Hardware suggestions for a simple file server

[d.thomas90]

OK so I'm planning out a build that will keep growing as I can add more HDDs. Right now I have 5 2TB drives and want to put these into a Norco 4224. This will give me a good base to expand upon. My questions have to do with which RAID/Controller cards should I be considering?

The use will be to store media (mostly larger HD movies). I could then pull up the files and watch them from another computer/laptop. I also want to implement redundancy (be it RAID 1 or some sort of drive syncing every X hours). The build right now looks like this:

(Case) Norco 4224
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

(Mobo) Asus 1155 5 PCI Slots
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131721R

(CPU) Sandy Bridge Dual-Core 2.6 GHz
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116399

(RAM) Kingston 4GB (2GB x 2) DDR3 1066 ECC Unbuffered
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139365

(PSU) FSP 700W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817104094

(RAID Card) SYBA PCI/SATA II x4
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124028

(HDD)
I have 4 2TB WD Greens, 1 2TB Hitachi... I plan to buy WD 2TB Blacks in the future tho (I think)

How does this build look? Will I be able to access 2 HD files at once?

Thanks
Doug

 

[matthewowen01]

How does this build look?

bad.

Will I be able to access 2 HD files at once?

probably not.

Don't use PCI cards they all share the same tiny bus. go with a board with a few pcie slots and populate them with a decent controller. i have a LSI Internal SATA/SAS SAS3081E-R 3Gb/s PCI-Express card (link below) you could get 3 and populate all of your bays. speaking of which, your case's bays do not support sata connectors. they use SFF-8087 Mini SAS connectors. you'll either need converters if you get use normal sata cards or the native output of the card i recommend (does not come with cables)

get more memory, 8 GB or preferable 16 GB if you're seriously going to use 24 drives.

MB:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128495

Card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118100

Cable:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133034

 

[jgreco]

Don't use PCI cards they all share the same tiny bus.

If you're buying a new board, that's probably true. On the other hand, there are plenty of us who recycle older gear, and that is most emphatically false as a general statement. Most of the older server-class chipsets allowed for multiple PCI busses, and so many of us bought them back when we needed to move insane amounts of data years ago. These boards will have no problems doing trivial tasks such as serving up files. But if you're buying new - yes, avoid older PCI stuff unless you know what you're doing or don't mind some limits.

 

[d.thomas90]

OK thanks for the suggestions.... My friend is trying to get me to use older stuff (LGA 775, PCI and cheap RAID cards). Figured if I'm going to do it, do it right. I've updated the parts and even tho it is a bit more expensive I think it is probably a much more robust combination.

(Case) Norco 4224
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038

(Mobo) Gigabyte 1155
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128495

(CPU) Intel i3-2100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115078

(RAM) G.Skill 8GB (4GB x 2)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231311

(PSU) Corsair 750W
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021

(RAID Card) LSI 9211-8i
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118113

(Cables) C-SFF8087-D SFF-8087 to SFF-8087
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133034

The reason for the more expensive RAID card is after thinking about it, having support for 3TB would be nice and let me get the most out of the case. If anyone knows of a cheaper solution please let me know. And also not sure if the change in RAID cards from what matthewowen01 suggested effects the type of SAS cable I need.

Also, probably a dumb question but since I want to watch HD movies, does the type of GPU I have in this matter? Or is it just Read performance of the HDDs?

 

[jgreco]

Quite frankly, you probably need to quantify how important it is to actually move stuff rapidly. Most vaguely modern stuff has more than enough CPU to move bits quickly. I have some old Opteron 240EE storage servers with 3Ware 9550's in them that can "only" read data off the disks at 120MBytes/sec or so, but the speed at which that gets served over the network varies quite a bit with protocol and all that. The real problem is that you can't have FreeNAS do anything like ZFS compression because it causes the system to pause while processing the compression for seconds at a time, and that's not real hot, but basically it can still serve up files as fast as any "small NAS" product I've seen on the market, and it's a ton more flexible.

Serving up content to your network doesn't require a GPU. It won't help you since it isn't used.

 

[ProtoSD]

That 750W power supply is overkill too. I have a 120W power supply (see specs below), and even that is more than I use. Something 300-400W is probably more reasonable.

 

[Milhouse]

That 750W power supply is overkill too. I have a 120W power supply (see specs below), and even that is more than I use. Something 300-400W is probably more reasonable.

It may actually be appropriate in this case, when using something like an i7-class processor and motherboard, and with all of the 24 drives populated though in order to achieve that the OP would require additional HBAs, or SAS expanders, adding to the power requirements.

I believe a PSU is most efficient when under about 50% load, so a 750W PSU may make the most sense given the number of possible disks (I'd assume a worst-case power consumption of 10W for each drive, and half that when at idle, though "Eco" drives will use less power under load).

 

[jgreco]

Generally a power supply is *less* efficient when it is under a lighter load. Think of a power supply like a vehicle. If you have a small car and a big truck, the big truck can pull quite a bit more than the car, but even when it's not pulling anything, it has larger overhead so it _will_ use more fuel.

The overhead amount could be thought of as some combination of a fixed amount plus a percentage of load, even though it's more complex than that. You can throw a supply on the bench and short out some lines or use a PSU tester, along with a Power Analyzer, or if you don't have one, a Kill-a-Watt or something like that, to power up a supply without a motherboard load.

For kicks, I just grabbed a few random supplies off the shelf.

400W desktop power supply: 30 watts
600W 2U server power supply: 24 watts
250W 1U server power supply: 21 watts
300W disk array power supply: 12 watts

Most power supplies will have spec sheets that indicate their efficiency (80%, 93%, etc) but this is typically measured when they're under heavy load. A 93% efficient power supply that consumes 20 watts to power a zero-watt load is obviously not being 93% efficient, and if you buy a 1200W 93% supply to power a 300W load, you're going to find that it's expensive on the power budget because you're not getting 93% efficiency due to the overhead the PS has in just running.

So the best thing to do is to take a good stab at the maximum amount of power you expect the system to consume, which you can arrive at without too much fuss just by iterating through all your components. Don't forget things like memory, fans, and add-on cards, even though some of those can be very low watts. Large numbers of hard drives can be set for staggered spin-up to *significantly* reduce the amount of power required, which may get you into a better class of power supply.

 

[Milhouse]

Take a look at the 80PLUS website by following this link and expand the section "What is an 80 PLUS certified power supply?" where there are the efficiency results for several PSU's at various loadings - peak efficiency is achieved at 50% load.

Of course there's a big jump from 50% load to 100% load, and efficiency may well increase slightly beyond 50% but it will also decline as the load approaches 100%, so a more accurate statement might be to say that peak efficiency is somewhere between 50% and 75% load.

However, as the figures from the 80PLUS site appear to demonstrate, even when under very light load most well designed PSU are not significantly more inefficient than when they are under the "ideal" load to achieve maximum efficiency. So in the case of the OP I'd say the planned 700W PSU is fine even when populating only a small number of storage bays, and the 700W PSU will achieve peak efficiency if/when all of the 24 storage bays are populated.

 

[jgreco]

Years of practical experience building systems yields slightly different answers; you probably don't want to shoot for a power supply that is significantly oversized. If you've got a 24-drive array, and you've got four bays filled, that's 20 more drives to add, and if you're using green drives for a home media center, that's only 6W per spinner or 120W more if you add 20 drives. That's really not all that much extra juice.

Now just to pull some numbers, a 65W CPU plus 2W for the DIMM's, maybe 50W for the mainboard, 7W for the RAID controller, 3W each for six fans, plus four 6W drives, that's 166 watts. Now there's usually other cruft in there too, so let's pad that up to 200 watts to be safe. Adding 20 more drives means we have a range of 200W-320W.

Now I'm actually pretty comfortable with running supplies at maybe 60-75%; your percentages are not horribly far off of that. But I just don't see where you figure 700W is a good idea.

What would probably make somewhat more sense is something like a 500W supply. Of course you still have to do all the math to make sure the actual amps work out right on all the rails and all that. This is also why a shop keeps all the gear to do actual testing under actual load ... it's just dicey making educated guesses. But I can see that your guess appears to be artificially high, unless you're also powering some 100W light bulbs off that box.

Now if you get lucky and you find a power supply that has a nice linear efficiency ratio, hey, by all means, heavier supplies are not a bad idea. Running a supply too close to its capacity is a recipe for short lifetime, failure, and Really Bad Things Happening(tm) when a component fails and your precious parts start getting the wrong voltage. But this is really one of those things where I wouldn't make the call for an artificially large power supply unless I had some comparison testing done first. The 80PLUS stuff is somewhat helpful in evaluating that, but you can see from many of those numbers that lightly loading a supply isn't as efficient.

In the old days, we had power-hungry drives, where'd you be budgeting 15W for idle and 20W for active *per drive*, but today you have to remember that even the 7200's are in the 7W range for operating power. The thing that's a killer is spinup current; your average drive still takes around 2 *amps* at 12V to spin, so you have to be a little careful about how you arrange things. A 500W supply might or might not be able to swing it, most seem to be around 40A on the 12V.

Now if I were building this system, I might be mighty tempted to look at

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121080

which if you look at the stats is *extremely* efficient even at 20% load, but I'd make a future notation that maybe it won't be okay once you get past sixteen drives or something like that. At which point you can probably afford to revisit the power supply anyways.

 

[Milhouse]

So, the summary of the above is that you don't agree with me that a 700W PSU might be suitable (I'm assuming a fully populated 24-disk system here), but then go on to say that 550W may not be OK for 16+ drives?

M'ok.

 

[matthewowen01]

I generally try and run my PSU's at 60%-75% load. it's reasonably efficient, but it produces less heat and therefore less noise from cooling. it also lets me reuse them in other systems without worrying about needing to by a new, bigger one.

 

[jgreco]

So, the summary of the above is that you don't agree with me that a 700W PSU might be suitable (I'm assuming a fully populated 24-disk system here), but then go on to say that 550W may not be OK for 16+ drives?

M'ok.

Actually, I basically said you have to be careful. It's pretty darn easy to find examples of failure OR success; there are 700W power supplies that couldn't simultaneously crank 24 hard drives, and there are 500W power supplies that can, for example.

You don't seem to have followed the more technical parts of my message, so for anyone who likes a simple answer, hey, just go get a 1000W power supply and "don't worry about it." Your electric company and your electronics retailer will both thank you for the extra cash you're sending their way.

I kind of figured that most of the people here are more technically oriented. After all, most of the world just goes out and buys a Seagate, Netgear, etc., crappyNAS box. And rule 1 in technology is that nothing's perfect - there are no perfect answers to the question that was being asked, so yes, the answer I gave isn't completely satisfying, but it's got a lot of experience and information embedded in it.

 

[weeniewawa]

and look at this card, will run 8 SATA drives

you will need the cables tho, it comes bare

cables here

it is the exact same card as the LSI

in fact it is the LSI card sold by Intel

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001NJMRPS/?tag=ozlp-20



works out of the box with FreeNAS

 

[matthewowen01]

and look at this card, will run 8 SATA drives

you will need the cables tho, it comes bare

cables here

it is the exact same card as the LSI

in fact it is the LSI card sold by Intel

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001NJMRPS/?tag=ozlp-20



works out of the box with FreeNAS

i have one of those and it runs great. make sure you buy breakout cables, and not reverse breakout cables.