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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thesandbender - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
It basically throws up a list of everything you could buy without providing any good reasons about why you should or should not. Can you really have the following in a 'buyer's' guide? "the most important factor in long-term HDD reliability is probably luck."Things that would have been nice to see:
1. Comparison of motherboard performance. Is a Dual 1.8ghz Atom enough to manage my RAID-5 array or do I need to pony up for a faster processor?
2. A real comparison of OS features and performance. This article just basically listed every OS and said "There are some good things... their are some bad things". Maybe benchmark each OS's performance as a SMB file share?
3. If one of your drive's reports an error... you should probably replace it. If it reports multiple errors, you should almost certainly replace it as soon as possible. Really? You think?
Most of the articles on Anandtech are pretty useful but this one smacks of a frantic attempt to finish a paper before class starts.
djc208 - Friday, September 9, 2011 - link
I would agree, especially about the OS section.Since a lot of the capabilities and stability of the system will be based on what OS you are running a little more in-depth look at each would have been nice.
I run and like the original version of WHS. I'm reluctant to move to 2011 since it's lost a lot of it's benefits and added too few new ones as far as I've seen. But if actually discussing OS's it's worth listing what they offer out of the box.
WHS does still offer easy integration and control from remote PCs, It does still handle client PC backups, and being Windows does allow you to do basically anything a windows PC will do with a little extra work.
Mine is running SageTV and ComSkip to handle all my DVR/media serving duties, and it has a few other services installed like eye-fi so I don't have to fire up a "normal" PC just to copy the files to the server anyway, just walk in the house and turn on the camera.
But knowing a little more about what is out there for alternatives would be nice in case I decide not to eventually go to WHS 2011.
kake - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
What about using a rack mount style case? For example, right now we're looking at moving our current tower (with 8 drives in it) to this one (or something like it):http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
A 24 port hot swap 4U case provides plenty of expansion, ease of access to drives, and it doesn't have to be rack mounted as it comes with feet.
At 400 dollars, I don't know of anything that provides such a bang/buck combination.
Rick83 - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Well, you also need the rack, which itself is going to dump another few hundred dollars on you.Consider the Lian-Li PC-V343 (http://skinflint.co.uk/301329 - not sure which markets it's available in) which (with 6 hot swap front ends) also houses 24 hot swap hard drives (or 30, if you use 5-in-3s) and yet costs the same as the rack case, while being able to mount conventional hardware. In the end it will probably be a lot cheaper than going with a rack-mount.
Of course, if you already have a rack for your switch, router and domain server, then adding 4U's is relatively straightforward. For the home and small office (less than 24 clients), I'm not sure going rack is economical.
jrocks84 - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
You don't actually need a rack for a single server, you can just put it on the ground. Also the Norco RPC-4224 has the hard drive racks included, with the Lian Li, you would have to buy 4 or 5 in 3 racks, nearly doubling the price. You also have to take into account that the total volume of the Lian Li is nearly 2x as much.MrCromulent - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Good for beginners, but to be honest I expected a little more depth from an Anandtech article. How about questions like:- Have all motherboard recommendations been positively tested to run under FreeBSD / FreeNAS? I my experience, FreeBSD is much more picky when it comes to SATA and network controllers than Linux and Windows.
- How much does (absence of) hardware-accelerated encryption impact transfer speeds on every processor mentioned?
- How important is ECC RAM? That's the reason I chose an Asus AM3 board for my file server. If you bother setting up a nice checksummed ZFS Raid, I would assume you also make sure your RAM has some parity check as well.
Rick83 - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Why?If you have ECC on the disk, do you still have to worry about RAM?
After all, data consistency should be given. At worst some cosmic ray will flip a bit of a kernel page and panic/crash, but that's exceedingly rare, and other hardware/software failures are more likely to send you into a crash than that.
ECC is nice if you actually fill your memory, for example in numerical simulation for engineering, you really don't want a flipped bit to impact the predicted tolerances, but if you already have an integrity check - why worry about RAM (on a fileserver)
Also, as you said, ECC is expensive: either you have to go AMD and pay for the extra electricty and not get AES acceleration, or you go Xeon and pay twice as much for mainboard and CPU as you normally would.
Currently I don't see ECC as an economically viable choice.
Death666Angel - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
From what I read, if you have RAID and don't have a 500+ bucks RAID controller, your RAM will be used for parity stuff. I have read of 2 cases where people had a RAID5 and everything went fine until they all of a sudden couldn't read their data without any prior indication of a problem. Turned out, one of their RAMs was faulty. Haven't read anything of the sort happening with ECC RAM (though that is hardly a good amount of data, I agree ;-)).A lot of things are pretty rare, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take action to avoid them, if those actions are not that huge. For me, going the AMD route with ECC didn't cost any more than the Pentium/1155 route described here.
- Phenom II X4 840 + Asus M4A88TD-V EVO/USB3 + 8GB Kingston DDR3-ECC 1333MHz cost 223€.
- Pentium G620 + comparable Mainboard (ASUS P8H67) + 8GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM cost 159€
That's a 64€ difference (my system that costs 700€ without the HDDs, so with the Intel route I could have saved ~10%). That wouldn't have bought me a better RAID controller. And again, all the RAID people I talked to have indicated that doing RAID with parity without ECC RAM is akin to data suicide.
Performance wise there won't be much difference between the X4 and the Pentium if I tax them laxly. But with the 2 extra cores I have the possibility of running more services off my server in the future.
I'll also undervolt the CPU, so the power consumption will still be higher for the X4, but not by a lot.
As for AES, I don't need it and you don't get it in any sub 145€ Intel CPU anyway, so that's not any argument if you talk about ECC being too expensive.
Rick83 - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
The i5 650 is below 135, actually, the cheapest Xeon is 20 euro more expensive.The ECC DDR3 is another ~20 euro more expensive. (in this case for the cheapest 3x1GB triple channel kit)
And finally, you've got to use a 1366 board, where the same 10 SATA ports are 70 euros more expensive.
(WTF, you can get an ASRock P55 extreme 4 for 110 euros! That's pretty insane.)
So, if you do do encryption, and/or want to go 32nm, then the difference is more than a 100 euros.
On a system that otherwise costs, for these components 275 euros.
25% more for something that induces a MBTF of over 9000!? (sorry, couldnt resist) - It's okay if you go AMD anyway, but for Intel ECC-ram is prohibitively expensive.
Flashfir - Monday, September 5, 2011 - link
Mine runs at around 26-33CArticle says best is around 40C?
Would I be correct in trying to up the hard drive temperatures to that range?