• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Centralized Server Ideas

B

BAC4D00R SP1D0R

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 24, 2007
Messages
392
Well since this is my first post on the Data Storage Forum subsection. I'm thinking about making the plunge into creating my home server/storage setup. My basic thinking is that I would like to store all my movies, pictures on the server and also have some kind of basic computer backup. I would like to have my dad and my brother access my server since I know my brother has way more movies on his computer and I thought it would be nice to make it easier for all of us to access it.

The catch is that I live pretty far from my family and I'm planning to move to Washington DC sometime this year where my family lives in North Dakota. My brother goes to school in Fargo and the rest live in Minot. I'm not sure what kind of specs a PC should have for a pretty basic home server setup. I know I plan to swap out my fiancee's AMD Athlon x2 3600+ with a faster chip for her to make the computer last longer. My basic thinking is just have a bare bones mobo and the AMD cpu with loads of hard drive space perhaps up to 5 TB for starters. I think for simplicity sake I will start with Windows Server even though I don't mind test out Ubuntu server client.

Input is appreciated and I do plan to do this home server soon as possible.
 
Well for future growth and future proofing i would recommend the Norco 4020/4220. Has twenty hard drive bays in it. Plenty of room for growth.

As for duplication Windows Home server has a duplication feature. Makes a copy of your file(s) and places it on another hard drive in case one of the drives were to fail. If you only plan on backing up picture and document and these aren't large amount. A simple external hard drive would do you just fine. Plug it in when you want to back up to it. Then when it finished unplug it and store it somewhere safe.
 
Well the Norco I looked at is pretty nice but I'm more looking for just a computer tower case, I would say max space is 10 TB. It would be easier for me to carry around and move it to different places.
 
You could also look at a Linux distro and MD raid. While lot of people don't like software raid, and I was one of them, MD raid is actually quite impressive as far as ease of use, reliability, and performance goes. With some "pull the plug" tests I was unable to kill it, even in the middle of a raid5 rebuild. I believe you can also grow an array live, but I have not tried that.

For backups rsync is great, though you do have to script cron jobs and what not. Eventually I want to write a GUI front end to make that easier but that wont be available any time soon.
 
BAC4D00R SP1D0R said:
Well the Norco I looked at is pretty nice but I'm more looking for just a computer tower case, I would say max space is 10 TB. It would be easier for me to carry around and move it to different places.
Click to expand...

So almost like a SFF or mATX setup or a "light" ATX size case?
 
I'd recommend the lancool (lian li) K7, aluminium so nice and light, and has 5 HDD bays so you could have 10tb with 5*2tb.
 
believe you can also grow an array live, but I have not tried that.
Click to expand...

Yes you can grow a mdadm array live. I have done that many times. Reshape does take a lot longer than rebuild though. So instead of a 4 to 8 hour rebuild it may be closer to a day.
 
I recommend Windows Home Server for its simplicity. I personally use it and I do just about everything you described. You will be able to unify all of your movies, pictures, documents, and other data into one expandable pool of data, and there is already built-in functions to backup up to 10 computers. Protecting the data is simple as well, as you can duplicate items in specific shares. If you don't like WHS for backup, other good programs that are free are Paragon Backup & Recovery Free Edition and GFI Backup Home Edition.

For hardware, you don't really need much as the server will mainly be hosting files. You will need some beef to the processor if you plan on deconding, encoding, transcoding, or doing other "intense" background tasks on the server. If you run something like ZFS (an expandable, self healing, and efficient RAID storage system), you will also want to have a lot of RAM. I think your X2 3600+ coupled with at least 2GB of RAM should be able to do what you described.

As for distance, you could always run VPN software such as LogMeIn Hamachi in order to easily grant access to your server from the web. Everyone will appear as if they are on the same local network and your connection is encrypted for security. You could also backup remotely over VPN as well, but make sure that everyone has a decent internet connection speed, as well as do the initial backup onsite and set whatever software you use to do incrimental backups.

Hope this helps.

-Cool-
 
sweet I'll have to check those out and I'm pretty positive my basic CPU with 2 gb of ram should suffice. The Lian-Li Lancool..I'll check that out what about the dedicated ATX server towers? Antec?
 
I like my Thermaltake Armour full tower. With 2 extra HDD cages it fits 12 3.5 inch drives ( mine has 11 just now ) and I'm rocking a Core i7 920 and a 8800GTS 640MB - Its a little hot in there due to the old gpu getting tired and just blasting out heat for the fun of it, but the drives are all nice and cool (20 to 26c)
 
That is a decent Lian-Li case, but its quite huge. A Norco 4020/4220 could fit more hard drives with hot swappable bays in a smaller package.

-Cool-
 
Id reccommend whs with hamachi.

And phuck buying a LianLi for a server, thats a total waste of money. I have like a $40 dollar case thats working great, in fact I have both my servers in the same cheapo case. Front fans, toolless drive attachment, mesh filter front, and holds 10 Tb no prob. Buy yourself another storage drive with the extra $150 or a good Intel Nic, etc. Servers dont have to be pretty, just have lots of gigs...;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top