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Constructing Small File Server From Existing PC!

Duekay

New Member
Joined
Oct 31, 2007
Messages
258 (0.04/day)
Location
Brisbane AU
System Name Workstation : Server/HTPC
Processor Core i7 920 @ 4.2GHz : Core i3 2120
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 : Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3
Cooling Cooler Master V8 : Stock
Memory Corsair DDR3 12GB @ 1600Mhz : Corsair DDR3 8GB @ 1600Mhz
Video Card(s) GTX 560 Ti & GT 430 : Onboard
Storage OCZ Max I/O 2x128 SSD Raid0 + Corsair 3x120GB SSD Raid0 : Corsair 2x60GB SSD Raid0
Display(s) Dual samsung 24" & 1 Acer 22" : Acer 22 & Samsung 46" TV
Case Antec P182 Performance One : Antec 4U rackmount
Audio Device(s) Mackie Onyx 400F 10x10 : Maudio Fast Track Pro
Power Supply Corsair HX-620 : Corsair HX-650
Software Windows 7 64bit, Cubase 5 : Windows 7 64bit
Hello all,

I'm back! been hitting the last 12 months pretty hard with some music production on my new i7 rig... she's a ripper, have had no issue's from day one.. but one over all issue I am running into at the moment is space!! My main DAW has 3x128GB SSD in Raid0 for my OS drive but my project and data drive is only 1TB (2x500GB in Raid0),

I am battling for space now with my missus being into watching DVD's and has a crazy music collection, what I am looking at doing is taking my old PC (specs below) and using the mobo, cpu and ram from it to run 8x1TB (or 2TB if I feel like I have a few extra dollars handy) hard drives on a Raid10 PCIe card.

The idea is that i have the net running from my router to the file sever that has all my Audio production, Music, Video and Word docs etc. on it, from there I want to connect my DAW via ethernet cable and have access to the net and any files I want. I will also have my missus netbook linked up via the wireless on the router and I am also looking for an LCD TV that has some kind of option to connect to this shindig (wireless preferred).

A few questions:
Is this all to much to ask for?
Will there be bottleneck issues with having me accessing my project files from the DAW while there is a download happening and the missus is watching a movie?
Will Sata drives do the job?
Will my Mobo handle 4-8TB hooked up to it?
What would be a good enclosure for the system?
Would there be a way of making the power consumption less (power supply)?
What type of Raid Card and HDD's would be a good choice?
Would there be advantages in buy Win 7 for the rig as all connection PC's will have it on board (i have copy's of XP home, XP Pro, XP-64bit also)?

The existing component for the proposed FS:
Mobo: Asus P5KPL-VM
CPU: Core2 Duo E6850 (3GHz)
Ram: Gskill DDR2 800MHz (4x1GB)

My DAW rig:
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5
CPU: i7-920
Ram: Corsair DDR3 1600MHz (6x2GB)
SSD: Corsair 3xP128 (Raid0)
HDD: Seagate 2x500GB (Raid0)
PSU: Corsair 620w (i think)
OS: Win 7 Ultimate 64bit

Netbook:
Win 7 home 32bit

Sorry if I have missed a few things out.. I always struggle at getting my crazy idea's out of my head :D

Thanks in advance for your help :toast:
 
with that many drives/storage i would go Raid 5 and not raid 10, due to effiency.



with raid 10 you will always lose 50% of the total hard drive space, however with raid 5 you will only ever lose 1 disk. so with 3 drives you will get 66% of the total space.. or with 4 drives you get 75%.. so the more you add the better the efficiency.


with a lot of hard drives, you will be wanting a raid card that supports staggerd spinup or you will need a larger power suppy then nessecary... have drives consume the most power when first turned on. you will be wanting about 400watt high quality power supply, with 80% or high efficency.

make sure you have Gigabit network or shareing that much data will be painful.... some nice WD blues 1 or 2TB drives should work well. i would recomend the green drives however some people have said they drop out of raids so its upto you. (personaly im running 2 green drives in raid 0 for the last year and a bit. havnt had any problems. but thats using onboard intel fake raid)


if you want to reduce power consumption, you could easily downclock the cpu to 1.8Ghz or less, should be more then enough for a file server... use onboard video card if you can.


the only other thing is wireless... you could only stream 1 movie to 1 device using Wireless G.. N would not have this problem. wireless G is onle 54mbps.. or 22mbps one way and the bandwidth is shared between all devices that are connected.
 
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with that many drives/storage i would go Raid 5 and not raid 10, due to effiency.



with raid 10 you will always lose 50% of the total hard drive space, however with raid 5 you will only ever lose 1 disk. so with 3 drives you will get 66% of the total space.. or with 4 drives you get 75%.. so the more you add the better the efficiency.

Hey mate, what about the speed function? the real reason i wanted raid10 was having approx. 4x the speed of a single drive... but i do like the fact that i could get a little extra space for free :)

A fast r/w with the safety would be nice :)
 
if you want to reduce power consumption, you could easily downclock the cpu to 1.8Ghz or less, should be more then enough for a file server... use onboard video card if you can.

Cool, was planning to use the onboard VGA connect :D with one of my old acer 22"
 
just noticed your from brisbane too :D what part? ^^

as far as i know, raid 5 is faster for reads then raid 10. its only a bit slower on the writes.... however with 4 drives or more.. it will easily exceed 80MBps writes... 300Mbps+ read.

raid 10 would only read from 2 of the drives at a time afaik. (if using 4 drives)


Note:
just going to double check somethings i said about raid 5 and 10.


well google is giving me conflicting infomation reguarding witch would be faster at what.... i can tell you raid 5 is slower at writing tho... however with 4 drives or more you should easily be able to max out gigabit bandwidth anyway (125MBps)
 
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the only other thing is wireless... you could only stream 1 movie to 1 device using Wireless G.. N would not have this problem. wireless G is onle 54mbps.. or 22mbps one way and the bandwidth is shared between all devices that are connected.

Crap! :banghead:

The Router i have is below:
http://www.belkin.com/au/IWCatProductPage.process?Product_Id=460611

I cant seem to find anything that IINet provide that uses 'N" Might just have to make my current one work.

Would it work ok just for streaming one thing and using Ethernet switch for maybe another 2 devices?
 
just noticed your from brisbane too :D what part? ^^

as far as i know, raid 5 is faster for reads then raid 10. its only a bit slower on the writes.... however with 4 drives or more.. it will easily exceed 80MBps writes... 300Mbps+ read.

raid 10 would only read from 2 of the drives at a time afaik. (if using 4 drives)


Note:
just going to double check somethings i said about raid 5 and 10.


well google is giving me conflicting infomation reguarding witch would be faster at what.... i can tell you raid 5 is slower at writing tho... however with 4 drives or more you should easily be able to max out gigabit bandwidth anyway (125MBps)

Haha.. I was in Toowong but just moved down to Beenleigh till i can find a nice two bed in the city :) small world!

If i ran 2 Ethernet cables to my DAW (with a network card in the FS) would that speed things up, i remember reading a while back about my DAW Mobo having 2 Ethernet connectors being good for extra gaming bandwidth... not to sure if it was true or posible though :)
 
yes it is possible to combine 2 network cards together for twice the speed... but if your network is only running 100mb... that would only give you 25MBytes per second (2x 12.5MBps) witch is still well below the 125MBytes of Gigabit lan.


but if your FS pc only has 1 connection and its only 100MBps.. it will limit your 200MBps connection anyway.... so that wont help unless both pc's have 2 cards...




your best option is to buy a Gigabit switch and plug the router Daw pc and FS pc. or you can buy a nother Router with Gigabit Lan and Wireless N. but you need to make sure the netbook and tv both support wireless N in that case.


you should check out MSY for cheap Pc parts, fairly certain there is a store in beenleigh or nearby... UMart is another cheap store with a huge range of parts.. but the closest store there i think is the gold coast or even milton in the city.
 
yes it is possible to combine 2 network cards together for twice the speed... but if your network is only running 100mb... that would only give you 25MBytes per second (2x 12.5MBps) witch is still well below the 125MBytes of Gigabit lan.


but if your FS pc only has 1 connection and its only 100MBps.. it will limit your 200MBps connection anyway.... so that wont help unless both pc's have 2 cards...




your best option is to buy a Gigabit switch and plug the router Daw pc and FS pc. or you can buy a nother Router with Gigabit Lan and Wireless N. but you need to make sure the netbook and tv both support wireless N in that case.


you should check out MSY for cheap Pc parts, fairly certain there is a store in beenleigh or nearby... UMart is another cheap store with a huge range of parts.. but the closest store there i think is the gold coast or even milton in the city.

Good old Umart is what i have used for the last few years... and a online one called MWave..
going to have to check out MSY though haven't heard of them before :D

this is sort of what i wanted to set up (attached):

I think i will have to use 2 gigabit PCI cards as i dont seem to be able to find any with 2 ports on the same card that are not PCIe,
The reason i want to avoid PCIe for the Network card is to keep my PCIe x4 Slot empty for anything i might need in the future.
 

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Looking at going with the spec below for case PSU, Raid controller and Ethernet Card (changed my mind not going to need the PCIe for anything else):

Case & PSU

Raid Card

Network Card

Hard Drives or This Hard drive cause i can buy an extra in case one dies for about the same amount of cash.

Any thoughts? im pretty open to idea's :D
 
The price of that case:eek:

If you are looking for a nice big case, you can choose from several Coolermaster models. have you looked at PC Case Gear?here They deliver local to Bris. and have a big range on offer.
Umart has lots too.
 
The price of that case:eek:

If you are looking for a nice big case, you can choose from several Coolermaster models. have you looked at PC Case Gear?here They deliver local to Bris. and have a big range on offer.
Umart has lots too.

Hey, do you know any of them that can host 9 HDD?

One of them says the following:
5.25" - 4 (without the use of exposed 3.5" drive bay)
3.5" - 6 Hidden, 1 Exposed (converted from one 5.25" drive bay)

Would it be easy to turn it into 6 hidden and 3 exposed 3.5" with 1 5.25" for a DVD/CD Drive?

Im not to clued up on the case side of thing :P
 
There are several options but this would work I think.

Get this with one of these or these

Even a 690 would do the job here. Note that the pictures are not fully representative of what you get. The empty space below the drive bays come with a 4 slot removable HDD section. If you got a second 4 bay module, this case will hold 10 plus an optical dev.
 
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Nice:toast:

I suggest you get another fan for the front. This will help cool the HDD more plus help keep the dust down in the back.
 
Nice:toast:

I suggest you get another fan for the front. This will help cool the HDD more plus help keep the dust down in the back.

good idea i will do that :) just need to wait till i get payed now :cry:
 
Fairly certain your also going to need Sas to Sata backbone/multiport adaptor with that raid card.

i also highly recomend you stay away from XP 64bit... drivers are usualy a problem... the extra ram you get by using 64bit wont help at all. 3gb (more or less) will be fine. infact most Nas systems use less then 1GB of ram.


how many HDD's do you plan on buying?
 
Fairly certain your also going to need Sas to Sata backbone/multiport adaptor with that raid card.

i also highly recomend you stay away from XP 64bit... drivers are usualy a problem... the extra ram you get by using 64bit wont help at all. 3gb (more or less) will be fine. infact most Nas systems use less then 1GB of ram.


how many HDD's do you plan on buying?

Was thinking of 8 x 1TB or 2TB, the reason i wanted to go with XP64 was that i heard XP32 has issue's in dealing with memory over 2TB i well as over 3gb..
 
you cant have more then 3.5gb or so of ram Due to 32 Bit limitations... there wont be any problems it will just cap your ram to 3gb or more.



as for 2TB limit, i cant remember exacly what the problem is, you need to set the Array to GPT to crate a partition size of 2tb or larger. its fairly straight forward.


NOTE:
you cannot install windows XP to the Raid array if its over 2TB. it must go on a separate disk.



EDIT:
sorry i was wrong, apparently Windows XP 32Bit does not support GUID/GPT and so larger then 2TB volumes are imposible.
 
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you cant have more then 3.5gb or so of ram Due to 32 Bit limitations... there wont be any problems it will just cap your ram to 3gb or more.



as for 2TB limit, i cant remember exacly what the problem is, you need to set the Array to GPT to crate a partition size of 2tb or larger. its fairly straight forward.


NOTE:
you cannot install windows XP to the Raid array if its over 2TB. it must go on a separate disk.



EDIT:
sorry i was wrong, apparently Windows XP 32Bit does not support GUID/GPT and so larger then 2TB volumes are imposible.

cool i was going to use my old Raptor drive for the OS then is stall the drives after...

What OS should i use.. should i buy another copy of 7U64bit?.. it would have been nice to be able to use the copy of XP64 tho
 
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