Building a Fileserver

[alexw]

Once again I'm almost completely out of storage space on my PC, and with 3 internal HDDs and 2 external USB HDDs already (comprising just about 1TiB total), I've decided that it's finally time to bring my fileserver plan into action.

I'm looking to build a home fileserver, for storing the vast majority of my stuff (mainly music), which I can connect to my wired network (i.e. my router!) and put away in a cupboard, and then access via my current computer.

It will be used for storing, backing up and sharing my music collection, and pretty much nothing else. At first I would be looking to have about 1TiB of storage available (including backups), but I know that my collection will just keep growing, so I'm wanting a solution which will be able to grow with it, in a more efficient manner than simply adding more and more USB hard drives, as I currently do.

My budget is a maximum of £500 (plucked pretty much out of the air), though that doesn't necessarily have to include much of the actual storage space, as I would move some of the drives over from my current pc. If I can do it cheaper, without sacrificing too much then that would be grand.

So I'm looking for:

- Big case

I'm looking at the Coolermaster Stacker and the Lian-Li V2000, with a preference for the latter because of its greater number of 3.5'' bays. Any thoughts on these, or other suggestions?

- Good power supply

I have no idea on this. Help, advice?

- Reliable basic motherboard

The only feature that I'm really thinking I'm looking for is as many SATA ports as possible, so as to allow me to maximise the number of drives I can have without needing any PCI cards.
Otherwise I'm a bit lost and could do with help here as well.

- Basic processor

Currently thinking of the cheapest available AMD Semipron.

- Memory

How much would be sensible for such a machine? (512?)

- Graphics Card

Cheapest possible, there merely to make the thing work.

I have spare keyboard, mouse and monitor available.

Any thoughts and guidance would be greatly appreciated, especially on the choice of motherboard (+processor), case and power supply, or on the project in general.

I had a search and did see the recent 'Minimum spec of a fileserver' thread, but I hope I'm ok to start this new one, as the question wasn't wholly the same.

Cheers for any help.

 

[semi-pro waster]

I haven't included any drives either optical or hard drives but this basic specification should be ok. The case is the most expensive part by a long way so you may want to look at old server cases that will be cheaper and do the same job. 1gb in a single stick because socket 754 doesn't support dual channel and a good solid, quiet PSU. The motherboard supports Semprons and has 4 SATA ports which I think is about the most that any socket 754 motherboard does.

MB-125-AS Asus K8N4-E nForce4 4X (Socket 754) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-125-AS)
£49.95 £49.95
CA-029-LL Lian-Li PC V2000 Black Aluminium Full-Tower (No PSU) (CA-029-LL)
£144.95 £144.95
CP-138-AM AMD Sempron 64 2800+ 1.6GHz (Socket 754) CPU - Retail (CP-138-AM)
£45.95 £45.95
MY-030-CR Crucial 1GB DDR PC3200 CAS3 (CT12864Z40B) (MY-030-CR)
£48.95 £48.95
CA-026-EN Enermax Liberty 400W ELT400AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CA-026-EN)
£44.95 £44.95
GX-021-HT HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon X300SE 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (RX300SE) (GX-021-HT)
£29.95 £29.95
Subtotal £364.70
VAT £63.83
Total £428.53

 

[malman]

Or purchase a Buffalo terrastation and save the hassle of building it

 

[Nem]

Best idea is to get a motherboard with integrated graphics just for this type of system:

Asus A8N-VM CSM Micro ATX (Socket 939) PCI Express Motherboard (MB-119-AS) £64.57
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3200BPBOX) (CP-118-AM) £112.74
Antec TruePower 2.0 380W PSU (CA-029-AN) £46.94
CoolerMaster Stacker STC-T01 - Silver Trim (No PSU) (CA-054-CM) £111.57
GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 (GE1GB3200BHDC) (MY-005-GL) £64.57

Total: £400.39 - inc vat

Nick

 

[leezer3]

Neither of those specs is too bad, I would probably go down the integrated GFX route, but it's much of a muchness over an incredibly cheap GFX.
However, I would probably crank the PSU up to at least 500w- If this is to be running a fileserver with loads of drives you want a decent amount of redundancy & spare power.
You could also go & buy a cheap fileserver off the well-known auction site, which should come with the size of case you want & will be a whole lot cheaper.

Edit: Having said that though, one of these wouldn't come with SATA as standard.

-Leezer-

 

[Sigg]

For the case I can recommend the old stacker, I'm using one with 12 HDDs in 3 4in3 device modules, better drive cooling & cheaper than the V2000. You can also use 2 PSUs which is handy.

 

[alexw]

Which is the old Coolermaster Stacker - the STC-T01 I presume?

 

[hhhhbk]

maybe look at getting some kind of raid card to safeguard against losing data if a hard drive fails

if you really plan to stick it in a cupboard is there any need for an expensive case
some of the cheap £20 ones have plenty of hard drive bays

the 250gig seagate ide drives are on offer at ocuk this week for about £65
8 of them plus a card which does raid 5 and you will have almost 2TB protected against a single disc failing

 

[Energize]

You could just use an old p3.

 

[Baplad]

I dont think he would need 1gb of ram since he will only be streaming music to one single pc and it wont be serving files to a lot of computers id say 512 or even 256mb would be enough

 

[Sigg]

Which is the old Coolermaster Stacker - the STC-T01 I presume?

Yep, the new one (Stacker 830) takes fewer drives, only 1 PSU & is more expensive. If you don't plan on putting so many drives in then I'd go for a cheap & basic case though, it's only when you need more than 8 HDDs that the choice of case is limited.

 

[kzar]

To be fair those specs are a bit ott. I use debian linux to do this, without the gui so intergrated graphics is pleanty. I have made a few similar fileservers and I find that an amd k2 works but is a little slow but duron or higher works fine.

 

[alexw]

Thanks for the help thus far.

1. Several people have mentioned that using old components (cpu, ram etc), would be the way to go. The reasons I wasn't thinking of going along this route were:

* I don't actually have any old suitable old components lying around spare (I'll post my current specs when I get home, but it's an Abit NF7-S, AMD, 2*256 Crucial system).

* Is it actually any cheaper than going with a low-end semipron system? If one uses an old cpu and appropriate motherboard, then it's not going to have inbuilt support for many HDD's, which would necessitate purchasing a RAID card of some sort, if not at first, then certainly in order to expand later. This seems to be as expensive, if not more expensive, than getting a current board with plenty of SATA ports built in.

2. A cheaper case would be ok, if there were any that were reasonable, but I was under the impression that you get what you pay for, as it were. The overriding opinion seems to be that the CM Stacker (and the Lian-Li et al) are 'good' cases, right? Are the higher prices not justified by better build quality, better cooling, and better design and features?

3. After some thoughts and discussions last night, here is a spec that I've come up with:

MB-113-AS Asus K8N4-E Deluxe nForce4 4X (Socket 754) PCI-Express Motherboard (MB-113-AS)
£54.95 £54.95
CP-138-AM AMD Sempron 64 2800+ 1.6GHz (Socket 754) CPU - Retail (CP-138-AM)
£45.95 £45.95
GX-014-HT HIS EXcalibur ATI Radeon 7000 64MB DDR TV-Out/Dual CRT (AGP) - Retail (R7000-TW64D) (GX-014-HT)
£17.95 £17.95
CA-025-EN Enermax Liberty 500W ELT500AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CA-025-EN)
£63.95 £63.95
CA-054-CM CoolerMaster Stacker STC-T01 - Silver Trim (No PSU) (CA-054-CM)
£94.95 £94.95
MY-040-CR Crucial 512MB DDR PC3200 CAS3.0 Dual Channel Kit (2x256MB) (CT2KIT3264Z40B) (MY-040-CR)
£29.95 £29.95
Subtotal £307.70
VAT £53.85
Total £361.55

Any thoughts?

The Asus K8N4-E Deluxe actually has 8 SATA ports according to the ASUS website (can any owners confirm this?), hence my choosing that.

The bulk of the money has gone on the case and the PSU, which I was advised were the important points of such a build.

I'm hoping to produce a long-term solution to my storage needs. Given that I'm currently needing >1TiB of storage and could easily need 2TiB within a year or two I'm thinking that a good large case like the stacker, and a quality high-power PSU are sensible investments.

I'm actually thinking of buying a Crucial 2*512MB PC3200 set and upgrading my current pc with that, then using the 2*256MB PC3200 from the old pc in the new fileserver, so have reflected the spec for the fileserver above.

For the case I can recommend the old stacker, I'm using one with 12 HDDs in 3 4in3 device modules, better drive cooling & cheaper than the V2000. You can also use 2 PSUs which is handy.

Does the old stacker come with one of these 4in3 Device modules included? Or will I have to buy one (or more) separately?
Is it fine to use several of these in the one case, in order to convert the 5.25'' bays to 3.5'', with 3 being the maximum I presume?

 

[semi-pro waster]

Your specification would be fine apart from the graphics card which is AGP and you need PCI-E or old-style PCI(but you might need a slot for a SATA card).

I'd also get 1 stick of Ram rather than 2 as socket 754 doesn't benefit from dual channel.

 

[Joe42]

You could just use an old p3.

Sorry to hijack the thread...

I want to use an old celeron 433 as a fileserver, using a sata card, would this be fast enough, or would browsing through files become really slow?

I can browse files on it now via the network and its quite slow, would the sata card and a faster harddisk speed it up?

Back on topic, there is no way that a low spec pc like that will need a 500w powersupply. There are few pc's out there now that use 300w, so you should be fine with a 350-400w psu.

 

[Sigg]

Does the old stacker come with one of these 4in3 Device modules included? Or will I have to buy one (or more) separately?
Is it fine to use several of these in the one case, in order to convert the 5.25'' bays to 3.5'', with 3 being the maximum I presume?

The case comes with 1 module so you'd need to buy an extra 2 if you want space for 12 HDDs. I've got 3 in mine & it leaves another 2 5.25" bays free. Each 4in3 module has a 12cm fan, so good for case ventilation but obviously less good for noise
As for quality - yes, they're much better than a cheapo case, whether it's worth the extra money is for you to decide.... For the sort of capacity you're after it sounds like you might need the space. I'd also seriously look at getting a RAID5 controller card for some redundancy. Another thing to remember - the stacker is BIG and heavy!