What do you think of this server build?

[BenF]

The server is a 'home server' but it sounds like the OP is planning to host servers to paying customers. Because of that very reliable hard drives plus backups are needed. Running the drives in RAID 0 would likely be a bad decision as it just increases decreases the reliability (one drives fails the whole array is not recoverable). Maybe look at the western digital RE3 drives. They are supposed to be more reliable than their regular drives.

I'm not sure how much ram you would need but I'd imagine if you are hosting as many servers as you plan you'd probably want at least 12gb-24gb if not more, one of the server gurus please correct me if I'm wrong.

As Mr. Guvernment said you really need to plan on how you will attract and keep customers before you purchase you're hardware.

 

[dropadrop]

for one raptors are not really know to be the most reliable hdds, just fast. reliability is a huge factor in servers.

And not just that, putting 3 of them in RAID 0 will triple your chance for failure.

 

[BoT]

thats where a good back up plus mirror image comes in.
or even better raid 10 or raid 0+1 .. as mentioned

but it's really irrelevant because OP already stated that he will use the SSD as the data drive and possibly get a second one

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

raid 0 alone i dont think will give great performance for a game server since most data is very small file sizes not massive ones, maybe the odd map or something.

 

[BenF]

raid 0 alone i dont think will give great performance for a game server since most data is very small file sizes not massive ones, maybe the odd map or something.

I have to agree with you. Even the maps aren't very big. I know that with cod5 the custom maps are rarely over 40mb. The included maps are likely a bit bigger as they have more detail but I can imagine you'd find a map big enough to benefit from raid 0. Everything is broken down into many smaller files like you said.

 

[BoT]

my thinking behind the raid 0 was not so much about file transfer speeds but it will perform well in a multi user access environment.
after all a raid 0 is not just one super fast large disc but multiple with multiple read/write heads, which each can perform tasks, which is where the raid 0 performance comes from.
if a multitude of of users accessing different data on the raid then these users would be able to access the data at the same time with very little performance loss, because there are multiple read/write heads. this at least works if the data is on different disk which is likely since it spread over all discs in the array
on a single disk, all users with access have to share the read/write heads of that single drive.

 

[dropadrop]

RAID 0 does not significantly improve access time. Not at all really.

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

the more drives you add to raid 0, usually once you get over 3 or 4, access times go up.

it would be better then a single drive for multi users, but all that is accessing the drives is the game server loading files, so really only 1 'user' so to speak, per game server.
i would rather do a raid 5 or something, have some redundancy on the server and still have good read's.

 

[BoT]

yes, now that would be an alternative