Reusing Old Parts for a Media Server - Would these parts work?

[EChondo]

Hey all, as time and time goes on I have been obtaining more and more videos of anime, movies, tv shows, home movies, and family photos. Instead of keeping them on my personal computer, I would like to expand it to a media server. I have old parts laying around, nothing too fancy, but I was hoping this could work. Most of these parts are indeed old, but the hard drives are practically brand new.

 

CPU: Core 2 Quad

MB: EVGA nForce 780i SLI

RAM: Corsair 2x(2x2GB) XMS DDR2, yes 8GB total

GPU: N/A

PSU: Antec TruePower Quattro 1000w OR Corsair GS700

 

I plan on throwing a single 120GB SSD in for the OS(haven't decided which OS, but definitely Linux), then adding in 4x3TB Seagate hard drives, but haven't decided on what kind of RAID I want to do. I was thinking of separating them into 2x3TB and 2x3TB and doing RAID 1 for a total of 6TB. These are 7200RPM as well.

 

I haven't decided on a case because the case I originally intended to use is MicroATX only and the EVGA board is ATX.

 

Also the two PSU's I listed are ones I have that are left over. The Antec is the one that system has been using for the past 4 years or so, but I can change it out for the Corsair one if need be(was using the 700w for my personal build up until 5 months ago).

 

Can anyone give me a "yay" or "nay" on this build? There are 5 people in my current household, so I would expect to have at max 5 people using the box at once, of course added guests. However, I doubt more than 2-3 people would be using the box at any given time.

 

Thanks for any and all help guys. I'll be gone for the next 5 or so hours, so sorry if I don't respond in a timely manner.

[AMICLG]

For the CPU if your feeling risky you can heat up a razor blade and cut the notches out of the socket and put an Xeon E5450 in it with a pcb sticker to bridge some pins on the Xeon. http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

[theawesomejman]

yay

[EChondo]

For the CPU if your feeling risky you can heat up a razor blade and cut the notches out of the socket and put an Xeon E5450 in it with a pcb sticker to bridge some pins on the Xeon. http://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

 

Mildly interesting.

 

Will consider it depending on which CPU I have on the board already.

[EChondo]

UPDATE

 

I have found out that the CPU is indeed a Core 2 Quad.

 

Hopefully that helps.

[dalekphalm]

UPDATE

 

I have found out that the CPU is indeed a Core 2 Quad.

 

Hopefully that helps.

The build looks pretty good. Media servers generally won't need a super lot of horsepower unless you specifically intend to do a ton of on-the-fly transcoding, and even then, a Core 2 Duo should hold up well enough for minor transcoding.

 

In terms of your storage solution. #1 definitely go Software RAID over hardware RAID (As I'm assuming those Seagate drives are the normal consumer level ones, correct?). If this is a Media/File server, then I would just do a RAID 5 array. You'll maximize your storage, and you won't require anything faster. I would personally check out FlexRAID, as it's simply a fantastic RAID-like solution. It works on Ubuntu (Possibly other Linux distro's as well), is easy to setup, extremely easy to do live expansions with more drives, swapping drives for larger drives, etc, and you can easily add more Parity drives on-the-go as your array grows (Whereas with traditional software RAID, if you choose RAID 5, you're pretty much stuck with one parity drive). It spans all the drives into one visible "share", but the spanning and RAID are "overtop" the file system, so that if you pop a drive out, you can stick it in any old computer and read the contents (assuming the OS can read the particular file system you use, ntfs, exfat, ext2(3, 4, etc), and so on). This is great in case the array ever fails during a rebuild or something, since if that happens, you ONLY lose the data from the failed disks, and all the other data will be fine.

 

Alternatives include the built-in Linux mdadm software raid utility. The benefit is that it's free, and for a software raid solution, it's fairly flexible (Allowing RAID5-like arrays where you can define any number of parity disks, similar to FlexRAID - though I personally don't know what limitations there are for online expansion of parity disks).

 

I would stay away from hardware raid, or "fakeraid" (motherboard RAID 5, or those cheap raid cards that don't actually have a RAID processor).

 

If you want to know more about FlexRAID then @looney would be a good person to ask.

[EChondo]

The build looks pretty good. Media servers generally won't need a super lot of horsepower unless you specifically intend to do a ton of on-the-fly transcoding, and even then, a Core 2 Duo should hold up well enough for minor transcoding.

 

In terms of your storage solution. #1 definitely go Software RAID over hardware RAID (As I'm assuming those Seagate drives are the normal consumer level ones, correct?). If this is a Media/File server, then I would just do a RAID 5 array. You'll maximize your storage, and you won't require anything faster. I would personally check out FlexRAID, as it's simply a fantastic RAID-like solution. It works on Ubuntu (Possibly other Linux distro's as well), is easy to setup, extremely easy to do live expansions with more drives, swapping drives for larger drives, etc, and you can easily add more Parity drives on-the-go as your array grows (Whereas with traditional software RAID, if you choose RAID 5, you're pretty much stuck with one parity drive). It spans all the drives into one visible "share", but the spanning and RAID are "overtop" the file system, so that if you pop a drive out, you can stick it in any old computer and read the contents (assuming the OS can read the particular file system you use, ntfs, exfat, ext2(3, 4, etc), and so on). This is great in case the array ever fails during a rebuild or something, since if that happens, you ONLY lose the data from the failed disks, and all the other data will be fine.

 

Alternatives include the built-in Linux mdadm software raid utility. The benefit is that it's free, and for a software raid solution, it's fairly flexible (Allowing RAID5-like arrays where you can define any number of parity disks, similar to FlexRAID - though I personally don't know what limitations there are for online expansion of parity disks).

 

I would stay away from hardware raid, or "fakeraid" (motherboard RAID 5, or those cheap raid cards that don't actually have a RAID processor).

 

If you want to know more about FlexRAID then @looney would be a good person to ask.

Thanks a lot for the writeup. I have decided on FreeNAS and will be doing ZFS.

 

I'm currently setting up the RAID, will read up on it some more before going through with it.

 

Also, hardware pic(I'm using a 550ti for initial boot and setup);

 

[bronsonp4htdude123455]

just out of curiosity why raid one? raid one if im not mistaken is the slowest? and raid 0 wouldnt be safe. why  not raid 5 so it has better performance and rudundancy?

[dalekphalm]

just out of curiosity why raid one? raid one if im not mistaken is the slowest? and raid 0 wouldnt be safe. why  not raid 5 so it has better performance and rudundancy?

RAID One is actually not that slow. When writing, it has the same performance as a single disk (As both disks write simultaneously). So assuming all drives are the same make and model, you may get a tiny performance hit due to added overhead, but essentially the same otherwise.

 

When reading from the array however, you'll get increased performance based on how many disks are in the array, as you'll be able to read from multiple disks at once. The only bottleneck here is the interface speed (PCIe lane being used, or SATA bottlenecks, etc).

[bronsonp4htdude123455]

RAID One is actually not that slow. When writing, it has the same performance as a single disk (As both disks write simultaneously). So assuming all drives are the same make and model, you may get a tiny performance hit due to added overhead, but essentially the same otherwise.

 

When reading from the array however, you'll get increased performance based on how many disks are in the array, as you'll be able to read from multiple disks at once. The only bottleneck here is the interface speed (PCIe lane being used, or SATA bottlenecks, etc).

i understand how raid one works its just a mirror i was just saying it was the slowest of the raids... ;p but would raid 5 be better because of the mirroring and striping?

[dalekphalm]

i understand how raid one works its just a mirror i was just saying it was the slowest of the raids... ;p but would raid 5 be better because of the mirroring and striping?

Can you explain what you mean by "the mirroring and striping"?

 

N = Number of drives in RAID Array

RAID 5 doesn't do mirroring at all. It takes the data, stripes each data set onto (N Drives - 1), and then adds the parity calculation to that last drive. But it goes in an alternating way like this:

 

4 Drive array with 4 files

A = File #1

B = File #2

C = File #3

D = File #4

p = Parity calc

 

Drive #1 | Drive #2 | Drive #3 | Drive #4

| A1        | A2          | A3          |Ap         |

| B1        | B2          | Bp          |B3         |

| C1        | Cp         | C2          |C3         |

| Dp        | D1         | D2          |D3         |

 

So each drive has one parity calculation and 1 bit of each different file. You can lose any ONE drive in RAID 5, but you also lose one drive's worth of space. RAID 6 is exactly the same but has 2 parity calculations per drive, and you can sustain 2 drive failures, but you also lose 2 drives worth of space.

 

Anyway RAID 5 (Or equivalent - and if you go more than 6 drives I highly recommend RAID 6 instead) is probably the most optimal storage mechanism for a Media Server. You get a great read speed increase over single drives, but the write speed can take a hit because of the parity calculations. But for a Media Server, generally writing happens far less than reading does.