help and advice needed for first server build

[silent]

hi

i am about to start building my server to replace my nas drives and for future storage.

so far i have these parts:

fractal design R3
antec 520 wt eco psu
120 gig sandisc extreme sata 2 SSD drive - may replace with a lower 60 gig kingston drive SSD
2 TB WD sata 2 hdd
1 tb WD10ears 64meg HDD
1 tb WD10EADS 32 meg drive
1.5 tb samsung spinpoint
1 tb seagate baracuda hdd
500 gig WD drive - may leave it out
4 gig of corsair ram - may go 8 gig

i have the following components i could use but i doubt there gonna be good enough:

sempron 145 processor
ASUS M5A78L-M LX MoBo v2

i want a good fast server with plenty of sata ports on the mobo hence i doubt that one is good enough and gigabit ethernet.

i currently have a netgear gigabit router, 2 solwise gigabit homeplugs and a 5 port gigabit switch in the lounge which connects xbox and ps3 and i will connect a humax box and new amp possibly. i want it to run a epson wireless printer to but wired.

should i go for a i3 processor and do i need sata cards etc.

i don;t want to spend a fortune but will sell my 500 gig buffalo NAS and zyzel nas box to raise funds. i want it quiet to and power consumption low. i want the ps3 to see it, may sell my xbox 360 as don't use it for funds to. i also have some old baseunits to raise a wee bit more and laptop to sell.

should i go WHS or unraid as happy to have all drives running seperate but if performance can be increased by raiding a couple of drives then so be it?

 

[jaybee]

Well I'm biast and recommend unraid. I'm still in the process of sorting my unraid box myself in terms of setup and actually using/configuring it. Are you aware where unraid is in it's road map and the history of it and what it's all about?
The forums are good there.

Your hardware you already have will be fine and you would be mad not using it to be honest. A waste of cash just buying for the sake of it being a new server. The sempron you might want to swap to something more powerful so it can transcode on the fly for PS3MS streaming of mkv files. But otherwise you only need moderate spec to run unraid, that's the whole point. Why would you think the mobo is not good enough? It's fine. It has what appear to be 6 sata ports, plus it has a 16x PCI-e slot, and 2 x1 slots, plus a PCI slot. That could support more than the pro licence allows using add on cards (about 20 drives I recall). The limit would be the case before the board?

The only thing to be aware of with that board, is that it uses the same (very popular) realtek 8111e gigabit lan as found on many (including my own) motherboards. It has been known to be problematic under load. However, the author of unraid knows about the problem and has developed builds with specific drivers that are stable with this LAN. A way to never have this problem and know that it will always work and have solid performance, is to buy and add on Gigabit LAN card from Intel. You could use a PCI one to save your PCI-e slots for later add on cards if it grows and you want to add more drives, as PCI gigabit cards are fine if you just keep those on the PCI bus and it will not bottleneck it.

In terms of drives. Unraid as you probably know is flexible, and again it would probably pay to use your current drives since the cost of HDD still hasn't come back down since the floods. I would use your 2TB drive as your parity drive, because arrays in unraid are limited to using hard disk drive sizes of a maximum size only up to the size of the parity drive. So this would allow you to use 2TB drives into the future as you purchase more.

The PSU will be fine, until you start to have so many drives that spinning them all up on server startup will choke it and it won't have enough. Single rails with high rating are best for this I believe. I would just again use it till it becomes a problem. It might work with 10+ drives.

4gb of ram is plenty, depending on what other tasks you give the unraid box to do, but even with torrent clients running and other plugins, 4gb is honestly fine. I was going to run with 2gb, but since 4gb was cheap I bought that.

So in conclusion, sell up your NAS, go unraid and just use/recycle all your stuff which is totally fine spec wise. Almost too much in fact. People run unraid boxes with old Pentium 4s etc.

Hope this helps.

 

[silent]

cheers thats great.

i'll go with my present gear and see how it fares. is the ssd the boot drive and the 2tb the parity? it currently has lots of stuff on it that i'll need to back up first.

 

[jaybee]

With Unraid you run the OS from a USB drive (for licencing reasons mainly being tied to a serial of the USB). Most people tend to use internal USB headers to plug a USB drive pretty much directly onto the motherboard via an adapter (so the drive cannot be pulled from the machine). The USB drive only needs to be small but to accomodate future packages/plugins etc, might I suggest going with something like an 8gb maybe. If you have USB3 on your board buy a USB3 drive and plug it into that for slightly faster boot.

The SSD drive you have...these are best used as - what are refered to in unraid as - a cache drive. That's if you want to use a cache drive at all. Because of the way unraid is designed it will never be ultra fast to write to the array in real time, as parity calculations have to be done. So typically write speeds tend to be 20-40mbps.
However, if you chose to run a cache drive as a kind of buffer (temporary space) then when you write to the array, you can achieve write speeds limited by the speed of your network rather than the write speed bottlenecked by calculating parity. Typically, people tend to use the fastest disks they have for cache drives. Since SSDs have come down in price, these are becoming popular since they have write speeds that exceed 125MB/s (theoretical maximum speed of gigabit ethernet) so that the bottleneck is never the disk.

Disadvantage of using a cache drive is that you are not protected with parity until your unraid server performs it's scheduled task of copying files from the cache drive onto the array "properly". So it basically just delays the proper write to the array until later, often scheduled for say 3am for some people.
You must ensure though, that the cache drive has enough space to accomodate a) your largest continuous file size you are likely to ever write (say a large backup image) and/or b) your daily largest amount of data you would ever be likely to queue up. Think of torrents and a day downloading since the last completion of clearing cache drive....could this ever exceed 60gb (size of SSD you are proposing to use as cache).

Anyway get over to the unraid forums and check it out.

 

[silent]

i have got a 8 gig usb stick expecially for this as was considering un-raid. i will view the forums and latest build and start building tomorrow night

i will use a cache drive i think but can it be used with the parity drive?