BUILD First Server Experience

[penfold1992]

Hello all,

so a bit of an introduction, I am a noob to servers and networking really, I have never had much success with networking as a whole however I have plenty of experience with Windows computing and beginning to become interested in what Linux has to offer.

Purpose:

• Networked storage for multiple access to videos and audio files (playlists on mediamonkey or foobar etc)
• connection to Sonos devices (Soundbar and Play speaker)
• potentially run a small database (for educational purposes)

really the idea is for a basic server solution to centralize our families media.

so I followed the Hardware Recommendations thread and taken advice and here is a proposal build with some comments:

Build:

• Case: Node 304 - £72
• Motherboard: Supermicro X9SCM-F - £175
• Processor: Intel Core i3 3240 - £85
• RAM: Crucial CT102472BD160B 8GB DDR3 - £65 (x2)
• PSU: Corsair CP-9020075-UK CS450M 450W - £53
• Hard-drives: Western Digital 3TB WD30EZRX - £80 (x3)
• USB: SanDisk Cruzer U 32GB Flash drive (already own)

Grand Total: £755

Thoughts:

• The case appears to be nice, but more expensive than cases I would normally buy. I would be looking at a cheaper option potentially around the £50 mark or slightly less however the case seems ok.
  
• I am not sure why the price of the motherboard is so expensive however I am hoping I can get a cheaper motherboard for my solution. This cost does not appear to reflect the cost of other parts of the build and when looking around this forum the buzzword "MORE MEMORY" appears to be thrown around much more than "expensive motherboard" and considering the RAM appears to be much cheaper than the motherboard, I was wondering if there is a better solution.
• I am hoping this RAM is ok. It is on the cheaper side however its not the lowest end I found and its by memory that I have had good dealings with before.
• I am not sure how well that PSU performs and if 450 would just be too low however one bonus was that it is part modular. Another option I found was the be quiet! 500W Straight Power which comes with a bit more power but is not modular at all.
• The hard-drives are a concern, I would be looking at 3 of them to go for a striped/mirror array getting 6TB of usable storage and 3TB of redundancy. I know that 6TB seems small however this is my first server setup so I cautious about going large and failing at the first hurdle here. An option for expansion would be to buy 3 larger HDD's and add them into a second vdev to increase storage size later on.

Please realise that I am a noob that has only been searching around for a little while and hoping to achieve something small with the aims of being able to expand at a later date. For safe storage, it appears that foundations are essential.

 

[Ericloewe]

There's not much of a reason to go with old stuff. Check if an X10 motherboard is a better deal - I have a handy little guide to the ones you'll want to check. That RAM would be OK for them, but the CPU would have to be something like an i3 4130 or 4330.

I'd consider a Seasonic G-450 instead of the Corsair. It shouldn't cost much more, but it's better quality (and has a better warranty, IIRC). Size is more than adequate, with plenty of room for expansion.

Three HDDs - sounds like RAIDZ1, which is not the best of ideas for storing valuable data. If your media includes stuff like family pictures, RAIDZ2 is a much better solution (unfortunately, several people have lost data due to errors during rebuilds of RAIDZ1 pools...). This means at least four drives.

The case is always a very personal choice. Anything from a reputable manufacturer with plenty of airflow over the drives and enough room for your future expansion plans will do.

 

[penfold1992]

There's not much of a reason to go with old stuff. Check if an X10 motherboard is a better deal - I have a handy little guide to the ones you'll want to check. That RAM would be OK for them, but the CPU would have to be something like an i3 4130 or 4330.

it seems that all supermicro motherboards are expensive nothing under £150 that I can find. I feel that over £100 is expensive for a motherboard, ive never build a system with a £100 mobo even gaming rigs have worked smooth with mobos around £100.

I'd consider a Seasonic G-450 instead of the Corsair. It shouldn't cost much more, but it's better quality (and has a better warranty, IIRC). Size is more than adequate, with plenty of room for expansion.

Can't find anything yet but I am looking around for that PSU :) thanks!

Three HDDs - sounds like RAIDZ1, which is not the best of ideas for storing valuable data. If your media includes stuff like family pictures, RAIDZ2 is a much better solution (unfortunately, several people have lost data due to errors during rebuilds of RAIDZ1 pools...). This means at least four drives.

yeah this is a problem... the total of £755 is going to increase when I include postage and packaging and we were originally looking for a solution around the £600 mark so increasing the funds is going to hurt. Additionally, I dont think you can change the pools after creation so I cant leave that to a "upgradable" option. and we certainly dont have any TB HDD's floating around to throw in... I built my PC over a year ago and it was the first time I ever brought 1TB drive and its served me fine... but future-proofing is important especially if I decide to put TV shows on the hdd.

Thanks for your input!

 

[marbus90]

Forgive me for being a muggle, but can you really expand the Node 304 into a full tower chassis on the inside?

If not, the board won't fit. Only ASRock E3C224D2I or E3C226D2I with a i3-4xxx series CPU.

 

[jgreco]

it seems that all supermicro motherboards are expensive nothing under £150 that I can find. I feel that over £100 is expensive for a motherboard, ive never build a system with a £100 mobo even gaming rigs have worked smooth with mobos around £100.

None of the Supermicro boards we suggest are expensive. They are more expensive than the consumer grade crap many PC's are built of, but then again you won't have any troubles with ECC or crappy network cards, and you won't need to buy a CPU with video capabilities that eat more watts. Most workstation, prosumer, and gamer boards are more expensive than the Supermicro boards we recommend.

 

[penfold1992]

We really dont want to spend over £600 if we can help it... is there any way in which was can reduce the cost even if it is a short term solution to reduce cost?
None of us have experience in this area to know how viable a solution is, whether it is the solution we want or if we feel it validated a higher price.
Is there any real way we can get it below £600?

 

[Ericloewe]

You can save a few bucks by going with a Pentium instead of an i3, starting out with 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB and/or drop to a mirror of two HDDs instead of a RAIDZ1 of three (or the ideal RAIDZ2 of four). That's as cheap as you can go and still have a reliable system.

I'll echo jgreco's advice on motherboards: No sub-100 buck motherboard is worth the trouble. I once said they're held together by a prayer, crummy drivers for Windows only and lots of user apathy - and I still believe in those words. My previous server was a WHS 2011 box. Even though it was consumer stuff, finding a motherboard that had something as basic as Intel GbE and six SATA ports required stepping up to a nearly 200 buck motherboard - I paid less for my Supermicro X10SLM+-F this summer. The only things that do get more expensive for servers are Registered/Load-Reduced RAM (no, unbuffered ECC is generally not appreciably more expensive than non-ECC) and Xeon CPUs (which have a ~10% premium over their non-ECC versions, should these exist).

 

[marbus90]

Registered DIMMs are still noth outerworldly, the LRDIMMs add ~10% per GB to the total price.

Also nobody seemed to get the notice, that the Node 304 is an ITX chassis and can't take mATX boards.

 

[mattpitts74]

@penfold1992 Just wondering if you have managed to complete your NAS build suggested above?

Also wondering which combination of motherboard and cpu you ended up with?