File Server Builder's Guide
by Zach Throckmorton on September 4, 2011 3:30 PM ESTAs motherboard layout is important in ensuring that airflow is as unobstructed as possible, case design is also critical in facilitating excellent airflow. If you're building a system with one or two hard drives, most cases work fine for a home file server - just make sure there is a fan near the hard drive(s) so it is not sitting in stagnant air. However, if your server requires multiple disks, here are a few cases that work especially well for file servers.
Mini-ITX
Fractal's Array R2 is a nearly perfect home file server case. At less than 14" deep by 10" wide by 8" tall, it occupies little volume. It positions a removable hard drive cage immediately behind a quiet yet powerful 140mm intake fan. The hard drive cage accommodates up to six hard drives using vibration-dampening silicone mounts, and there is also room for a 2.5" drive (either an SSD or HDD). According to my testing, when stuffed with six low-rpm 2TB mass storage HDDs and one SSD (with an Intel Pentium G620 CPU installed), the temperatures of the HDDs hover around 40C even when all drives are under artificial sustained load (using Iometer). The PSU is a custom SFX form factor model, 80+ efficiency 300W unit with ample amps on the split 12V rail to power six HDDs. The PSU features seven SATA connectors and one legacy molex connector, so there are no extraneous molex plugs and enough SATA plugs. Furthermore, the cables are shorter than typical, so excessive cabling does not interfere with airflow. The case itself is constructed of aluminum so it is lightweight, and its overall build quality is very high. It does not have room for an optical drive, but I consider optical drives superfluous for a home file server. If necessary, you can always hook up a USB interface external optical drive. The only drawback of this case and its PSU is the price: at just under $200, it is not cheap. However, the subjective aesthetics, objective functionality of the case and the custom PSU are worth the cost if you want a small but capacious home file server case.
Micro-ATX
As I prefer home file servers that take up as little space as possible, Silverstone's TJ08B-E is a great, smaller micro-ATX minitower. It's less than 16" deep, 9" wide, 15" tall and weighs less than 12 pounds. It can accommodate up to five HDDs plus one SSD. As with the Fractal Array R2, the hard drives are placed immediately behind a front intake fan - though in this case, it's an even larger 180mm unit. The TJ08B-E is flexible in that it can hold a couple optical drives as well as a GPU in case you want to repurpose or multipurpose it. When stuffed with four low-rpm green drives, the temperatures under load don't exceed 45C during sustained transfers. Overall build quality is very good, like most Silverstone cases.
Silverstone makes a diminutive, fully modular PSU that makes working with smaller cases like the TJ08B-E, Lian Li PC-Q08, and others much easier. Silverstone also offers a short cable kit, making the ST50F-P PSU even better suited to SFF cases. Finally, it's clear that Silverstone had smaller multi-HDD systems in mind when designing the CP06 SATA power plug extension cable. This extender connects to a single SATA power plug and then has four SATA power plugs that are spaced closer than usual together, further reducing cable clutter. Though the cost of these accessories adds up, they make an ideal cabling solution very easy to implement. Regardless of whatever PSU you decide to go with, if you use a split 12V rail model, make sure you don't load up one rail with HDDs. If you go with a single 12V rail model, you'll want that rail to be beefy - for example, don't try to put ten HDDs and four case fans on a budget PSU with a 20A 12V rail.
Full Tower
Very few cases can accommodate ten HDDs at stock (without adding adapters), and such cases are not at all small. Full towers also typically offer excellent airflow, and cable management is not very difficult. Fractal's Define XL is one of the least expensive 10 HDD bay full tower cases available. It is well-built, and extra care has been paid to making the case quiet in the form of panel insulation. It is impossible to hear active HDDs inside this case even when you're sitting just a few feet from it (even the notoriously loud VelociRaptors). Further, there are plenty of integrated niceties like adjustable/flexible cable baffles that assist in cable management. Seven of the ten HDD slots are immediately behind fans, with three slots one cage removed from the front intake fans. Even still, the HDDs that aren't right behind the fans stay cool (between 35C and 40C). At around $150, it is an excellent value. Just make sure you don't pair it up with Silverstone's short cable kit!
We've saved the most important aspect of a home file server - the hard drives - for the next and last component page.
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HMTK - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
We don't even use encryption for our enterprise customers. There's just no point. How easy do you think it is recovering useful data from a RAID member? Not talking about a mirror here but RAID 5/6/10qoonik - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
Hardware:motherboard: supermicro X7SPA-H-D525 (
- Intel® Atom™ D525 (Passive cooling)
- Intel® ICH9R Express Chipset
- 6x SATA (3.0Gbps)
ram: 2 x 4GB DDR3 SO-DIMM Kingston
case: CFI A7879 Mini-ITX NAS/Server Case - 4 Hot Swap Bays
psu: FSP120-50GNF (FANLESS)
fan: BeQuiet SilentWings 120 mm PWM
hd: 1 x WD green 1.5 TB (completing ... )
OS:
Amahi Home Server (Fedora) http://www.amahi.org
Rick83 - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
Gonna chime in here ;)motherboard is a gigabyte P55-UD5
i5 650
10xSATA + 2x eSATA + 1xIDE + 2xIDE from PCI card
2x1 GB some-DDR3
CM Stacker STC-1 (yes, the original goodness!) with 3 4in3 modules
psu: seasonic 430W with plenty of power adapters
fan: stock fans all around (120mm per 4in3, one 120mm exhaust, one 80mm top exhaust, no CPU fan), CPU cooler is a scythe Yasya
hd: 1x 8GB transcend IDE flash module (SLC), 1x 2.5" transcend IDE ssd (SLC), 1x 40GB seagate IDE, 1x 80 gb WD IDE, 1x 80GB seagate SATA, 3x 400GB Seagate SATA, 5x WD 1TB EARS SATA, 1x Samsung 1TB SATA (12 spinning disks, 2 SSDs)
an optical drive
a TV-card (though apparently broken...stream coming out of it is corrupted)
an IEEE1394 CF Card reader
Setup is 2x RAID1 (second level back up, and dynamic system files, consisting of the small disks) ad 2x RAID 5 (main and back-up array)
graphics: nVidia 6200 - looking to replace this with something that idles at lower energy - can't stand the card being as hot as it is, with no screens attached.
Now having lived with that machine for a few years (previously it was running only 7 disks and a sempron single core on it, before that there was a pre-cursor server that was running on different celerons and as little as 32MB of RAM) I am currently looking at options to make the disks more accessible. Something this article doesn't touch on, is with many disks come many deaths. Which is where a hot-plug cage really comes into its own. So I'm on the look-out for affordable backplanes with 120mm fans which I can replace 1:1 with two of the 4-in-3s (my IDE disks will have less use in a hot swap cage ;) )
Death666Angel - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
That's a nice coincidence. I just ordered my file server stuff this week and it got here on Friday. So far I just put it together, haven't turned it on, yet (exam stress).I haven't read this article, hope my stuff isn't too useless. ;-)
Just a fyi, here is the system I have:
- Sharkoon T9, 9 x 5.25"!!
- AMD Phenom II X4 840 (fake Phenom btw)
- Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3, which supports ECC memory
- 2x4GB Kingston DDR3-ECC 1333MHz RAM
- 2 x IcyDock 5 in 3 Backplane (MB455SPF-B)
- Intel Gigabit CT Desktop Adapter for PCI-E x1
- A300 Couger PSU (staggered spin-up ftw! I just hope it works out ;-))
- Highpoint Rocketraid 2680SGL + 2 MiniSAS to 4xSATA cables
I'll use 8 2TB HDDs for a RAID5 with Linux Ubuntu, at least that's the plan. I'll also get a UPS soon. I have enough space to upgrade to a second raid adapter (the motherboard has 2 PCI-E slots and I hope the graphics slot will be accepted) and have 15 HDDs in the 9 5.25" trays and I can cram one additional one in there for sure ;-).
Rick83 - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
That's a big RAID-5.Those are pretty risky: Rebuilds take a long time, and are dependant upon all other disks surviving that long.
If you really want to go the way of 'one big RAID 5', I'd propose to go with 7 disks and keep one as hot spare. That way at least the rebuild will start right as the first disk dies, minimizing somewhat that other disks deteriorate gravely until a replacement disk is there.
In general I'd stop with level 5 at 6 disks though. Consider Going with two 4-disk level 5's or a level 6 also.
Ideally of course you'd have two level 5's where one is a regular back-up of the other, but using a different file system.
qoonik - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
Also consider software protection like flexraid http://wiki.flexraid.com/.Death666Angel - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Yeah, my ideal solution was to go with RAID6 where 2 disks could fail (and of course a real RAID controller with a XOR unit and 16 sata ports) but that would have cost about 4 to 6 times the price of the 2680.I haven't heard good things about the spare disks, so I would rather go with 2 4HDD RAID5s. But I will do some testing before setting it up, I have 4 empty 2TB drives and will play around with pulling a disk out, having the array rebuilt etc. and then I'll decide which way to go.
Luckily, the only sensitive, non-easily recoverable data will be my photos and probably some system images which will be backed up regularly. The music and videos can easily be ripped from my collection again. It will be time lost, but not inrecoverable :-).
As for software RAID, I haven't heard of flexraid. I looked into FreeNAS and ZFS and that wasn't up my ally. Very powerful filesystem, but FreeNAS is too limited to just providing a NAS. I would like to have the option of going full server with this too, hosting different things. And the linux port of ZFS isn't stable as far as I heard, so that was out of the question.
With the hardware controller I know that I am not OS dependant and all that I read is that in a case of failure, modern raid controllers can also be switched easily by a model from the same maker and not lose any data (which I heard wasn't the case a few years/decades back). :-)
alpha754293 - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 - link
My current system is 10 * 3TB (30 TB raw, 27 TB RAID5). If I go with anything else, I'd have to probably pile LustreFS or some other kind of distributed FS on top of that, which adds to the complexity, and cost, and another system, and power, and complexity in the parity calculations.A second server will likely go online and it will run rsync or something akin to that for incremental backups.
Lonyo - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
You seem to have missed the perfect board for an Atom based file server.http://pden.zotac.com/index.php?page=shop.product_...
6 SATA ports, x16 and x1 PCIe slots (for potentially 2 RAID cards).
DTX means it should fit in an mATX case (assuming there is one with enough HDD space), or if you are making something custom the footprint shouldn't be too big.
qoonik - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
also suggest supermicro X7SPA-H-D525 ( Intel® Atom™ D525 (Pineview-D)Dual Core, 1.8GHz (13W) processor, 6 sata,2x RJ45 LAN port, Mini ITX)