
2. No built-in gigabit
3. No drive cooling
4. 80mm fans
5. Obsolete socket 478

I suppose you could mitigate (1) by either not using more drives or combining PATA + SATA drives in software RAID. Just be aware that there are some reports of drive failure on one PATA channel affecting the other drive on the same channel.

You can mitigate (2) with an add-on PCI gigabit card, but this means that you should avoid putting anything else on the PCI bus -- e.g. an add-on SATA card or PCI video. An inexpensive card can be found for around $20. A good card can be found for around $45 CAD.

You can mitigate (3) with an add-on drive cage in the 5.25 slots (Thermaltake iCage, Lian Li, Supermicro, or Coolermaster perhaps, etc) but that adds cost and you may have filtration and appearance problems. There also might be room for fans in front of the drive cage.

(4) will mean that the fans won't provide as much airflow for noise. It might be livable, but for (3) and (4) a case with dual 120mm capability, with one for intake in front of a drive cage, would be better.

Of course, it'd probably cost a fair bit of money to solve all of these "limitations" I've raised, and you can decide what's important for yourself -- that price is hard to beat; naturally there would be limitations.

 

[EatSpam]

Are you thinking RAID or just single drives? Its this a whole house server or just for you?

If you are just thinking single drives/single user, consider the costs in electricity. Intel chips, especially Prescott cores, eat power like mad.

Depending on what you are doing, it might be cheaper/better to just get a bigger case, a SATA card and keep your drive in your current machine.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

thanks for the replies guys. SATA isnt a big deal, i think i'll do SATA + PATA and I'm thinking of RAID and using it as a whole house server. The gigabit lan was something I was thinking about but the price was just so low.


I wasnt aware of the power consumption...that along with the lack of gigabit lan might make this not suitable.

I have an old dell and an old vaio...the dell only has 1 hd slot and the vaio has 2. Is it possible to change cases with something that can hold more drives?

 

[EatSpam]

For a low-end, low power whole house server, look on eBay for an old Pentium III board. Try for an 866mhz board or better. Get one with onboard video.

Then add an Intel Gigabit NIC and a 4 port SATA card. Run Linux w/software RAID and you'll have a nice little low end server.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Originally posted by: EatSpam
For a low-end, low power whole house server, look on eBay for an old Pentium III board. Try for an 866mhz board or better. Get one with onboard video.

Then add an Intel Gigabit NIC and a 4 port SATA card. Run Linux w/software RAID and you'll have a nice little low end server.

wait, i cant help but be noobish...what do you mean by 866mhz board? The processor? Can you find me an example please

 

[EatSpam]

Originally posted by: Inspector Jihad

Originally posted by: EatSpam
For a low-end, low power whole house server, look on eBay for an old Pentium III board. Try for an 866mhz board or better. Get one with onboard video.

Then add an Intel Gigabit NIC and a 4 port SATA card. Run Linux w/software RAID and you'll have a nice little low end server.

wait, i cant help but be noobish...what do you mean by 866mhz board? The processor? Can you find me an example please

866mhz Pentium III CPU.... most of the time I see board/chip combos on eBay.

Something like:
This board
This CPU

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: EatSpam
For a low-end, low power whole house server, look on eBay for an old Pentium III board. Try for an 866mhz board or better. Get one with onboard video.

Then add an Intel Gigabit NIC and a 4 port SATA card. Run Linux w/software RAID and you'll have a nice little low end server.

Do you have any figures on what sort of data transfer performance you've been able to get with this sort of setup? You have a low-performance (in this day) CPU together with SATA and network controllers on the same PCI bus, using software RAID. You did say "low-end". How low? What sort of file transfer speeds have you measured in this setup?

I don't mean to be a nay-sayer, I'd like to know of your experience here. I'll admit though that personally, I'd tend towards a newer system perhaps using an AMD Sempron.

 

[MichaelD]

Here's my take on this situation. For a home office file server, or even for a small business (less than 10 users) unless you're constantly transferring 5GB files back and forth, a small box with a sub-1GHz CPU and 512MB of memory is more than enough.

If data integrity is an issue, get yourself a PCI RAID card. You can pick up a 2-port IDE RAID card for about $25 these days. Huge IDE drives are dirt cheap. Do a RAID 1 setup with four 250GB drives and you've got half a terrabyte of secure storage.

The RAID card does the calculations so the CPU won't be taxed. Don't worry about the lack of Gigabit LAN. Again, unless you're transferring HUGE amounts of data, you'll be fine.

I happen to have a P3-550/512MB ram box that I use as a file server. It used to be my FTP box back in the good old days before the RIAA got stupid. Anyway, you'd never know it was such a "weak" box while you were using it.

BUT, based on price and the fact that all the stuff is NEW as opposed to buying 5 year old used stuff on EBay, I think the Tigerdirect deal is a very good one. You've got two SATA channels (two drives) and two IDE channels (four drives, or three and an optical.

With the size of drives these days, you've got a potential TB of storage capability in a box that's much, much faster than my old P3 box. Get the Tiger deal and some big drives and you're done for about $500.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

they jacked up the price 20 bucks

 

[MichaelD]

It's still not a bad deal! The rebates are still good. You get the MB/CPU/memory/case/PS and it's all NEW.

The mobo has onboard video (for when you actually load the OS and configure it) so all you really need to buy are HDs and IDE/SATA cables. For under $500, you could have a brand new TB file server. With a 3GHz CPU at that.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

would that system be overkill for a server?

 

[Madwand1]

Gigabit LAN is a good performance value to be had these days. Of course you can live without it, as we did for several years, but I personally wouldn't, when it's so cheap and potentially beneficial, esp. on a file server. You can add it via an adapter, and as long as the drivers are OK and you're not pushing performance very hard, I think this is a viable solution -- at low transfer speeds of around 30 MB/s, you're not likely to be bottlenecked by a PCI gigabit NIC, and this is still around 3x what you can do with 100 Mb/s ethernet.

A $25 RAID card isn't likely to do its own calculation -- it's going to do the calculations via the software drivers. Such cards are termed "fake RAID" in the Linux vernacular. I personally don't like the term "fake RAID", and am pretty happy with on-board nVIDIA RAID performance, but I think a claim of true hardware RAID for $25 needs some backing up.

I'd also like to hear about the performance implications of putting both the RAID card and a gigabit NIC on the PCI bus. If it can do the minimum -- 30 MB/s sustained, I'd call it a win, as it's still better than most if not all cheap pre-built NAS boxes, and matches basic desktop IDE + gigabit performance. As a point of reference, on-board nVIDIA RAID and gigabit can sustain > 70 MB/s in my experience.

OTOH, I think that a real backup solution can be more important in this context than raw performance. "RAID is not a backup." If you have significant amounts of personal data accumulating -- all your home movies, pictures, etc., which you can do with a file server, you should also think about how you're going to back all that up. RAID goes a good distance, but is not perfect (and often has its own problems). Even a periodic backup to a separate simple drive on the same computer for the critical stuff is a good start IMO. I understand that this is making the problem probably too complicated at the onset, but it's something worth thinking about in the longer run. A backup also gives you a lot of flexibility in changing your system around.

In the vein, aiming for lower amounts of total storage can be advantageous -- how are you going to backup a TB of stuff? Another TB server? It might be simpler to do 2x RAID 1 and separate drive that you use for the OS and a backup.

There are lots of options these days, and pretty much all of them are viable. I'm just sharing some thoughts and experience -- of course you should do what you think is best.

 

[Inspector Jihad]

My file server would contain my music and videos and what is important, i'll back up on a seperate drive. I figuered a RAID setup will be sufficient for the rest of the stuff.