Private Sile Server

D

DeadBolt

New Member
I am upgrading one of my computers to a file server, I want to use RAID 5 but Im having trouble finding a suitable motherboard.

Specs:
AMD Athlon 64 939 3700+
Gigabyte K8NF-9
3GB RAM
WD 160GB IDE
2x WD 500GB SATA
XFX 6600GT 128MB
Windows XP Pro

As you can see the current motherboard only supports RAID 0/1/0+1
I am looking for a 939 socket board with ddr400, possibly no on-board video, Raid 0/1/0+1/5, 0/1/0+1/5/10, 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD or, 0/1/0+1/5/10 JBOD
 
you're going to have to buy a RAID 5 PCI, or PCI-E controller, or buy a server motherboard.

Also, you want at least 4 disks for a RAID 5
 
Well I dont really want to use RAID 1 cause im not looking to mirror my hdd's

and the cost of raid controllers are way to expensive
 
DeadBolt said:
Well I dont really want to use RAID 1 cause im not looking to mirror my hdd's

and the cost of raid controllers are way to expensive
Click to expand...

That is why you go with RAID 1, that is probably for the best, almost all motherboards support it. If the RAID controllers and server boards are too expensive get 4x 500Gb HDD's and put them in RAID 1. That makes 1Tb(approx) of total storage and you have that 1Tb all backed up.
 
RAID 1 slows down performance because you have to wait for both drives to read/write at the same time.

RAID 5 is a better solution, especialy if you have it set up with RAID 5 + 1 spare drive. If a drive fails you can just toss in a new drive and the RAID rebuilds itself and no data is lost.

If you are setting up a database or something that will be accessed by lots of users RAID 5 with a spare is one of your best bets. RAID 1 is kind of pointless in many ways. 1) it slows performance 2) if any virus, malware, corruption occurs both drives have it since mirroring is done constantly, and 3) and RAID 1 is more of a desktop solution rather than a server side one.

Yes, it is expensive, because one of the hardest and most expensive tasks for anyone to do is back up and store user's data. If this is for a company tell your company that they are going to have to spend some money, and if they complain ask them how much their data is worth to them. You'll spend 6k on a server, then 3k for a tape back up solution on top of that.
 
Well all I am doing is setting a private home file server which 5 computers will access. Its mainly going to contain music, photos, videos, movies, etc.... things along that line
 
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