I have previously built simple gaming rigs but never one in the server category. Basically what I want here is a system that can function as a home file server (for music, movies, pictures, etc.) which can be accessed by any device on my home network. It should be affordable and not too expensive to burn a hole in my pocket. It needs to have atleast 5 TB of storage space with some kind of redundancy (I have lost critical data before due to hdd failure).
The Case has 5 native 3.5" tool less bays and 5 5.25" bays, which I can convert to 3.5". I got an old 80Plus Bronze Tagan 600W psu, having 8 SATA and 8 molex connectors.
Id Grab a decent Cpu and Mobo that will handle simple tasks, so something like an fx4300 or a Phenom II x4 and a low price motherboard to go with them.
As For the Hard Drive grab some Western Digital Red's in and the TB flavour you choose( 1,2 or 3), and an LSI or intel raid card with at least 2 internal Mini sas (allows up to 8 Hard drives to be connected) and run the hard drives in Raid 5 for Speed and redundancy.
or You could get a Motherboard with at least 6 SATA connectors and use Windows 8 storage Spaces or something similar for a software type Raid.
theres quite a few way you can go about having Redundancy, so id reccommend doing some research into what youd be comfortable with and what suits your needs.
I got an old Intel Dual Core Pentium (775 socket) lying around, I'll try to get a good G41 board (believe it or not, they are still readily available in my country), and slap a raid card on it. raid cards with sas are expensive but i already got a processor good enough for simple tasks, and a compatible motherboard for it is dirt cheap,
OR
should I get a new processor as BeyondNight said, I heard that he new AMD 990fx chipset supports all SATA 6GB/s ports. should I do raid on this? lets say I get Phenom II x2 560, (quad core might be overkill), with a decent board, and put in a bunch of big fat hard drives.
OR
Any decent and affordable motherboard with onboard SAS support (intel or amd does not matter)
Which of the options is better?
As of the operating system, is there anything I could do with linux?
Also please suggest a good NIC.
edit: Getting an old motherboard from a friend, ASUS P45 with intel ICH10R has 6 native sata ii ports
I've had no problems with a dual pentium 3 1ghz, 2 gb sdram on windows home server. Works wonders with remote music software, hard disks had low access times (only had harddisk failures). Old and reliable. Also it had an old TRENDNet PCI ethernet 100mbit card and works just fine on a router.
The interface of home server console and it's overall GUI friendliness is good for Windows users.
Acquired most of the stuff. I got a couple of 500gb drives and will do a test run first before i invest into those 3tb ones. here's what I have till now:
Case, 600w PSU, Dual core pentium 3.0 Ghz LGA775 processor, ASUS P5Q motherboard, some old cheap ddr2 memory(need to get some decent ones, how much should i put in? suggestions welcome.) 3x 500gb drives(hitachi, seagate, western)
The reason I need a good NIC is because the board has a single GbLAN port and I need separate upstream and downstream channels to a Gb router.
I'll be checking out unraid. It looks really good on paper.
There is no bios update for Asus P5Q to support 3tb drives. So I am getting Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3 board and a Phenom II to go with it. I got an old amd 5450 lying around which i can use for the display.
My final RAID setup will be 2 arrays running raid 1.