My New Home Server, hardware selection

OK

So I know pretty much what I want this box to do and have some basic idea about the sort of hardware I should push into service to make it all work.

As RAID support is a critical piece of this puzzle, for the hardware I started at the disks and worked out from there. I want this server to be nice and quick and to run RAID 5 so I am going to need 3 or more matched hard drives. Searching around, I found a source of SATA II RAID cages in the US at http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_cages_enclosures/. They had a range of 3 4 and 5 drive bays.

The one that tickled me was the ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B 5-in-3 SATA-II Cage.

This supported 5 X 3.5 inch SATA II drives vertically in 3 X 5.25" drive bays. it also had 1 for 1 SATA II connectors on the back and good cooling. Whilst PC Pitstops prices are OK (I paid US$125), their international shipping is off the dial so I would look closer to home for this cage. The only issue with this cage in reviews I have seen is that the latches are a "bit goofy" and may vibrate but I will sort that once the system is built.

There are other similar cages on Amazon that may be cheaper for shipping etc.

OK so I now need a server chassis that has 3 free 5.25" drive bays and I also need 5 hard drives to fill the cage.

Lets look at the disks first. I could push the boat out here and and stuff it full of 2tb drives giving me (after parity) 8tb of space. Sure I could do this, but I don't think I will ever fill that amount of storage, I am not building a huge library of video or storing data from the Large Hadron Collider. Good 2tb drives are also at the top end of pricing due to there desirability.  At the time of writing, a 2TB drive is going for around £60-£70 on Amazon. I will aim for 4tb and put in 5 X 1tb drives. Looking at Amazon I found the following Samsung drives and got them for £36.99 each.

 F3 HD103SJ 1TB internal Hard Drive SATAII 32MB Cache 7200RPM

They are fast, get good reviews and are just over half the price of the 2tb drives.






OK, so I have the cage and the drives so now to the PC / Server.

What I need is a chassis that can free up 3 5.25 drive bays. What I also need is a Raid controller but more on that later.

I have in the past, gone out and purchased an empty case and built from the ground up, so this would be an option however it may be cheaper to buy a fully built PC and just modify it. The PC I select or built will have to be recent technology as I want lots of funky IO and any of the newer power saving features to keep the consumption low. I also want expansion slots so that I can add cards in the future to add NICs or storage adaptors etc.

I started off first trawling Ebay for inspiration looking for something that fitted the ready built criteria and immediately struck gold.

I found a clearance company selling refurbished HP XW4600 workstations. These workstations are built like tanks, have an Intel Core2 duo 2.8ghz CPU lots of IO and if I remove the CD Rom, three spare 5.25 drive bays. It also has Firewire and an eSata port to boot! It also has some fancy Eco PSU with dynamic power factor correction.

Now for the bonus, this workstation also has an embedded multi port SATA II Raid controller.

As I said, it has loads of I/O so I have lots of ports, even an old school LPD and 232 port and the USB ports are all USB2.

Now for the really good bit, I got it for £206 plus 6£ postage!! Bargain..

As I had said in the previous post, I had decided to run Windows Home Server so this is the last purchase. Microsoft do not sell WHS as a retail product, it is only bundled with new hardware so I turned to Ebay again.

I found a genuine seal boxed copy of WHS on Ebay for just under £80. I know I will not get support (and I don't really need it), but it's fully licensed so it should be good to go.

To wrap up the hardware purchases, I added a Trust 1300 UPS to keep the machine protected. These units are cheap and seem to work very well. I have had one downstairs for 2 years and it has not missed a beat.








So that's all the hardware done. All up Excluding the UPS, I have spent £607 and should have a beast of a server built on a solid hardware platform to keep the media flowing for years to come.

Next, What happened next during the build

Stay Tuned.....

It's Time for a new Home Server

So after over 10 years of non stop operation (baring relocation and upgrades) it's finally time to move my home server to a new platform and join the rush to the integrated home IT solution.

My current workhorse is a Fedora server running on a generic reasonably fast motherboard with a 3ware IDE raid controller and 3 140gb drives in raid 5. The current drives have been running continuously for nearly 7 years and give my around 280gb of usable storage. The server is also my Linux play toy running various scripts and enduring my tinkering it's even had a Signiant agent installed on it as part of a proof of concept test for work. Overall, it's been a solid platform, even surviving the 3 months of relocation from Hong Kong to the UK and a stint at sea in a container.

So it's time to move on and look at what else is out there and where I can go taking my home IT infrastructure "to the next level". The House itself is ready. When it was built, it had multiple cat 5E installed to pretty much every room with a central RG45 patch bay in the study. It's a little OTT, some rooms have 3 pairs of cables and 3 RF cables too (I will get around to terminating them one day)




So what do I want my new server to provide?

1. It has to be fast enough to stream video (SD for sure, HD would be nice)
2. It has to be resilient so we are talking hardware raid for both the storage and the OS (raid 5 please)
3. I want all that DLNA has to offer, (I currently have a Roku soundbridge and a DLNA friendly Bluray) 
4. I need it to be able to manage my backups to Amazon S3
5. It has to be somewhere around 4TB usable storage but with the option to expand
6. It has to be expandable with lots of ports of all sorts
7. It has to have a 3rd party community to create plug ins and hacks to keep me tinkering.

This is not too much to ask is it?

So what is out there? Currently based on cruising the net there are basically three ways to go.

1. Builds a server and stick on linux and lots of other modules to make it work for me (what I have already)
2. Buy a ready to go box such as a Lacie Big5 or Netgear ReadyNAS with a customised version of a unixish OS and stuff it full of disks (I did this too but the hardware broke)
3. Buy or build a server and run Microsoft Home Server

 oops, did I forget "buy a Mac", I would rather sniff a Yak's armpit.

Looking at the list of options above, I have really done option 1 and 2 already and while option 1 could deliver everything I want with a lot of fiddling with software, I have really done this already and want to try something different. Option 2 would make me lock this server into a single manufacturers solution  and would not give me the ability to add option cards or upgrade the disk controller etc. This server would not be able to grow and expand due to it's fixed hardware configuration. I would also be locked into to an extent to the servers community for new software modules and feature support.

The last option, and the one that I will go for is to run a Microsoft Home Server system, but opt to build the hardware for it to run on.

Whilst it may seem that I am selling out my Linux roots, after looking around, this server has massive appeal in that it seems to be at the front end of the connected home solution, supporting all sorts of cool features (some I didn't even think of) and has a good aftermarket 3rd party community building all sorts of interesting plugins.

I could actually buy a server ready to go such as one of the Lacie Big5 models, the Acer H310 of the HP Media Vault range (soon to be discontinued) but there is one big issue. WHS version one uses a module called the Disk Extender. this allows the WHS server to take all available hard drives and build an aggregate pool of storage (sort of a Raid 0). As with Raid 0, this storage pool in its basic form has no resilience and fails to meet one of my primary requirements. The disk extender does allow you to replicate designated folders across different physical drives however, providing a sort of Raid 1 at a folder level. This would protect your data but to protect all you data, you would loose 50% of your usable disk capacity. Another issue for me is that it seems you cannot use this folder replication feature to protect the OS partition, so your boot drive would remain unprotected.

From my research, none of the WHS server in a box solutions offered hardware raid. Forum traffic however has indicated that WHS will run on top of hardware raid so this is an option if I build my own.

So this is my mission! Build a nice and expandable server with hardware raid and run WHS.

In my next post will cover my hardware purchases