Home Server Build

My current home server is starting to age and I went a lot longer on my last desktop upgade so I dont really have older parts to upgrade to like I have in the past so i'm looking at building a new home server and wanted to get some guidance on my parts selection. I'm trying to keep this cheap but want it to be future proof as much as possible.

As for what it will be used for... It will have linux probably ubuntu server on it. It will be used as a file server via samba, minecraft server and teamspeak server for at most 5 people, streaming media for PS3/Windows PCs. I may also play around with loading some form of virtual machine software on it. This wont ever play games or media or be overclocked as I have desktops for that.

Case
Power Supply
RAM
Motherboard
CPU
Hard Drive

For the hard drives, I already have 3 1TB WD black drives so was thinking of grabbing another and setting up raid 1+0 unless there is a better way to do the hard drive setup? Currently I just use raid 1 using 2 drives with the third on hand as a backup. Will I notice a difference or even use the extra speed from raid 1+0?

Is this build overkill and could I save some cost somewhere? Dont need monitor or DVD drives. Thanks!

No need for that much CPU power. Grab an i3 or FX-4300.

An i3 will be fine in your application, but if you are serious about doing visualization, stick with a non-K i5 series variant as it has VT-x enabled unlike the K's. The i3's will work as well but I believe all of the i3's (if not the lower end versions) disable some form of virtualization optimization. Check Intel's ARK website when looking up the processor.

I'm not sure if mdadm (linux raid) supports a RAID 1+0 setup? However a RAID 5 will be fine if the majority of the traffic is just streaming media.

Ok so the i5 might be overkill unless I really want to get into virtualization. I think mdadm can do RAID 1+0 but i've only ever done 1 and 0. Thanks for the help.

Mdadm can do RAID 10, yes. You'd be better off with RAID 5, though.

Vogster,

I3 procs have HW optimizations for VM disabled (IIRC I can look for the specifics if needed.) IMO, If you are seriously debating looking into virtualization, and you plan to run a fileserver, get a server grade board, CPU and ECC. You can pick up decent HW for not much more than what you were looking at new, with a bit of work.

I am still running a dual socket 604 system that I bought used off of the classies here a few years ago as my fileserver, and it works without complaint serving up 16Tb.

What are the benefits of actual server hardware over desktop hardware? I mean this will serve my family and maybe a few friends for minecraft/teamspeak but nothing super intensive. I am interested in virtualization because right now when I want to test something I either have to do it on my main desktop or toss together working computer from old parts.

As far as raid 5 vs raid 10 when you guys say raid 5 is fine do you mean just using 3 disks? Everything I keep reading says to stay away from raid 5 and do raid 6 or raid 10.

vogster said:

What are the benefits of actual server hardware over desktop hardware?

Click to expand...

Stability and certain features, such as ECC RAM and higher quality. Server components are generally build to last longer and built with stability as a main priority. Desktop components are built for cost, overclocking, etc. In an enterprise environment, making sure your data is safe and being calculated correctly is much more important than doing it quickly and hoping it isn't corrupt. The downside to this is that it will cost more.

vogster said:

As far as raid 5 vs raid 10 when you guys say raid 5 is fine do you mean just using 3 disks? Everything I keep reading says to stay away from raid 5 and do raid 6 or raid 10.

Click to expand...

If you had five or less disks, RAID 5 is fine. With anything larger, I would suggest RAID 6. If a drive fails, it has to rebuild the array once you replace the disk or fix the problem. The more disks you have in the array, the larger it is, the more points of failure you have, and the higher the chances of a second disk failing during the rebuild. If a second disk fails during a rebuild in a RAID 5 array, all the data is gone. There are steps you could try to force it back into the array as a last ditch effort, but it is risky.

Every RAID level has its place. If someone if flat out saying to stay away from RAID 5, either they aren't giving you all the reasons or they don't know the RAID levels all that well and are parroting bad information. I would only suggest RAID 10 if you needed to avoid the write parity penalty and were writing a lot of data to the disk constantly. For home use, RAID 10 is not worth the disk space loss due to parity. I use RAID 10 on my Dell Poweredge R710 simply because I have many virtual machines accessing the same disk (currently 10 active operating systems, plus the hypervisor). RAID 5/6 wouldn't work as well in this situation.

I also wrote a vast majority of the current Storage Megathread, which may give you some additional information.

Very awesome write up! Ok so with my currently owned 3 1tb drives I can setup a software raid 5 in ubuntu and I will have some fault tolerance and good enough speed to stream video which I think is all I really need.

To put it short, yes, that will be fine. It will also allow you to expand the array if you want to add additional drives.

Properly compressed video takes very little bandwidth. The largest bluray movie I have is 10gb at around 3 hours, which puts it just under 1 MB/sec (0.98/s). DVDs are even smaller (~300 KB/sec) and audio depends on the format, but around 100-200 KB/sec for FLAC. For a single gigabit network connection, you could have a lot of streams running.