File Server/Photoshop Workstation

[PiKe]

How does this look?

Raid 5 System using 4 drives with 1 hot spare mounted in an internal drive bay, Backups will be done using Nero BackItUp onto external hard drives.
Item Description Quantity Price Ex. Vat Price Inc. VAT
Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II 7200RPM 16MB Cache - OEM 5 £323.35 £379.94
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 Socket 775 Onboard Audio SATA ATX 1 £91.54 £107.56
Antec Atlas Black Server Case - With 550W Truepower 2 PSU 1 £77.39 £90.93
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86ghz Socket 775 FSB800 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor 1 £62.27 £73.17
Corsair 1GB DDR2-6400 128Mx64 non-ECC 240 DIMM unbuffered 5-5-5-12 Heat Spreader Lifetime Warranty (CM2X1024-6400 ) 1 £45.45 £53.40
Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2B (Release 2) x32bit OEM 1PK CD 1 £73.29 £86.12
SATA Black HDD Caddy 4 £112.17 £135.96
MSI NX7100GS-TD128E 512MB DDR2 DVI VGA HDTV Out PCI-E Graphics Card 1 £18.24 £33.99

Total £803.70 £961.07

 

[BillytheImpaler]

The RAM is overkill if you're not overclocking. How about this instead?:
Corsair 1GB DDR2 Value Select PC4200 Dual Channel Kit (2x512MB) (VS1GBKIT533D2)

 

[PiKe]

Just thought may as well utilise full bandwidth of memory bus. It's only £45 anyway.

Would this spec be far too overkill for purely a fileserver/email server? Does it need to be used as a photoshop machine aswell to be justified?

Current photoshop machine is a socket a 2800+ with 768mb ram and pata hdd.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

A file/email server for a home would run just fine on a PII 450 with 128 MiB RAM. So yes, I'd say you'd have to use it for something else.

 

[PiKe]

Isn't for home

It's for a SOHO.

 

[lsg1r]

OK personally I think photoshop really needs 2GB of ram as a minimum and I would also have 2 hard drives so photoshop/other programs can use the second drive as its scratch disk.

As a completely random suggestion

Why dont you convert the old photoshop machine, ie the xp 2800+ into the mail/file server and buy a new photoshop machine

 

[PiKe]

OK personally I think photoshop really needs 2GB of ram as a minimum and I would also have 2 hard drives so photoshop/other programs can use the second drive as its scratch disk.

As a completely random suggestion

Why dont you convert the old photoshop machine, ie the xp 2800+ into the mail/file server and buy a new photoshop machine

Is 5 hard drives in raid 5 not enough then?

 

[lay-z-boy]

Is 5 hard drives in raid 5 not enough then?

In that case look into a pci-e raid controller that gives the option of raid 5, some add-in cache would go down well too.

Cost quite a bit though to get ones with a decent hardware XOR engine.

 

[lsg1r]

Is 5 hard drives in raid 5 not enough then?

missed that bit but I'd still have a second drive