file server questions

[OhMyGiddyAunt]

I am looking into building my very first file server. for this server I want to use some of my parts I have lying around but the most i am questioning is the CPU i have a Pentium g640 (Which is a sandy bridge Pentium). would I be able to use this for the server. would i be able to use a lsi 9211-8i hooked up to 4 2tb hdd's connected to another system with an infiniband adapter that would be hoocked up to my gaming pc for file transfer (which would also have an infiniband adapter) would this be more trouble than it is worth or would it  work at all

[Vg05KO9r]

If your doing raid 5 then your CPU probably isn't good enough, although you are using a raid controller so that will mitigate the load on the CPU some what. Really for a file server, it's RAM over CPU, how much ram do you have to throw at this project?

 

[NelizMastr]

4 hours ago, Jake Madden said:

If your doing raid 5 then your CPU probably isn't good enough, although you are using a raid controller so that will mitigate the load on the CPU some what. Really for a file server, it's RAM over CPU, how much ram do you have to throw at this project?

 

RAM really doesn't matter that much for basic file sharing. That's some false BS brought into this world when ZFS was the magical new thing. You'd get away with 4-8GB just fine.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, NelizMastr said:

That's some false BS brought into this world when ZFS was the magical new thing

Which also brought in to this world the magical BS of you need to be using ZFS because anything else is not safe and you'll lose data to data rot/corruption etc.

[NelizMastr]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Which also brought in to this world the magical BS of you need to be using ZFS because anything else is not safe and you'll lose data to data rot/corruption etc.

All of our customers running on RAID5 and 1+0 arrays beg to differ hah  RAID, a decent back-up solution and hot spares save data, no software layer out there can beat that.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, NelizMastr said:

All of our customers running on RAID5 and 1+0 arrays beg to differ hah  RAID, a decent back-up solution and hot spares save data, no software layer out there can beat that.

And hardware RAID controllers do patrol reads to find errors and will fix them with mirror copies or rebuilding from parity bits, silent corruption is EXTREMELY rare.

[NelizMastr]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

And hardware RAID controllers do patrol reads to find errors and will fix them with mirror copies or rebuilding from parity bits, silent corruption is EXTREMELY rare.

Plus the magical things called caching and battery back-ups. We've had some instances of servers losing connectivity to a degree where a hard reboot was necessary. Data was stored in the cache and written do disk after the server came back. Gotta love that.

[OhMyGiddyAunt]

10 hours ago, OhMyGiddyAunt said:

I am looking into building my very first file server. for this server I want to use some of my parts I have lying around but the most i am questioning is the CPU i have a Pentium g640 (Which is a sandy bridge Pentium). would I be able to use this for the server. would i be able to use a lsi 9211-8i hooked up to 4 2tb hdd's connected to another system with an infiniband adapter that would be hoocked up to my gaming pc for file transfer (which would also have an infiniband adapter) would this be more trouble than it is worth or would it  work at all

Would my idea of connecting the data server to another system equipped  with an infiniband adapter work I need to do this because I only have 1u cases (my friend gave me a load of them) thanks in advance 

 

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, OhMyGiddyAunt said:

Would my idea of connecting the data server to another system equipped  with an infiniband adapter work I need to do this because I only have 1u cases (my friend gave me a load of them) thanks in advance 

 

Not with infiniband no. What you need is an external disk shelf, either buy one used or you can make one. You connect to this using SAS SFF-8088 using a external SAS HBA in the 1u server to that disk shelf.

 

 

or

 

 

Then you connect that host server system to your gaming system with either SFP+ 10Gb ethernet or infiniband.

 

[OhMyGiddyAunt]

26 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Not with infiniband no. What you need is an external disk shelf, either buy one used or you can make one. You connect to this using SAS SFF-8088 using a external SAS HBA in the 1u server to that disk shelf.

 

 

or

 

 

Then you connect that host server system to your gaming system with either SFP+ 10Gb ethernet or infiniband.

 

Thanks for the help