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Home Server and Dev Lab

C

Cottonwood00

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
Messages
90
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Plex Media Server(transcoding included), Running multiple VM's (DB, WebServer, Utilities) for development, Torrent Box, NFS/NAS
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
~$600.00, dont worry about shipping and tax
3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible.
United States, Pittsburgh PA
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.
a. Motherboard with sata6
b. ~4+TB Raid (maybe 3x2tb on raid 5)
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
a. AMD Phenom II x4 965BE
b. 12gb DDR2 RAM
c. 2x640gb HDD
d. Crucial M4 SSD (OS)
e. PSU Corsair tx750
f. Corsair Obsidian Series 550D
g. AMD Radeon 5770(Only to set it up if the MOBO dont have onboard video)
6) Will you be overclocking?
no probably not
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it?
1920x1080p x2 but ill run this headless
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?
This week
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.
I need minimal 6x SATA6gb/s, RAID 5, and onboard video for setup but ill run this headless. I do have a AMD5770 i can use if the board dont have video
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Ubuntu 12.04


This is my current gaming system but I've found myself running out of storage and have been doing more development so the VM's are nice. I also plan to build a moderate gaming build soon so all these parts would just be sitting around. Additionally I'd like to have a mobo that i can upgrade later to an AMD FX 8-cores if thats possible. Figure give myself some head room for that if possible so AMD3+ would be cool.
 
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Cottonwood00 said:
Thought about these:
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
3xWD Red 2 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5
Click to expand...

Unless you meant to say "DDR3" instead of "DDR2", that motherboard won't work with your currently planned setup. So you willing to up your budget to get DDR3 RAM? Also, you're going to need a cheap low power video card for 24/7 use to use any 990FX or 990X motherboard due to their lack of onboard video.

As for your RAID 5 plans, not the best idea since that is quite a lot of storage that could be potentially lost during a RAID rebuild after a drive failure. You should be looking at RAID 6 and/or a more suitable file system setup:
http://arstechnica.com/information-...-and-atomic-cows-inside-next-gen-filesystems/
 
I popped them out and checked:
2 x 4gb DDR3-1333 G.Skill
2 x 2gb DDR3-1600 G.Skill

Not sure If the 1600 paired with 1333 is bad... I dunno the 1600 was free so I put them in and its seems to work.

Found this mobo too Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 ATX AM3+, looks a little cheaper might go with that. Any advice on some low power video cards? I have a AMD Radeon 5770 I could use since ill be building a new gaming rig later will that be fine?


Seems like If i do 5x1tb on Raid 6 I can get the same storage amount and as 3x2tb on raid5 and it will on cost about 50 difference without tax. Perhaps Raid1 with 2x3tb?
 
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Cottonwood00 said:
I popped them out and checked:
2 x 4gb DDR3-1333 G.Skill
2 x 2gb DDR3-1600 G.Skill

Not sure If the 1600 paired with 1333 is bad... I dunno the 1600 was free so I put them in and its seems to work.
Click to expand...
Not bad. The DDR3 1600 RAM will be running at DDR3 1333 speeds though. Ok so you do have DDR3 RAM.

Cottonwood00 said:
Found this mobo too Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 ATX AM3+, looks a little cheaper might go with that.
Click to expand...
I recommend going with the Gigabyte GA-990FX-UD3 instead due to its popularlity for ESXi setups and lots of PCI-E expansions which will give you a lot of upgrade options in the future.
Cottonwood00 said:
Any advice on some low power video cards? I have a AMD Radeon 5770 I could use since ill be building a new gaming rig later will that be fine?
Click to expand...
I'd recommend just getting a new GPU alotgether to cut down on power use as well as heat generation inside this new server. The HD 5450 should do the job just fine at $33 shipped:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150655&ignorebbr=1

Cottonwood00 said:
Seems like If i do 5x1tb on Raid 6 I can get the same storage amount and as 3x2tb on raid5 and it will on cost about 50 difference without tax. Perhaps Raid1 with 2x3tb?
Click to expand...
With the above mobo and GPU recommendation, you're looking at around $415 leftover for the hard drives. That's more than enough to do 4 x 2TB for RAID 6:
$352 - 4 x Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s Hard Drive

Hell, if you do decide to go over your budget a little bit or don't mind the increased heat and power usage from reusing your HD 5770, you could do 5 x 2TB for under $600.
 
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Cottonwood00 said:
The mother board GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 - http://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-GA-990FXA-UD3-990FX-SATA-Motherboard/dp/B0055QYKQO

Sounds great but when i was looking around it said "Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5,RAID 10"

Do I need a hardware RAID card for Raid 6?
Click to expand...

You're using Linux right? Then just use Linux's Mdadm utility to create a software RAID 6. More than likely it'll be end up being more stable and faster than most motherboard onboard RAID.

EDIT: Also, another alternative to my earlier Gigabyte mobo recommendation would be the Asus M5A99FX PRO for $145 shipped. It has one extra SATA port over the Gigabyte.
 
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So I've been researching my software set up for my server and I've found Open Media Vault (http://www.openmediavault.org/) which runs on debian using PHP which im familier with plus it has plugin/packages for virtualbox and transmission(torrent client) so it seems this is everything I need. Oh and I found the Debian Plex Repo so I've got that working on a VM. Not sure how stable it is yet but it works.

Any thoughts on this software?
 
Honestly, I don't know too much about that particular software setup. Worth a try though from what I've seen.
 
As I mentioned above, I was going to get a new Gaming Computer while i set this away as a server, but I was wondering if the AMD Phenom II x965 still has life as a gaming computer.

I normally play Starcraft 2 but I was interested in getting into BF4, Thief, and Titanfall. If so i was thinking about just buying something thats lower power such as and i3 for the server and upgrading the Video card to something more recent. Or continue to make this a server and buy a new gaming computer.

I could sell my xboxone to get more money for a better gaming computer. What do you guys think?
 
Cottonwood00 said:
As I mentioned above, I was going to get a new Gaming Computer while i set this away as a server, but I was wondering if the AMD Phenom II x965 still has life as a gaming computer.

I normally play Starcraft 2 but I was interested in getting into BF4, Thief, and Titanfall. If so i was thinking about just buying something thats lower power such as and i3 for the server and upgrading the Video card to something more recent. Or continue to make this a server and buy a new gaming computer.

I could sell my xboxone to get more money for a better gaming computer. What do you guys think?
Click to expand...

Buy a new gaming PC, make that setup a server. BF4 is pretty CPU heavy. I played BF4 on an AMD Phenom II X4 CPU and it wasn't...good enough for my tastes.


Now would be a good time to upgrade: The Intel CPUs coming in 2014 won't be that much of an upgrade over current Intel Haswell CPUs judging from past successive Intel CPU releases. In addition, the Intel Skylake CPUs that are supposedly coming out in 2015 will more than likely use rather expensive DDR4 RAM. It probably won't be until 2016 when we'll see a mainstream Intel CPU that'll be a cost-effective and worthwhile upgrade over a Haswell or even an Ivy Bridge setup. Or that DDR4 pricing might drop down to more reasonable levels. Not to mention that DDR3 RAM pricing is only going to go higher.
 
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