Home fileserver

J

Just_Visiting

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 3, 2008
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It's time for me to build a fileserver for home. It's main functions are to store movies to stream to my Popcornhour media player (great little device!) and provide storage for music, docs and photos. Right now I have 3 different computers being used for this purpose. I purchased 8 500GB Seagate HD's. I have a perc 5 on the way. From other posts that I've seen on here and on 2cpu, people seem to be happy with their perc 5 solution. I figured this would be the most cost effective solution for my first big build. I need recommendations from you gurus on motherboards. I currently have an Intel D925xcv and D875pbz just sitting here. Is the D925 desktop board sufficient for this build? I also considered purchasing and Asus K8N-LR for my fileserver: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...gle-_-Motherboards+-+Server-_-ASUS-_-13131160. I ran across that board when I was building my clarkconnect firewall. If the Intel board isn't sufficient, is this board much better?

I also need chassis recommendations. My firewall is currently on a Dell 1U dual processor P3. The 2 rackmount cases that I like are the Chenbro RM21508B http://www.provantage.com/chenbro-rm21508t2-bh~BCHEN00R.htm and the Supermicro SC825 http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-cse-825tq-560lpb~7SUPC00K.htm

What else am I missing?
 
Use a board that you already have, HomeFileServers dont need a bunch of power because its really only dealing with disk i/o. Dont waste a bunch of money on a board and a quadcore proc to share mp3s and pics.
 
you are going to have many problems since they are not compatible. You might be thinking pci-x which is backwards compatible with pci.
 
Just_Visiting said:
Any problems with a pci-e going into a regular pci slot?
Click to expand...

Yes. They are completely incompatible. Like quique55 said, you're thinking of PCI-X, which is compatible with PCI.

However, that Dell Perc card is a PCI-E x16 card. So you will need to use either a PCI or PCI-Ex1 video card since the D925xcv only has one PCI-Ex16 slot but does have two PCI-Ex1 slots.

Also do you already have a rack where those rack chasis can go?
 
Danny Bui said:
Yes. They are completely incompatible. Like quique55 said, you're thinking of PCI-X, which is compatible with PCI.

However, that Dell Perc card is a PCI-E x16 card. So you will need to use either a PCI or PCI-Ex1 video card since the D925xcv only has one PCI-Ex16 slot but does have two PCI-Ex1 slots.

Also do you already have a rack where those rack chasis can go?
Click to expand...

Thx for the info. I wasn't successful with either of the Intel boards. The perc card was sent to me without any RAM. I had an 512MB DDR2-400 chip laying so I put that in it to test, but that didn't change anything. I saw somewhere about taping off pins 5 and 6 on the perc card to get it to work on Intel boards so I'll give that a shot before buying anything.

I have a rack to install all of this in once the house is wired (got too many other little projects going on for that at the moment. I still haven't made up my mind on which case. Another motherboard that I was looking at is the Asus P5MT http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131551. I have an extra processor and memory for a board like this.
 
A tip: for the OS, consider Vista or Sever 2008. If you turn off everything everything you don't need, either makes a good file server because they both support SMB 2.0 which gives much better performance than the older SMB protocol in XP.
 
mojo-chan said:
A tip: for the OS, consider Vista or Sever 2008. If you turn off everything everything you don't need, either makes a good file server because they both support SMB 2.0 which gives much better performance than the older SMB protocol in XP.
Click to expand...

On a related note, how does Windows 2k3 or 2k8 server line up performance wise, compared to Samba on linux?

Once I've paid off the car, I plan on building a fileserver myself, the OS is the sticking point at the moment. I like WIndows because it is relatively simple to setup (everything has drivers that just install with a few clicks), but isn't it's network performance subpar compared to linux?

Plus what the heck does their licensing mean? Example:

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 - License - 1 user CAL - Open Business - Single Language (R18-02709) n/a $84

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 5 Device CAL OEM *No Software* n/a $216

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 5 User CAL OEM *No Software* n/a $224

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition 32/64bit + 25 CAL OEMn/a $3969

Which one is a simple server OS?

OP, sorry to get so horribly OT.
 
mojo-chan said:
A tip: for the OS, consider Vista or Sever 2008. If you turn off everything everything you don't need, either makes a good file server because they both support SMB 2.0 which gives much better performance than the older SMB protocol in XP.
Click to expand...

Thx for the info. The following clients will connect to the fileserver:
1. 2 laptops over wireless
2. popcornhour media player (100Mbps)
3. macpro, 2 pc desktops all 1Gbps

I planned on using a free (nix) distro for the fileserver. I'll start researching to see if any of those support SMB 2. SMB 1 has worked fine for me streaming movies 1080p mkv's to my popcorn without problems.
 
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