Any suggestions for building my first file server?

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jotns

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Feb 14, 2005
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I am planning on building a file server box and I'm looking for suggestions on what to get.

I am especially clueless on what type of RAID controller to get, and I'm trying to keep it under 800 dollars.

I already have a 300gb and a 400gb drive and plan on buying similar drives to Raid 1 them and add another 400gb set.
 
I think the first question that you may want to ask yourself is: how am I going to back my critical data up?
 
I 've just set-up a sever with a PNY S-Cure Raid controller card thati got off of Newegg when they were on sale! Cost about $40 Its a Raid3 and it was really easy to setup- no need for drivers. Running 5 maxtor 320gb 16mb Sata -1.2TB. I tested out by dropping out one of the drives and it rebuilt the array within one day! So it works really well. I using this has my media server. Just make sure that you have s really good PSU!
 
drizzt81 said:
I think the first question that you may want to ask yourself is: how am I going to back my critical data up?
Click to expand...

I have had a 300gb drive fail on me, so I was hoping that using RAID 1 would reduce the chances of that happing again. The only other way they could get wiped is by a virus right? In which case backing up to DVD-Rs sounds like the only solid way to prevent data loss. Any other ideas for cost effective back up?
 
jotns said:
I have had a 300gb drive fail on me, so I was hoping that using RAID 1 would reduce the chances of that happing again. The only other way they could get wiped is by a virus right? In which case backing up to DVD-Rs sounds like the only solid way to prevent data loss. Any other ideas for cost effective back up?
Click to expand...

Don't mix up the two things:
-RAID helps protect against harddrive failure (and in some cases providing better uptime, if hot swapping is supported and used).
-RAID will not save against a virus or trojan wiping your drive. It will not save you against your filesystem crapping out on you. A RAID array will happily write whatever bits you tell it to, it may just make those bits redundant.

If you are using this system as a backup here is my suggested process for determining hardware for super cheap file servers:
1) Determine how much space you need.
2) Determine the price point for the various drives and models, you will probably want SATA, choose a drive that has a good warranty (5 year is optimal, 3 year is ok, skip 1 years). This will give you the number of drives you have to buy.
3) Take the price of those drives out of the total amount you want to spend - now you need to purchase a system that will fall under that cost.
4) Pick a motherboard, you will need at least the number of available ports for the drives. So if you have 4 drives, you will need at least 4 ports. Pick an accompanying processor and probably 512mb of ram, 256mb if you really need to save money. Ideally choose a motherboard that has 2 IDE ports.
5) Pick up a super cheap CDROM/Hard drive for the installation and the operating system to reside on. For Linux/BSD you can probably get away with as low as 4-6gb, with Windows you will probably need at least 8gb. If you don't have a drive spare for this task, and can't find one on your local craigslist, from a friend, etc, you will probably be able to find a 20/40/60/80gb drive for between $20-$50 new.
6) Pick a case that can fit all the hardware.
7) Build the actual system, do not connect the additional hard drives that will be the raid array, install whatever OS you want to use (you will have to buy a Windows license if you don't have one spare and you are set on that O/S).
8) After you are done configuring the system, connect the drives. If you are using Linux, you will likely be using md, if you are using Windows, you will likely be using dynamic disks. Find and follow a guide for this process, if you have two data drives, you will want to use RAID1 (mirror). If you are using 3+ data drives, you will want to use RAID5 (single parity). If you are using 6+ data drives, RAID5 is fine but I would suggest RAID6 (double parity)
9) Share data + profit.

I think I built llama (see sig, 2.1tb) for something like $1200 or $1400 total out the door.

So long as the chipset is supported by the OS you want you should be fine choosing pretty much anything, for a cheap file server you will probably not be able to afford an actual raid card and everything else.
 
I can already see that I'm gonna need to spend more than 800 for this.

So far I'm looking to use http://www.freenas.org/ for the OS

Hardware:

$100 1gb ram
$50 1gb usb flash key or 60-80gig drive
$100 500+ watt psu
$360 3 400gb drives in RAID 5 (seems pretty solid idea if it can survive a drive failure)
$80 mobo
$100 cpu
$20 dvd burner
$75 case
$120 raid controller http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102062

So I'm up to 1005 plus shipping.

I plan on expanding this w/ 3 more 400gb drives a month or two after I build it. Should I go with software or hardware RAID? Also if i expand can I convert from one RAID to another, eg RAID 5 to RAID 6 or would I have to format and start over?
 
If this system is just a basic system than you don't need a 500w psu. Hard drives take on average about 12 watts per, spin up *could* reach up to 30 watts depending on the drive.

And you don't to spend alot on mobo/cpu either.
 
You can't afford a hardware raid controller with that budget. You will not need a 500w PSU - a quality PSU is nice but not necessarily a must so long as you have a clean power input. Check out the psu forums for further discussion there. In my opinion you are better off buying a motherboard that has all the necessary ports than buying something else. And remember, fileservers (especially BSD/Linux based ones) can be very, very lightweight. Unless you are running something like Sun ZFS you are not going to need much ram. Go minimal. You don't have to spend money on a cdrom either if you just swap in a drive temporarily. You are doing something wrong with that build because it should not be so expensive. The actual hardware cost of my backup file server was something like $400, and that came with 8 sata ports, pci-e 8x8x1x and all sorts of other goodies.

So long as the underlying system supports upgrading, you should be fine. I have no idea whether FreeBSD supports expansion or hot swapping, I know md (Linux) does despite its slow upgrade time. I would think so the way they tout their raid capabilities but you should check.
 
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