Home server spec

Deep

Deep

Deep

Soldato
Joined
29 Jul 2004
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Esher
Hi All,

I made a thread previously about a home server spec and luckily I didn't need to buy one at that time, but the time when I need to upgrade my Microserver is creeping up on me.

Essentially I want to buy a PC that will have around 20TB of storage, using Flexraid to use a raid5 esq raid setup.
Will be used for music and full HD blu ray rips which will be streamed to a few computers in my house (not simultaneously)

The only thing I know is the case which will be the Fractal XL R2 which has 8 hard drive spaces and 4 5.25" spaces. 7 of the internal bays will be used for 4 TB drives (eventually) and 1 of the 5.25" will also be a 4TB.
I'll use the one space for a drive which holds the OS so a 1TB drive will be used there.

There wont be anything that needs to be transcoded or anything graphic heavy.

So essentially I need a spec that will power the 9 hard drives (8 x 4TB, 1 x 1TB) and allow me to stream to other computers with no stuttering or anything.

Even though it won't be in a room that is being used I'd still like it to be fairly quiet and cool if that is possible?

Cheers all :)

Oh and I will want 1 internal blu ray reader as well
Can this spec also include the best VFM fans and also all cables I'd need please?
 
If it was me, I'd put everything in a hot swappable rack mountable case, rather than a Fractal. Makes finding dead drives easier should one go. An i3 or AMD APU will have more than enough grunt for what you need. You could go Pentium to save a few quid on the Intel route since nothing needs transcoded. Will you be using a SAS controller? If not you'll need a board with at least 10 SATA ports.
 
I did think about a hot swap rack case, but I'm a complete noob about those.
Can I put a motherboard in them just the same as before?
 
Have you considered just getting another Microserver and serving the disks up using iSCSI to the the flexraid on the first Microserver? You can fit 6x 4TB drives easy in a single Microserver (7 if you are willing to do a bit of cutting) along with a SSD or indeed using linux and the oboard USB port.

By my reckoning that would give you all in with 6 drives per server (4TB*6*2) - (4TB*1) = 44TB (minus the 1 disk for redundancy). you will lose some space due to the overhead of iSCSI but it would give you a still ridiculously large amount of space in the region of 40TB.

Also even just a single server with 6 disks will let you hit that that 20TB number if you didnt fancy the iSCSI.
 
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