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.
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.
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.
Now for the bonus, this workstation also has an embedded multi port SATA II Raid controller.
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.
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.....
Hi, looking forward to your next instalment on this. Do you know when that may be?
ReplyDeleteYour 'requirements' pretty much match those of mine.
I guess where we differ is that I do require full HD streaming and transcoding. Not sure if your proposed dual core idea will work for that. What do you think? I suspect I would need to go for an i3 or i5 setup, but maybe that will be overkill.
Currently I'm streaming from my main machine (an DIY i9 rig) which works just great. But the aim here is to get away from the main machine and to a NAS.
The other difference is that I want to have easy remote access and I think that WHS 2011 (the one in RTM now) will do that easily, whereas WHS 2008 is perhaps a bit more clunky. But, to be fair, I have not had direct expeience with WHS 2008.
Anyway, look forward to your actual experiences once you have your new NAS up and running.
Edward