hard drive for home server?

dh003i · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2007 Posts: 70

On the Google groups forums, I asked about configurations for a home server running Linux. I was advised to focus on hard-drive performance, and worry secondarily about things like CPU-speed.

Due to the ability to use up to 32GB of RAM (16GB / CPU) I've decided to build my system with Opteron 2000 series CPU's, using an EATX motherboard, which has 6 SATA ports and 8 SAS/SATA ports via a SAS controller.

Now, I'm trying to decide a hard-drive layout. Initially, I think 1TB of storage space will be good to start out with. However, I'm trying to decide between different hard-drives and a combination of (e.g., one for data-storage, the other for frequently accessed kernel / OS files and applications).

I will be using the server to store my data on, will probably be accessing it from off-site, and will probably also use it for streaming of media-content, as well as remote-hostage / use of Linux applications, including X-apps (I'll install a small Linux install on my laptop for that purpose).

Here's a list of what I'm looking at. Any comments / suggestions?

Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM 32MB Buffer Serial ATA II/300, 3.5in, 9.2ms seek, Deskstar 7k1000

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB 7200RPM SATA 32MB

Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB SATA 7200RPM 32MB Cache

Hitachi 36GB 15K SAS Hard Drive

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Sep 12, 2007 10:22 pm Post subject:

dh003i,

The first thing to think about is network bandwidth. A 1Gbit card on a PCI-E (not ordianry PCI) has a theoretical maximum data rate of 100MB/sec (allowing for some overhead). How much network bandwidth do your need for your purposes ?
A 100Mbit card will provide 10MB/sec

Those drives will provide about 50 MB/sec average.

How will you back up 1Tb of data?
Thats a lot to lose in a crash, or with a dying disk. I would use 3 or more drives in kernel software raid5 to protect against a single drive failure. You still need backups of course, to get back things accidently rm'ed. Raid may well improve your hard drive bandwidth too.

Don't skimp on space in the case, for a long healthy life, you need to keep the system well cooled
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

dh003i · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2007 Posts: 70

snIP3r · l33t Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 853 Location: germany

hi dh003i!

i also agree with NeddySeagoon: you should use a raid configuration for your server. if you want to simply backup the data, use another 1tb drive and create a software raid1.
the integrated controllers should do their job, so there is no need to use an extra card.

i suggest the sas drive for system installation and the sata drive for storage. with your amount of ram you should perhaps think about using a ramdisk for the highly frequented files.
for the purpose of the server, a single sata drive (probably with "backup" disk in a raid1 config) should provide the data as fast as needed.

HTH

snIP3r
_________________
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if your problem is fixed please add something like [solved] to the topic!

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 12:40 pm Post subject:

dh003i,

Akkara · Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 1:33 pm Post subject:

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Wow... it seems a bit over-kill for what sounds like a glorified file-server, but if you can afford it, why not

RAID5 is highly recommended if this is going to be on 24/7 as you will more than likely get a disk failure at some point.
Higher capacity drives in any range have lots of platters and thus heat up like crazy when under heavy load which doesn't help...
As has been mentioned, it's a lot more cost effective to buy more smaller HDs and RAID them than it is to buy fewer bigger ones.
Also, RAID is cool :mrgreen:

Just don't RAID a bunch of 1TB's. RAID stands for Redundant Array of INEXPENSIVE Disks, after all

The downside of RAID5 is writes are a lot slower than reads - Reads are as fast as RAID0, but even with a monster CPU and disk subsystem you're hard-pressed to get RAID5 write speeds greater than that of a fast single hard disk.

The problem here is that there is no cheap way of backing up a giant disk array - I am currently in this situation with my RAID5 4x500GB array - CDs and DVDs are completely impractical. On-line backup is far too slow and expensive. Tapes are just crap (Expensive, slow and unreliable!).
The best way to back up is to another hard disk, but nobody makes a 1.5TB hard disk, so that leaves the cheapest way is to build a second array!!

Because of this, I changed my perspective. To me, the array now IS the backup system! Thinking this way means I don't have to back it up

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

I'll join the "Well, it's your money.." comments..

My home server performs DNS, Mail repository (postfix, courier-imap), time server, portage rsync (for my workstations), and multimedia file serving. I use an Asus SLI Deluxe motherboard (hand-me-down from a gaming system), AMD X2 3800+ (dual core), 2GB ram, 4 320GB drives in raid 5 (gives close to 1TB of usable space) Backup of media (currently 360 GB of space) is to DVD; backup of everything else is to a USB external drive using rsnapshot. Using onboard GB ethernet (marvell chip internally connected to PCIe bus), and helpful is having a gigabit switch. I serve the media files from an encrypted raid-5 partition via NFS - is plenty fast enough for 720x480 mpeg2 material (whatever that bandwidth limit is); tested it one time and got sustained like 28MB/s, which appeared to be drive limiting; when driving that hard one cpu core was running at like 20% or so - I've got ext3 on top of cryptsetup luks (encryption) on top of LVM2 on top of software raid 5.