Itty bitty server.

[dwayne001]

OK. So...

I'm building a server.

The idea is to supplement my current system with something that will 1-hold data, and 2, perform some simple tasks all day, all night. It's meant to be accessible by all the computers in my little house via win networking and ssh.

It's role as a storage device, however, is PARAMOUNT...which is why i'm laying it out here, rather than on some other forum.

I have in lying around an athlon xp 2600+ w/ 256 megs of ddr 333 ram and an asus nforce2 board (a7nx-x?)

I also have an old Xaser II (2) case-- it has 3 native 3.5" bays and 4 5.25" bays. Using one of those as a space for an optical drive i figure i've got space enough for 9 hdds.

My preferred model is 200gb maxtor ultra series drive. it's ide--but i'm not convinced of sata's need as the thing is storing data...and not really gonna be doing much else bu recalling it to an htpc which hasnt yet been created, as well as my main rig. it's gonna sit in the corner of the room next door to my bed chamber, and thus it'll be connected to my main machine via a 1gbit netgear switch w/ a meg of cache.

So, down to it.
I want ~600gb of storage on the thing. Is raid 5 cool with you gurus? do you have a recommended pci raid card to use? I was looking at the highpointrocketraid 454 card. Does anyone have any real experience w/ it? It's got 4 channels (8 drives) so i can have 8 in the case eventually with one little 80gb drive (i just picked up on sale) running the OS of the machine.

Am I doin ok here then?

Mobo = Asus Nforce 2 mobo

CPU = Athlon XP 2600+

RAM = 256megs of samsung ram on one stick, in one single channel

Chassis = Thermaltake XASER 2 (six 3.5" bays, three 5.25" bays to be later converted for holding of 3.5" drives (i'll use underdrive fan coolers for these
three) and one more 4th 5.25" bay for the very necessary optical drive

RAID5 Card= Help me here people. Requirements: Expandability from 3 drives at
RAID 5 to 8 drives.

IDE/ ATA 100/133 support

is it possible to eventually
have parity on two of the 8
drives?

DRIVES = One WD 80gb device at 7200RPM w/ a 2meg cache (system drive) w/
one 10gb partition for windows and the rest for program files and the like.

three MAXTOR 200 gb IDE drives at 7200rpm w/ 8meg caches


VIDEO CARD = Nvid fx5200 or equivalent. (i might want this thing to serve
games...maybe)


NIC = Intel Pro something gigabit card (already have this too)
So, am i missing anything? do i need more RAM? I think i need more RAM. I need more RAM right? Is dual channel imperative w/ these Nforce 2 boards?

Thanks guys.

 

[dwayne001]

bump myself, i need some advice!

 

[shramj]

If you have 3 x 200g drives running Raid5, then you will only see 400g of spac but in case one of the drives dies, you will still be operational. I do not like that you are running the OS on a single 80 drive, what happens if that drive dies, you loose your server! You could wait and get your hands on another 80 drive and run it Raid0 so you are redundent. But I would run it like this if you could afford it....Get another 200g drive and also get an IDE Raid Controller, run the 4 drives at Raid5 so you will see around 600gig of data, then when you go to partition your system, make a 10gig C:\ for the OS, and then make the rest of the space your D:\ Data partition. I personally do not know of any IDE controllers that can support more then 4 drives but they might be out there, take a look at this one, http://www.lsilogic.com/products/parallell_ata_raid/index.html

Later, Shramj

 

[Lazn_Work]

shramj was fairly close.. first RAID 1 is mirroring, RAID 0 has no rudundancy..

2nd, for 8+ IDE channels, 3ware is your only option, they have up to 12 channels of IDE and are true hardware RAID 5 http://www.hypermicro.com/dept.asp?dept_id=13-004

the RocketRaid 454 is software RAID 5 and very slow at it, but it might still be fine for a server as you are limited to the speed of your network anyways (assuming 100Mbit/s)

As for 2 parity drives.. not really, but you can have a "hot spare" that will just sit idle till a drive dies, then it will immediately become part of the array when a drive dies, and you can then swap out the dead drive and set it's replacement up as the "hot spare"

==>Lazn

 

[swatbat]

I've been looking into this and the rocketraid is not a good idea. It is very slow

 

[dwayne001]

OK, so I'm going 3ware, eh? It's way more expensive, but for the speed, and true hardware raid 5, i'll do it. And sorry about the mistake, i meant that i was gonna get four 200gb drives, rather than 3. That way i'd get some thing like ~560gb of space.

Now, is expanding the array very difficult?

And aslo, should i want to wipe the OS drive, the 80giger, and redo teh OS, would the array remain in tact once the driver for the 3ware card is installed on the newly built OS?

As for the OS drive, i'm a big fan of keeping the OS and proggies on a seperate drive. it's like a must for me. should the OS crap out, i want the data on the other drives retained...i think.

 

[m1abram]

Well for most normal setups to expand an already operational RAID5 is not possible without rebuilding the array.

Now then I know with some setups you can expand an array, however that would require both an RAID adapter that supports it and and LVM (Logical Volume Management).

I have only see system with the above capability in some of the "Bigger" server farms I have worked with. (Bigger -> Server rooms larger than 3 football fields) Not that you need that big of a room to do this, but the systems that need to be able to expand the size of a partition without even a flinch of the system tend to have.

 

[Lazn_Work]

Unfortunatly 3ware cards do not let you expand an array, you would have to delete it and recreate it. (bummer)

The SCSI RAID cards I have dealt with do let you expand arrays.. but not the IDE ones.

I am sure that if you delete the OS drive (separate drive) you will not lose the data on the RAID array. I don't have a 3ware card, but a friend of mine does, and he has reinstalled several times without losing his data.

==>Lazn