Home 2003 Server (NOT Windows Home Server)

[Monty Burns]

Hi Guys

I need to build a server for home use (NOT Windows Home Server) and having looked at the systems available i'm not impressed with Dell e.t.c. so i've decided to build one.

What I've decided:

• Based on a Q6600
• 4 gig ram
• will have twin raptors for O/S (striped) running from a PCI SATA RAID card

Your input:

• mobo needs to be able to cope with 4x1terrabyte minimum of disk
• mobo and case need to be able to hot-swap these disks (inlcuding drive bay access)
• mobo and case needs to be able to cope with at least 8 disks in RAID 5 config (my max will be 8x1tb)
• must be SATA disks (or later derivative but not SAS)
• onboard gfx is fine and i don't care if it doesn't have a soundcard

The problem i'm having is finding a mobo that will support up to 8tb of disk and also a case that has 8 hot-swap bays on the front of it.

So guys, anyone any idea on the mobo/case combo?

[aitor_ibarra]

My suggestion...

Get any motherboard you like, so long as it has at least one PCIe 8x or 16x slot. Go with integrated graphics so you can keep that slot (if there's only one) for a hardware RAID card. Go with any case you like.

Get a good hardware RAID card. If you want to do RAID5, look at the Areca cards. For 8+ drives, this will be more expensive than the rest of your PC, but worth it - RAID5 parity calculation will be completely off loaded from the CPU. I would get one with an external SAS connector, and run it to this external hot swap enclosure: http://www.span.com/catalog/product_...ducts_id=16416

SAS is backwards compatible with SATA; you can still use SATA drives in this array.

If you really want everything in one case, then look at SuperMicro cases, or get some removable drive caddies that let you put five 3.5" drives in the space of three 5.25" bays, and a case with lots of 5.25" bays.

I would seriously suggest you mirror rather than stripe your OS drives. You really don't need the speed, and with RAID 0 you lose the whole array when one drive goes. I gave up striping my Raptors when a bug in my motherboard raid driver lost me data, and with lots of RAM in my workstation the paging file hardly gets touched, so RAID0 is overkill.

If the purpose of this box is to serve big files quickly to several client pcs simultaneously, multiple RAID1s will perform better than one big RAID5, but obviously you only get 4TB useable space from 8 drives (vs 7TB with RAID5)

cheers,

Aitor

[Monty Burns]

thanks for all the excellent ideas!

I will stick with RAID 0 on the boot O/S. I know the risks however, it is just the O/S and can easily and quickly be rebuilt should it need to be. Also, the twin raptors I have in my games machine have not let me down, not even once, in what must be close to two years

RAID 5 is sufficient for the data drives and gives some data protection with all my data being backed up off-site to my web host which has unlimited data storage - obviously, the first time may be a bit time consuming

I didn't think of using the PCIe slot for a very fast raid card, good idea!

Will take a look at those cases and also the 5 in 3 bay systems.

So again, many thanks!