Posted: 3/2/2007 6:03:23 AM EDT
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So it's my birthday... So... This year I want a server. Building from the ground up. sort of. I have Win 2000 pro and some hard drives... I'm planing on getting more hard drives, a case, power supply and a mother board. I'm planing on raiding the Hard drives... only thing is I've never done that. As far as I know raiding the Hard drives makes them act like 1 drive and gives you some redundancy if one of the drives fails. So basically can someone give me a basic how to on Raid? Am I going to need a Raid controller or will the mother board most likely be sufficient? I may have up to 6 drives connected. |
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while some what helpful... it said basically what I already know and did not answer my question... I've connected Hard drives before but never with raid. Is there anything fundamentally different about it. I mean do you even use jumpers in a raid set up? What do you set as the primary drive? This is the type of thing I need answered. |
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You are asking some rather extravagant questions. I am willing to answer any questions you have about building a server. I will also build, set up, and configure servers for you if you wish. This includes expertise and problem avoidance on reliability, fault tolerance, data backup routines, bottleneck avoidance, data throughput issues, performance issues & analysis, security issues, hardware & software configuration, networking, etc. My normal rate is $125 per hour. Other than that, Google is your friend. |
 It is kind of a reaching questin for GD. OP, head to the Urban Commandos forum. They are really helpful in general, and you have many people there with billing rates that would shock you who will nonetheless give you some answers without added jackassery. |
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Master_of_Orion - Happy Birthday! It's great that you are taking an interest in this. The first question I would ask is what do you plan to use the server for? To do RAID you need a disk controller that supports it. ETA The rock-bottom minimum RAID configuration is a pair of mirrored (RAID level The least expensive way to get into higher RAID levels is probably to use SATA drives and a SATA RAID controller. Servers for commercial use are still normally built with SCSI drives, which are more reliable and a lot more expensive. If disk performance is important, e.g. you plan to manipulate large media files or run a database server, either SATA or RAID directly attached to your computer is good. If you just need a lot of storage that's redundant, and disk I/O speed is not important, a Buffalo Terrastation or similar is a good way to go. It's basically RAID in a box, preconfigured. (Today's Fry's Electronics ad has several interesting choices including wireless ones.) That kind of device can serve either as direct attach storage for a single computer, or (depending on the model) it can be configured as a Network-Attached Storage device (NAS). At the high end are Storage-Area Networks (SANs). Those cost shitloads of money. They're great for serving large databases. My employer uses all of the above and much more. We are deploying Web servers on Hewlett-Packard blade servers with mirrored IDE drives. Reliability has been less than I would like, but that may have a lot to do with heat problems. Other considerations are how much processing power you'll need, the bus speed, amount of memory you need, etc. |
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I want a multi teribyte server to... Store my riped dvds and other media that I'll then be streaming to my TV... It will be open to select people on campus who will be able to upload and download when ever they wish. Mainly it'll be storing my videos and pictures and some text files... I want the redundancy because this will most likely be the only copy's of these files I have... so the average use will be... I'm on campus with my laptop. I want to watch an episode of my favorite show. log in to the server.... download.... watch. |
I think californiakid meant to say RAID1. RAID0 = multiple drives with the data striped across all drives. slightly faster than single disk or raid 5s but probably not worth the risk. The risk? If one drive is a RAID0 goes, they ALL go. (you lose all your data not just one disk) RAID1= mirrored drives. Data is written to two drives simultaneously. If one drive fails, the other drive is an exact copy. This is the cheapest way to get into a home backup / redundancy situation cause the controller is built into many boards already. RAID5 = multiple drives with parity built into all the drives. If one fails, you still get your data although at degraded speeds due to having to read the data out of parity. RAID 3 = largely out of use. Basically three drives with parity on one drive. You need to be more specific as to what you want to do with it. is this to back up files or to serve video files to your home network or what? What's your budget? Check google for "linux NAS" and see how to build a cheap NAS unit for about 500 bucks. If you already have parts it'd be cheaper. |
I believe I answered that question... I don't know how to be more specific... Than video stored on server-- only copy-- redundancey-- so I don't lose it-- uplaoding and downloading on a college campus-- My budget is about 1-1.5 k |
That's gonna be ROUGH. Multi-terabyte on that budget???? 1. Redundancy - RAID should never be used in lieu of a solid backup. Especially CHEAP raid - which is what you will be doing. RAID is well proven technology - but is only there to save you from a short term hardware failure. I cant tell you the number of times I have been called in after someone had a disk failure on a raid array.... then in the method of replacing it - screwed something up and lost the entire array. Never assume that this will be foolproof. 2. 500GB sata drives are as low as $160. You said multi-terabyte - so that assumes at least 4 of those drives..... which is typical for a ~$300 RAID5 sata card. However, with RAID5 - you lose one drive for parity - so we are down to 1.5TB. An 8 port version of SATA card will run you around $450. So - lets go with that... and assuming 2TB (multi) are required per your post, we need 5 drives. So that is ~ $1300 just for the drives and controller card. Mixing drive speed/type/size drastically degrades performance on most cards, reduces the total size of the array, and impairs the ability for the parity to even work as planned, in the event of a failure. Maxing out your $1500 budget - we now have $200 to spend on motherboard, case, memory, CPU, PS, etc.... Good luck!!!! |
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Now - if you wanna go CHEAP - get a copy of server.... and do a software raid. You will be limited to your smallest drive size, however, so pick that appropriately. I'd just go look at some the the SNAP/external USB drives, plug them im, share them, and be done with it. If you have the space - set up backup schedules where they each backup to each other. |
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FYI, RAID is not a backup. If you rely on RAID without any other backup, you will lose everything eventually. Since you are making it kind of public, other people might find a way to delete files, some new virus could be more destructive, you could have a power outage/issue that corrupts the data. Without another layer of backup, you would have to recreate all the data from scratch. I'm not saying that RAID is a bad thing, but it doesn't really work in the situation you are describing. You connect the drives normally, but you will have to set up the RAID the in BIOS (either onboard, or if you get a regular card, it will have its own BIOS). In the BIOS you set up what kind of RAID you want, and the drives you want in the array. This will then allow windows to see the array as one drive, not all the members of the array. You can also use software raid, but it has its learning curve and limitations as well. With consumer RAID, you might not be notified when a drive fails. If you are, you need to be able to bring the server down, replace the failed drive, bring it back up, and know how to initiate a rebuild. Just being able to set it up is only 25% of the work. |
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Oh - by the way - most power supplies - even good ones, will burn up running 4 drives or more. They arent designed for that level of continuous useage. You can buy bigger power supplies - but dont go just on wattage - you GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. You should expect to budget $100 for the power supply, especially of you are thinking 5 drives or more. Or you will need to purchase an external SATA chassis with its own power supply. Cooling - another factor. Cases are not designed for thermals with two drives in most cases. Measuring your internal temps - you will be above the safety region with more than two drives. Heat KILLS drives..... keeping them cool is paramount. This is why real servers have several, very high RPM drives, and generate a LOT of thermal heat, and noise. Keep this in mind - especially if you are thinking you will put this monster in a dorm room. If you use a typical case - you will need to add several cooling fans on the front and the rear, further impacting your power supply problem. 
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You'll want to go with RAID 5 (or RAID 6) with a real hardware RAID controller, like Adaptec or 3Ware. You can do RAID 5 in software, but the performance will be terrible if you get too much I/O going on. One big consideration will be buying a case that has hot-swappable bays, and enough bays. Be ready to spend a few bucks. Use a name-brand like Antec or Supermicro. Someone mentioned backups. When you have terabytes of data, backups become a real problem... there is no media big enough, or enough bandwidth to easily move that much info around. One way to address that is to use a real server, like an HP Proliant. If a disk fails, the system can take it off-line, bring a hot spare on-line, and then page you  Look on eBay or craigslist for older systems.
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Exactly right. I just saved the typing by suggesting he go with a Supermicro or Antec chassis instead of the corner PC shop special
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Get yourself a copy of Windows Server 2003 and you can run a software based RAID 5 array on any PC. Just for shits and giggles I set up a S2K server on an old Pentium 66 pc with 64 mb of RAM and 4 ide drives (with 3 configured as RAID 5). It wasn't a screamer but it worked. I have been running a S2K file server for the past 3 years on a HP desktop PC (1.6 ghz processor and 1.5 GB Ram) that has an old Promise ATA 66 card and seven 40 GB IDE drives. It works like a champ.....you just have to make sure it gets good ventilation. I also have an old Dell Poweredge 4300 (P III 500 mhz) server that runs S2K and has a hardware based RAID 5 array with six 72 GB SCSI disks. I literally plucked this machine from the trash. It had one processor, 512 mb RAM and no harddrives but I was able to get new OEM replacements online for about $50.00 a piece. You can find working servers like this (among others) online for $200 to $300 bucks these days. |
And when a user deletes a folder shared over SMB, how will that super fancy HP fix it? Page you and say "you don't have any backups for that do you?" |
A StorageTek/Sun T10000 tape will hold 500GB uncompressed. Although the drive alone will run you around 60K. |
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And another option is solaris ZFS with snapshots, but its learning curve was not meant for regular folks. Basically if you want to be able to survive a had drive failing, cheap raid will work. Beyond that, it depends on how much you value the data, and the cost of recreating it vs backing it up. |
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hmm... so what would an off the self 1 TB server cost me... with the option to expand to 2 TB? Would it be cheaper and easier to just buy a pre built server? I'm thinking I'll probably use a mother board I already have. I think I have 2 300 GB drives... So I'd be getting 2 500 GB drives: say $400 A case: say $ 100-150 A power supply: say $ 100-150 A Raid controller: How much are these? and I have 3 - 4 other HDs of lesser capacity that I was thinking of tossing in there.... My situation is ... 3 older desktops and a nice new laptop... I want to consolidate the storage I have in the desktops into one server to serve my laptops storage needs. I'd like to be able to survive a HD failure but the data with the exception of the pictures... is mostly replaceable... |
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Hardware: (3) supermicro 5 SATA drive cages, $120 each (16) 400GB SATA drives (or whatever's cheapest per gigabyte that day) I like seagate (5 yr. warranty) and I paid about $100 shipped last time I bought some. case that will accommodate 9 half-height 5 1/4" devices (to hold SATA cages), example is Enlight EN-8990 ($80) (3 or 4) 4 port SATA cards (may be able to use motherboard SATA ports) ($20 each) Motherboard with onboard video and ethernet ($100?) 500W power supply, 512MB of ram (or more), modest CPU ($300) CD-ROM drive for install. Software: http://www.openfiler.com/ This is open source, linux-based software that will give you a web-based gui interface to set up the software RAID, partition chunks of it up and share it amongst your network (using windows CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, WebDAV, it's actually pretty easy to use) RAID 5 14 of those drives, keep one for a hot spare and one for a cold (on the shelf) spare. That's about 5 TB of online storage. You can do this for less than $3K. The RAID 5 will protect you against data loss due to a single drive failure. The hot spare will come on line and replace the failed drive. You will get an email informing you that a drive has failed, you swap the failed drive with the cold spare, return the failed drive for warranty replacement (I like seagates because they have a 5 year warranty, no questions asked and a fast turn-around time.) If you want to get fancier, you can look at hardware raid cards ( $800+ option), or a case with built-in SATA backplane (much more expensive than your own $80 case plus the SATA drive cages; supermicro makes a 15 bay 3U case which is $750, including a triple redundant 760W power supply. Sure are nice though.) Remember this RAID5 solution protects only against a single drive failure; two drives fail, and your data is toast. If you erase something accidentally, it's toast. Or if somebody steals the whole thing--toast. A RAID6 config will protect against 2 drives failing, at the cost of a reduction in total capacity (and on the third drive failure--data is toast.). A tape drive and enough media for a backup rotation (and 'free' software) for a tape backup solution would run around $2k. Tape backup can save you from those "whoops" moments and mysteriously corrupted RAID sets. Tapes can also be taken off-site or locked in a fire safe for more physical security. |
You might look at the Buffalo Terastation units, plug 'em in and they work. See here Certainly easier, but more expensive per gigabyte (and less flexible/expandable) You can always add additional units as your needs increase, however.
If you use a bunch of assorted size hard drives, that complicates the RAID configuration. Most hardware controllers will simply use the size of the smallest drive and the "extra" space on the bigger drives will go to waste. Linux can utilize the "leftover spaces" (what can't linux do?) but that's a little bit advanced to configure and maintain. If you forgo redundancy you can string any number of drives of any size into one logical set... but hard drives are like light bulbs, they will go out eventually-- so I would recommend redundancy. |
??? We're talking about the OPs desire for a file-sharing server, not a corporate solution with a six-figure budget. If you have a backup solution that'll work with terabytes of data, that's reliable, and can be bought on a home hobbyist's budget, I'm all ears. |
I would not use odd parts you have lying around unless you've done this several times already, or are on a tight budget and don't mind constantly monkeying around with this thing. Check out www.gopcn.com You can "build" a server on-line, and see what the price comes out to for various options. |
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I currently have 3 Desktops... 2 are set up as servers... but they only have one drive in them each. I'm using win xp home on one and win 2000 pro on the other.... I'll most likely use the 2000 pro one and mother board. I guess I'll have to get 3 500 gbs and maybe set up 2 arrays so I can make use of the 300 gb drives I have lying around. I don't really care all that much about the speed of the read/write... I don't need blindingly fast... All I need is functional. I'll be getting on a plane shortly so I'll check in again much later... |
single LTO2 tape drive (ebay, $1,000) (I saw a nice LTO2 changer with 8 slots sell for $2k on ebay!) 40 LTO2 media, $25 each = $1,000 40*400GB (compressed) = 16 TB of storage, enough for 2 full backups and some incrementals. Throw in a little for a SCSI card, cable, possibly an enclosure for the drive Use Bacula or Amanda (or even tar) for backup software. Orion: As to where the 5TB figure came from, that was my 15x400GB drive configure (approx $3K) that I mentioned in a prior post. Seems like that is more storage than you're interested in. You could scale that back considerably to meet your present needs. Lot of people would just as soon forgo the purchase of the tape drive/tapes and buy a second system NAS system of similar capacity as a "backup". Personally I only have a few gigs of "irreplaceable" data (photos, tax returns). I burn a DVD once in a while. The rest of the "bulk" data (DVD rips for the video-on-demand system, recorded TV shows that I'll never get around to watching, etc.) you might just want to take your chances. |
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Here's a completely different solution, based on your need to allow upload/downloads and get it lots of RAID-5 storage on the cheap. Get a "Buffalo Tera-Station" or similar Network Attached Storage device. It's small, pretty much plug-n-play, quite, reliable and doesn't put off a lot of heat. We use a 1tb model in the office as a shared drive it's been cruising along for a year or so with no issues. You can check them out here. The 1-TB model is $499.00 the 2-TB model is $899.00. |
Much wiser investment.... of course - these models dont come with redundancy - they are typically RAID0 or spanned volumes. However, some allow you to reconfigure as RAID1, but you cut storage in half. |
well I went and bought me some stuff... made some mistakes... returned stuff... bought new stuff... realized the new stuff has more than I expected and I can return some more stuff...  As it stands... I have a new case new mother board new processor new 1gb ram 4 new 500 gb Sata HDs 1 old 300 gb IDE HD... boot drive 1 old DVD drive 1 new 600 W power source that I need to return and get a higher Wattage 1 new Raid controller that I can return because the mother board has raid 5 capability built in. So my question right now is what Wattage PS do you guys think I need? The mother board recommends 600w at a minimum and I've already confirmed that it isn't enough. going with Linux Ubuntu for the OS I was close to a successful power up today but the 600w PS just wasn't up to the task. |
What does this mean exactly? What was the issue?
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hit the power switch... fans... start kicking in then processor bios appears on screen HDs start sucking power bios disappears... power off |
... good for you ... It seems my mother board, 5 HDDs, 1 DVD, and 6 chassis fans are some what more power hungry than yours |
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i guess when someone says "server" i don't conjure up an image of an old home PC running winXP home you can do a "server" cheap with old parts or you can do a real server right with good server parts. dell sometimes runs decent deals. if you want to re-purpose an old desktop PC for file server work i can reccomend "clark connect", a linux OS that used a web-based interface for really simple config, and it is optimized for this sort of work |
| I have 3 HDD+DVD in my Athlon (Home) server, with a 300W power supply and have no issues except for noise due to fans. I would do what the other guy said; start small and troubleshoot your problem, changing out power supply because the thing won't boot is not the best option. Start it with one drive (IDE), see if it works, keep adding pieces until it fails. Don't try it with the RAID card even in there. I had a box that would not boot because of incompatabilities between the mobo chipset and a SCSI controller card. |
Incorrect. Yours dont necessarily draw more power. A QUALITY 550W rate supply will VASTLY outperform a cheaper 600W "rated" supply. As I said - you get what you pay for... and you went cheap. |
I've learned my lesson about cheap power supply's . Last cheap one I had in my desktop gave me fits , low voltages voltage spikes ect. causing lockups and data corruption , went with a GOOD 500w power supply and everything been great. |