Private home server

Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
I have just bought 4x 2TB HDD's, which i want to run in raid 1 (mirroring). This I hope will hold all my data and backups for all the computers in the house. All I need this server to do is to be able to feed this data through a gigabit connection as fast as possible, i.e a HD film to my media pc. What sort of specs would the server need?
 
BlownFiveLiter

BlownFiveLiter

Member
Not too much, really. An old P4 with a RAID card would do it, though I suspect you'd want something a little better than that. I have a Supermicro X7SPA-HF running Server 2003 R2 that handles my file server needs just fine. I'm running 3 750GB drives in RAID5, for a total of 1.5TB of storage. It was a bit pricey (though I didn't pay what Newegg wants for it), but with the dual GBE LAN, RAID, and low power usage, it works very well. I had initially purchased it with the intent of using it as a low end webserver, colocating it somewhere. I think using it in its current form is more appropriate.
 
Shlouski

Shlouski

VIP Member
I have a e8200 and 2x 1gb ddr2 ocz gold, but its in an crappy asrock mobo, with no gigabit lan and only 4 sata ports. For a few quid ive seen gigabit lan cards that fit in a pci socket and sata raid cards that go in pci-e x1 socket (which i think will work in pci-e x16 socket this mobo has), but how well do these work? will i lose any speed?


lol your bar code is for www.originalponycar.com
 
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Vipernitrox

Vipernitrox

New Member
I'm not sure if the pci slot will provide enough throughput to reach 1gbit. I don't know what kind of budget your on but getting a decent raid controller can be very expensive. They start at like 100 if you want to get a decent card. In simple raid 1 performance should be ok then.

But you only want to stream hd film? That doesn't require a whole lot. My "simple" raid 5 volume gets a sustained transfer rate of 30MB/s. Which is more then enough for any HD content if come across so far. Why not put them in raid 5? Then you'll have 6tb of effective storage. In stead of 2 x 2tb volumes. This will put a dent in your performance but it doesn't sound like you need it.
 
P

PhotonCrasher

New Member
yeh but if one of those 4 drive dies in raid 5 it puts a dent in all your data where as in raid 1 if one drive fails the data is still mirrored on the other drives, i guess if it is data that is very important go for raid 1 but if its data that is not vital to your every day living then raid 5 would rpobably be better, i guess its just what your storing and how important that stuff is.
 
Vipernitrox

Vipernitrox

New Member
PhotonCrasher said:
yeh but if one of those 4 drive dies in raid 5 it puts a dent in all your data where as in raid 1 if one drive fails the data is still mirrored on the other drives, i guess if it is data that is very important go for raid 1 but if its data that is not vital to your every day living then raid 5 would rpobably be better, i guess its just what your storing and how important that stuff is.
Click to expand...

Shame on you, go read up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID Raid 1 mirrors data on 2 drives. Raid 5 offers data redundancy through parity being written over all drives. So if 1 drive fails in raid 5 you still have all your data. Raid 5 is more cpu intensive though. And in most cases slower then raid 1 (depends on your raid card). It does have a minimum of 3 drives though.
 
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