Let's Build a Home Server

[lilrofl]

So I promised a NAS to my lovely wife, and while I did deliver with a hacked Seagate Dockstar running a Debian server with NFS support, I have to admit performance was underwhelming. That little ARM processor just doesn't have the juice to stream video over the network, or really manage anything over FTP.

My search for home servers was also less then productive, leading to products that are not only over priced, but often running those same ARM processors I have come to not trust for the heavy lifting I want my server to manage. I want power! After some research I found a good idea in an Maximum PC, and decided on a server plan.

Most of the time I build a machine my order is: GPU > Mainboard > CPU > case > everything else > power supply; but with a server who will be used primarily for data storage my priorities change. I have to start by finding a case that will meet my hard drive capacity needs and then build out from there.

The article listed the Fractal Design Array R2 Black Aluminum Mini-ITX Desktop Computer Case 300W SFX PSU Power Supply, which if you can find it is a great start. It has rack space for 6 X 3.5 inch drives and 1 X 2.5 inch drive. It is a micro-ITX form factor, but GIGABYTE makes some very nice micro-ITX mainboards that suit the server role well; and I've got to admit, it is a pretty box

Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 (rev. 1.0) is an example of such a mainboard. Supporting USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, hybrid EFI BIOS allowing for booting 3TB and plenty of energy saving features. It can be noted that this motherboard supports RAID 0,1,5 and 10 but I want to build a RAID 6 setup (block level striping with duel parity more on this later)

To step away from ARM servers and pick up something capable of driving my server wherever I want to take it, I'll go with the Intel CORE i5 2405s sandy bridge pumping 2.5Ghz without turbo boost. Overclockers may cringe, but that's ok, it's a solid choice.

4GB DDR3 Corsair ram with 9-9-9-24 timing (CMV4GX3M2A1333c is recommended by GIGABYTE)

You're gonna need an OS drive, I like the Seagate 7200.12 160GB drive because it's 36 bucks and it's sole purpose in life is to boot my machine. Alternatively you could run a Linux live server environment off USB, all of the hardware choices have Linux drivers available, this will impact you RAM a bit.

Let's talk about my RAID 6 preference. It comes down to availability. My wife is a data monkey, her job involves the collection of thousands of pictures and hundreds of hours of video and audio that must be available. RAID 6 is block level striping with duel parity. This will allow the RAID to be rebuilt even if 2 disk fail. The relevant math in my RAID is:
> you must have at least 4 drives
> space available is measured as 1 – 2/n where n is = to the number of drives in the RAID

Now I'm gonna loose a significant amount of space to accommodate the double parity, this is why I will choose Seagate barracuda 3TB drives and pick up 5 of them. 1 – 2/5 = .6 so my 15TB in RAID 6 will turn into just under 9TB of usable space. Additionally they have an AFR of .34% and a mean time between failures of 750000 hours. This will give my array of 5 disk a failure rate of 2.4% a year:
n(n-1)(n-2).34^3 = 5(4)(3).34^3 = 2.358% and the stability of a single parity RAID after a single disk failure. I like it!

Since RAID 6 is not supported by my motherboard, and I have a PCIe 16x slot to play with, I will install a RAID controller. Highpoint makes the rocketRAID 2720SGL for just such an occasion, supported by windows, Linux and FreeBSD this is the card to beat. Throw in a pair of int-ms-1m4s RAID cables also offered by Highpoint and you're ready to go.

OS? I dunno, the article makes a good argument for Windows home server, it's not real expensive, and user friendly but I think I'll go with Debian because my existing network is already completely Linux, and I'm not afraid of a command line, ssh or headless machines in the corner.

You may have noticed there is no optical drive, this is because I have a USB dvd drive I can use to load software when needed. You may have also noticed no cooling advice, this is because I am a fan guy, but I respect water cooled machines so it's really a matter of preference. If you go the fan route, make sure you get good fans.

Thanks for the idea MaxPC.

[maboroshi]

What will you build next a helicopter...

Nice hardware make up, the math you figured out is intriguing. I must say you are definitely a person who spends time doing his homework. Why I suggested the helicopter as the next project to build

Mabo

[computathug]

Im up for helping on this, we need to stream video from the recording studio and am looking for ways to increase the reliability.

Nice project, il read more later, just pushed for time, short on hours and minutes