Advice on File Server Build

Q

QQ~

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 16, 2010
Messages
195
I am looking to update my file server to a less power hungry CPU/Board, while also upgrading the raid controller and adding a HP SAS Expander. My Current budget is $800-900 for CPU, MB, Raid Card, and the HP SAS Expander +Cables. As I already own a Norco 4020.

The current box is a Q6600 on a cheap Intel media MB. Using a Highpoint SATA fakeraid card.

I am looking at these parts, Ideals and suggestions are more them welcome.

MB: GIGABYTE GA-MA785G-UD3H
CPU: AMD Athlon II X2 240
Raid Card: areca ARC-1680LP or 3ware 9690SA-4I-KIT

The main issue is I'm not sure if the CPU will be powerful enough for me to pull HD 720p and 1080p content over my network. While also being download loaded and file extracted on the array.

Edited to reflect new hardware choices as suggested by nitrobass24.
 
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The sempron might be struggling to keep up, but I'm sure someone else will be able to tell you for sure.
 
Well for starters that card will not work well with the HP sas expander.

I would grab an Areca 1680LP intstead as its know to work. Also the Management for the Areca is lightyears better than the LSI card.

The HP SAS expander has an external port so you could daisy chain an additional case in the future.

I actually bought the Areca 1680X which has two external SAS only and just run an external cable to my HP SAS expander.

On the CPU i would step up to an X2 240. It wont actually use much more electricity if any when idle, and you will have that extra power when you need it.

I assume you already have RAM and PSU?
 
Ouch that card is pricey. But I will add it to my shopping list. And I swapped up the CPU aswell.

I do have ram and a PSU I can reuse.
 
I don't think you need quite such a pricey card if you're going to be using the HP expander...the Areca cards are nice but there are much less expensive options like the 3ware 9690SA that will work just fine and cost a lot less. I think you can probably do it in budget with some savvy shopping.

Your CPU is more than fine as long as you don't need to reencode the content on the fly. It takes very little CPU, it's basically acting as a DMA manager between the RAID card and NIC... Speaking of, I would suggest adding an Intel PCIe NIC or using a motherboard with Intel onboard. I personally like the Intel DG43NB + Celeron E3300 option as it's in the same price range but includes an Intel NIC, cost and performance should be virtually identical - but your AMD solution will work great as well.
 
QQ~ said:
The main issue is I'm not sure if the CPU will be powerful enough for me to pull HD 720p and 1080p content over my network. While also being download loaded and file extracted on the array.
I'm not sure if this fits your workload, but my main file server has servers multiple internet clients doing uploads and downloads. Downloads are typically few burst over a few hours at 1MB/s. Uploads are 24x7 access at 70kbps. The server doubles as a media server which I've used to stream 1080p and 720p files via wireless N and GbE. The Server is a plain old dual core E6300 @ 3GHz (currently running at 2.4GHz) on a P35 board with a cheap EIDE card for 2 500GB PATA drives that I have left over. I've had up to 7 drives attached. The CPU and drives have not been a bottleneck for streaming. 1080p video. Over GbE I have no problems at all. On Wireless I sometimes have trouble if the connection drops down to levels that are not enough to support the bitrate of the video file. I use a GbE wireless router on my network and typically have only 1 video stream running in parallel the the upload/download application.

In your case, so long as you have a faster CPU than my E6300 and a RAID controller that can handle the stream traffic you should be ok.
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QQ~ said:
Ouch that card is pricey. But I will add it to my shopping list. And I swapped up the CPU aswell.

I do have ram and a PSU I can reuse.
Click to expand...

look for a used one. I picked up my 1680x for $350 :)
 
keenan said:
I don't think you need quite such a pricey card if you're going to be using the HP expander...the Areca cards are nice but there are much less expensive options like the 3ware 9690SA that will work just fine and cost a lot less. I think you can probably do it in budget with some savvy shopping.
Click to expand...

Do you know that the 9690SA will work with the HP SAS expander?
My guess is that it wont, becasue LSI owns 3ware and the LSIs that have been tested to my knowledge (9280DE-8e) dont work.

It would be a shame to spend $500 on something that is just mediocre to begin with, that may or may not work, when you can spend $600 on the very best.
 
Yeah, we had nothing but problems when testing the LSI 9280-8e. Just stick with Areca if your budget allows. You won't regret it.
 
Heres an LP for $540
Use bing cash back and its under $500

Give you internal and external and out of band web-based management

None of that crappy java shit LSI and Adaptec use.
 
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nitrobass24 said:
I would grab an Areca 1680LP intstead as its know to work. Also the Management for the Areca is lightyears better than the LSI card.

The HP SAS expander has an external port so you could daisy chain an additional case in the future.
Click to expand...

Just as a FYI I'm using a HP SAS Expander with the Areca 1680LP with 21 drives currently attached, so it works.

Also, if you live by a Fry's, you can probably get either a similar combo, or in i3/i5 based combo for the same price (or a few dollars more) than that motherboard + Athlon II.

Finally, get an Intel GigE network card.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Do you know that the 9690SA will work with the HP SAS expander?
My guess is that it wont, becasue LSI owns 3ware and the LSIs that have been tested to my knowledge (9280DE-8e) dont work.

It would be a shame to spend $500 on something that is just mediocre to begin with, that may or may not work, when you can spend $600 on the very best.
Click to expand...

The 3ware 9690SA Series is said to work in the HP SAS Expander Owner's Thread

keenan said:
I don't think you need quite such a pricey card if you're going to be using the HP expander...the Areca cards are nice but there are much less expensive options like the 3ware 9690SA that will work just fine and cost a lot less. I think you can probably do it in budget with some savvy shopping.

Your CPU is more than fine as long as you don't need to reencode the content on the fly. It takes very little CPU, it's basically acting as a DMA manager between the RAID card and NIC... Speaking of, I would suggest adding an Intel PCIe NIC or using a motherboard with Intel onboard. I personally like the Intel DG43NB + Celeron E3300 option as it's in the same price range but includes an Intel NIC, cost and performance should be virtually identical - but your AMD solution will work great as well.
Click to expand...

I wont be re-encoding. That was my first setup, and it didn't work out to well when doing 1080p content.

I have a lot of Intel EXPI9301CTBLK I plan to toss 1-2 in the case, rather then use the onboard.

pjkenned said:
Just as a FYI I'm using a HP SAS Expander with the Areca 1680LP with 21 drives currently attached, so it works.

Also, if you live by a Fry's, you can probably get either a similar combo, or in i3/i5 based combo for the same price (or a few dollars more) than that motherboard + Athlon II.

Finally, get an Intel GigE network card.
Click to expand...

I live no where near a Fry's :mad:
 
As far as performance, consider that the maximum raw BluRay bitrate, which you'll never see in the real world is 48mbit/s (most reencoded content is going to be in the 10mbit or less range). That's about 6MB/s. Even a 5 or 6 year old low-end machine should have no trouble maintaining that over a 100mbit LAN. It's about equivalent to the disk performance required to burn a DVD at 4x - not very much.

I had a server with a single-core Celeron from a couple years ago doing software RAID-5 and I got > 100MB/s reads. It couldn't quite manage to saturate GigE on writes, but it came pretty close (about 70MB/s IIRC). No problem at all with multiple simultaneous streams of 1080p. If you had problems with an E3300-based system, they were software/driver issues or due to crappy NICs/network - perhaps the fakeraid was 'bursty' and couldn't keep the data flowing consistently. Streaming 1080p doesn't require much at all in the way of performance, you can do it with a $100 NAS that can't do better than 10MB/s, you certainly don't need a fast computer.

Edit:
Do you know that the 9690SA will work with the HP SAS expander?
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According to the owner's thread it does, but I'm not a fan of hardware RAID and always do softraid, so I don't have personal experience with it.
 
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I would generally ditch the raid card and use the motherboard ports (get one with 8 or more sata ports) and software raid. However this is not recommended on windows since software raid (5/6 ..) is crippled under windows because they are paranoid (that the system will BSOD) so they use a very small and ineffective cache causing most writes on a raid5 or better to require a read-write cycle. On Opensolaris, Freebsd, linux ... this is not a problem.
 
drescherjm said:
I would generally ditch the raid card and use the motherboard ports (get one with 8 or more sata ports) and software raid. However this is not recommended on windows since software raid (5/6 ..) is crippled under windows because they are paranoid (that the system will BSOD) so they use a very small and ineffective cache causing most writes on a raid5 or better to require a read-write cycle. On Opensolaris, Freebsd, linux ... this is not a problem.
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I wouldn't say that they're paranoid of BSODs. I think the larger issue is that Windows Software RAID is simply an after thought. The vast majority of Windows Server users are going to be running hardware RAID so MS has little incentive to improve it. However, they have greatly improved the RAID 1 boot setup - 2008 actually writes the boot sector properly without any problems.

That said, I ran Windows software RAID 5 for a bit and while the performance was nowhere near a hardware RAID, Linux SW, or ZFS, it was still quite acceptable. Would I recommend it? In a pinch.
 
I think the larger issue is that Windows Software RAID is simply an after thought.
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RAID 5 in the os has been available since at least NT4.0 maybe earlier. I used it in in the mid to late 1990s. I have even tried fakeraid on windows and that had bad performance as well. Same problem did not seem to have a write cache. However I admit, I have not tried Intels solution so that may be much better.
 
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drescherjm said:
RAID 5 in the os has been available since at least NT4.0 maybe earlier. I used it in in the mid to late 1990s. I have even tried fakeraid on windows and that had bad performance as well. Same problem did not seem to have a write cache. However I admit, I have not tried Intels solution so that may be much better.
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It also really hasn't been updated since the NT 4.0 days, hence my comment that its an afterthought! It works better on faster hardware, but its still a fairly poor solution.
 
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