Questions on building a file/media server

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epicstruggle

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
Messages
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Got a few questions, hope some of you can help me out. Im looking at building a file/media server. This server needs to do the following:
--will be running 24/7
--server files/media to 7-10 XBMC.
--storage of 2+TB, Id love to use some sort of RAID, but its not necessary. (raid is probably the least important part)
--preferably be energy efficient

So, my questions are:
--Should I go with one of AMDs BE chips? Or having so many streams running require something like Intels E8500 or a quad core q9550?
--Whats a good mb for the chip? Is it better to have a built in video solution or install a discrete graphics card?
--What about raid? (im sure this has been asked like a million times) Should I go with what a mb might have or go with a separate card.

This system will only be used for serving files and storage. No more than that. Thanks for any help you all can offer.

kirit
 
Have you looked at Windows Home Server?

HD video?

If you're talking about 7-10 simultaneous HD streams then you should pay careful attention to your network interface.

I've got an E5200 in my server and don't have any problem streaming HD-DVD content.
 
No HD streams, all will be SD/regular streams 7-10 of them simultaneously 24/7. Basically I pipe these streams into my cable system through the XBMC, so have to run them all the time.

As to the WHS, I was actually going to ask about that, should I go linux and save the 100$ so that I could get better hardware?
 
epicstruggle said:
No HD streams, all will be SD/regular streams 7-10 of them simultaneously 24/7. Basically I pipe these streams into my cable system through the XBMC, so have to run them all the time.

As to the WHS, I was actually going to ask about that, should I go linux and save the 100$ so that I could get better hardware?
Click to expand...

If you are just serving files there is absolutely no reason to go with WHS. Save money and go with raid. You can almost go with a Raid 5 config with that 100 bucks depending what hard drives you have. Use NFS and you'll have transfer rates higher than what can be achieved with the Windows Network Protocol.
 
yeah, for file serving, go with XP pro, unRAID, FlexRIAD, FreeNAS or such...

if you want remote access, image based backups, user drives and file sharing go with WHS
 
epicstruggle said:
--Whats a good mb for the chip? Is it better to have a built in video solution or install a discrete graphics card?
kirit
Click to expand...

No reason to have a discrete graphics card in there at all, unless you fancy having a few bouts of Crysis on there or something. This is one of the few situations where onboard GFX are okay.

And yes, Linux raid will do what you want, most likely. It'll take more setting up (and more swearing, probably) than WHS but will be faster since it'll be raided.
 
alan.p said:
No reason to have a discrete graphics card in there at all, unless you fancy having a few bouts of Crysis on there or something. This is one of the few situations where onboard GFX are okay.

And yes, Linux raid will do what you want, most likely. It'll take more setting up (and more swearing, probably) than WHS but will be faster since it'll be raided.
Click to expand...

Setup Raid5:

Code: 
mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1
 
alan.p said:
No reason to have a discrete graphics card in there at all, unless you fancy having a few bouts of Crysis on there or something. This is one of the few situations where onboard GFX are okay.

And yes, Linux raid will do what you want, most likely. It'll take more setting up (and more swearing, probably) than WHS but will be faster since it'll be raided.
Click to expand...

In fact a discrete graphics card just takes up a slot and generates heat.
 
alan.p said:
No reason to have a discrete graphics card in there at all, unless you fancy having a few bouts of Crysis on there or something. This is one of the few situations where onboard GFX are okay.

And yes, Linux raid will do what you want, most likely. It'll take more setting up (and more swearing, probably) than WHS but will be faster since it'll be raided.
Click to expand...

If he's not doing software raid there shouldn't be any any cursing whatsoever...LOL
I did a media center PC / file server for my folks just yesterday. It went something like this.

Install Ubuntu-Alternate
Boot Into Ubuntu
Create folder
Right-Click "Share Folder"
Click "Allow Write Acess"
Click OK
Reboot
Done.

Oh forgot about Remote Desktop Access.
Go to System - Remote Desktop
Click "Allow others to Access Machine"
Reboot
Done.

Now if you want cool features like web front ends to incremental backups you will work for that but you usually end up with enterprise features that no normal sane person would have...lol
 
wow, thanks for all the help n the raid/software side, I need to digest some of the info on it before asking more questions.
How about the hardware side? what type of cpu do you think I need for 7-10 streams?
 
well, you could get a cheap AMD x4... i got mine for $80 from a guy here on the bst,
an good X2, C2D, X4 or C2Q will work for what....


its the DISK I/O thats going to kill you and network speed...

here is what I would do:
RAID 5 with a good hardware card 3ware or such that is PCIe 4x or 8x
I would use high end SATA drives with average read speeds of 90mb/s +

so you are looking at 640gb WD Black, 320gb WD Blue, 1TB WD black, or 10,000 RPM sata or SCSI drives


then you must have 1000mbps lan connection at a minimum on the server... or get an old AMD 940 server board that has 2 nics and do nic teaming for 2000mbps

10 streams is going to be ambitious with consumer grade hardware.... from what i know....

look at a good switch that support nic teaming and you might be able to get 7-10 streams at the same time....
 
Adidas4275 said:
well, you could get a cheap AMD x4... i got mine for $80 from a guy here on the bst,
an good X2, C2D, X4 or C2Q will work for what....


its the DISK I/O thats going to kill you and network speed...

here is what I would do:
RAID 5 with a good hardware card 3ware or such that is PCIe 4x or 8x
I would use high end SATA drives with average read speeds of 90mb/s +

so you are looking at 640gb WD Black, 320gb WD Blue, 1TB WD black, or 10,000 RPM sata or SCSI drives


then you must have 1000mbps lan connection at a minimum on the server... or get an old AMD 940 server board that has 2 nics and do nic teaming for 2000mbps

10 streams is going to be ambitious with consumer grade hardware.... from what i know....

look at a good switch that support nic teaming and you might be able to get 7-10 streams at the same time....
Click to expand...


I agree completely on this point.
Disk IO is going to kill you especially if you are doing any writes to the server on a software raid or even hardware raid5 just because you wont be using many drives if you only need 2tb.
A disk can only be read or written to at any given moment so if your reading 7 streams and trying to write one thing your going to have issues on the disk front way before your gigabit nic gets saturated.
Your going to beed some damn good drives.
 
nitrobass24 said:
I agree completely on this point.
Disk IO is going to kill you especially if you are doing any writes to the server on a software raid or even hardware raid5 just because you wont be using many drives if you only need 2tb.
A disk can only be read or written to at any given moment so if your reading 7 streams and trying to write one thing your going to have issues on the disk front way before your gigabit nic gets saturated.
Your going to beed some damn good drives.
Click to expand...

I really wouldn't freak out over disk IO or network speed. Most front ends (not all) stream media content so you're probably not going to eat up very much in terms of disk IO from streaming SD content. You're average read speed after burst settles somewhere between 17 - 25 Mb/s that's more than enough to to run 7 SD streams. You're problem is going to be random disk access which will be from stuff you drop on top of this load.

To solve this problem what I did for my HTPC/File Server is limit writes to the server. I know some home routers support this. If you use Linux there are shapers out there that will do this for you. That way you have maximum bandwidth on read from the server and a minimum write to the server. Problem solved. Oh BTW I would go ahead and do the Gigabit Network. You won't need it for SD content but you will want to plan for when you do.
 
I agree with the others about the disk i/o and network speeds not being a problem. Streamed SD content is not going to require all that much disk access. Good performing SATA drives will have no trouble with this in regards to reading the data. You might want to go RAID 5 just for a little extra boost just in case but I doubt it's needed. The only way you should have any trouble with disk i/o is if you are doing a large number of writes along with the streaming. From the sound of things, this system will basically be used for nothing other than streaming which should not necessitate many writes. Having a decent amount of RAM in the machine would probably help as well.

A gigabit interface should be more than good enough as well. I doubt you would get close to half the read capabilities of the drive which means any good gigabit NIC should serve your purposes just fine. With the constant traffic and load you're running, I would definitely suggest a quality add in gigabit NIC rather than using an onboard NIC.

Another thing to consider is the type of media you are going to be serving. Anything with decent compression will cut down on the bandwidth and disk access. I had a movie streaming from one of my systems the other day. It's a 1.4 gig x264 encoded rip of a DVD with the original AC3 5.1 audio. I think the average network transfer speed for the streaming was around 250kB/sec and this was for a movie about 2 hours long and over an encrypted wireless connection. Ten streams such as that would only be around 25mB/sec total which is easily in the low end of the gigabit speed range that I'm accustomed to on my systems with integrated gigabit NICs and cheap gigabit switch. If you were talking about something like 700 meg divx encodes with mp3 stereo audio, you can figure it would take about half that much bandwidth. Also, if you were talking about streaming regular DVDs the bandwidth needs would increase 3-6x.

Your exact usage will determine if your hardware will be up to the job but I doubt you're going to be using something like straight DVD rips which would require much higher bandwidth.

 
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