Server Options Options

[Shub0xx]

Hey everyone,

It's been a crazy time since I was here last, with so much stuff going on in my personal life.. It's not all sorted out yet, but I'm getting there..

I need some help.. I'm looking at downsizing my main rig, and transferring all of my file sharing tasks to a separate machine. I'm looking at possibly building a server (or buying an off the shelf option) and running that for file sharing and streaming to tv devices..

Now... Do I go out and custom build myself a system, or do I go find myself a cheap NAS and run that? I'm currently operating on a limited budget of about $600. Because it will be "always-on" I want a low power system.

Any suggestions?

[yoshiyoshi]

I know it's late, but I have a server I can pass on to you for $200... An HP Proliant Microserver no less.

Not the quietest, or most power efficient (Pentium D 820), but mega-cheap to start with.

Otherwise, I can help out with putting together a good pseudo-server that is power-efficient and has lots of room for hard-drives at Respawn v28. I'll be volunteering, the little guy with long blonde hair ;-)

Just grab me and we can discuss a way forward for you that suits you and your needs. I reckon we can beat $600 with ease!

[Jen]

Hey everyone,

It's been a crazy time since I was here last, with so much stuff going on in my personal life.. It's not all sorted out yet, but I'm getting there..

I need some help.. I'm looking at downsizing my main rig, and transferring all of my file sharing tasks to a separate machine. I'm looking at possibly building a server (or buying an off the shelf option) and running that for file sharing and streaming to tv devices..

Now... Do I go out and custom build myself a system, or do I go find myself a cheap NAS and run that? I'm currently operating on a limited budget of about $600. Because it will be "always-on" I want a low power system.

Any suggestions?

What I have currently is the following:

Dell Optiplex 760 that I upgraded the chip to a 64bit capable chip
Added 8GB of DDR2 ram
Put a 1TB HDD in it.

Then I virtualised a tonne of my normal "Desktop operations" into virtual machines.

The virtual machines do the work, and pump the output of the work into a Buffalo 4 bay NAS running RAID 5 with 4 x 4TB disks.

[admin]

I took the Build it yourself approach for my server. The full spec list is in the signature but it runs damn well (50w idle, 80w under 100% gigabit network utilization). And is expandable.

The reason I'm running a smaller 160GB drive in there is for persistent plugins like a web server and various downloaders. Means I can spin down the array for most of the time and only load it when I am downloading or accessing it.

A few people have told me RAID-Z1 (and RAID 5) is pointless because of the chance of a drive dying during recovery, so just to be on the safe side I would go RAID-Z2 (RAID 6) but it requires 6 drives to be effective in Z-RAID.

I can provide more info as well as all resources I read and learned from if you want, as well as budget although that will have changed because of the RAM prices alone. I think overall I spent $1300 for a 15TB 50w 'Server'/NAS.