• 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.

Office File Server Build (Specs Suggestions) Please

B

BoomerX01

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 1, 2002
Messages
442
Hey guys,

I am looking into building an office server for backup and storage. The server will have between 3-5 users data on it, I was thinking of full copies of their drives, or at least profile/critical documents my guess is less than 10GB easily per person at most.

I also would like another form of backup, like an external drive or something, basically something to take offsite for backup/security reasons.

My question is: What kind of system should I be building specs wise? A dual PC system, with some sort of RAID plus tape drive? Thanks guys!! Any reccomendations are appreciated.
 
Just guessing, but I would think

Raid 5
as much ram as the MB will take. go big. max out the MB.
 
For a small office, 3 x 200GB would be plenty, not just for user folders but also to allow for different backup solutions such as a Monday full backup with daily incremental backups after than with 1 to 3 weeks of archives available on disk vs. tape.

Granted, I'm talking RAID 5, so 400GB useable, but you only need to look for a tape device that will be able to hold your full backup of user folders. By your math, 10GB x 3 + 1GB daily incremental data, or something along those lines. Be sure to set quotas and stick to them.

As for software, that depends greatly on preference and what you are willing to spend. The above spec'ed system is perfect for home users as the hardware will only set you back about 500 to 800. Don't worry so much about CPU or RAM, a P3 1GHz with 512MB is more than enough to keep this system up and working for a few years.

Hope that helps.
 
It all depends what you will be doing with the server. I have a few clients that run a Dell PowerEdge with a 1Ghz Celly and 512MB of Ram with 2x80 GB drives in RAID 1.

Unless you're looking for more I say stick with RAID 1 and a couple of 200GB HDD and you should be fine. You will get better write speeds with RAID 1 if you have a Gigabit backbone. If it's 10/100 you don't have to worry becuase the network is your bottle neck.

So to sum up my ramblings. Get the cheapest server you can with 512mb of RAM with 2 HDD mirrored. Plus I would get a tape backup using Windows Backup, it's not that bad.

I would also look at getting a system from Dell, now I know that's not [H]ard, but you will save money.

In two seconds I just configured a server with the following specs:

Windows 2003 Server
2.8Ghz P4
512MB Ram
2x160GB SATA Hard Disks in RAID 1
And 1 year of support
$1,336.00

Not to bad considering $499 is for W3K Server.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top