Building a File Server

[Killgannon]

So I'm planning on building a File server, which will likely also house other servers i'm going to experiment with. The OS will be linux of course. the internal specs really don't matter too much for me so those are fine, the real question that i'm posing here is how to handle the storage drives. I'm sort of torn between getting a full sized case and jamming it full of HDDs, or getting a smaller case and using an external enclosure. with the external i'm worried about speeds being not as good as internal would be, so really I'm looking for advice about that.

[Evanos]

How are you planning on using your discs? Are you going to put them in a RAID? If so, I would recommend getting a good sized tower that has slots for a decent amount of 3.5 bays and then just doing a straight line to the SATA connectors. If not a RAID an external enclosure could work, but if you are building this from off the ground and have a choice between a case that can fit your drives or an external enclosure, I would go with a case that can fit your drives.


How is your budget? A good case with decent cooling and tons of 3.5 bay slots at a good price is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129042
They are currently $70 on the egg, but they go on sale all the time, I'm barely exaggerating when I say once a week.

[Isiolia]

Why Linux? AFAIK, most folks building storage servers are using Opensolaris or FreeBSD in order to use ZFS...though that ups your RAM requirements substantially.

External enclosure would really depend on what you were connecting it with.

You may want to browse around here http://hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=29 - should give you some ideas.

[jurjur]

Depending on number of drives you need, Norco makes some pretty good+expensive cases that house a ton of drives (20+)

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail....delno=RPC-4220

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail....delno=RPC-4020

Also, maybe you should take a look at unraid as an OS.

[Hellfury]

It really depends on what kind of size (capacity wise) and future expansion plans you're looking at, as well as what you're actually going to use it for, how many users etc.

The requirements for a server stuffed with large files but few actual accesses would be wildly different from a database server with frequent (but potentially small) processes. (you mentioned housing other servers)

You also need to consider the practical hardware issues, in addition to the placement issues you've already mentioned, your choice of RAID solutions will matter significantly. in addition to the hardware vs software(ugh) RAID, there's the matter of failure rates and rebuilding the arrays, the problem presented with RAID5 is that rebuilding can quickly be a pain if the controller itself goes to hell and critical information about the RAID composition itself is lost (whereas _some_ RAID1s are pure mirrors, and if the controller itself goes to hell, the drives work just fine standalone), of course there are controllers where this is no problem at all. But this isn't superrelevant until you know for sure what you want to do with the drives

I personally have a (statistically unfouded?) skepticism towards standard external HDs, I've had way too many fail on me, I prefer internal ones that I can easily put in RAID setups, I haven't kept up with how well eSATA works, and USB3 might be good stuff, but unless you intend to move the drives around a lot to other locations, why?
(there are some fairly neat external USB gadgets that allow functionality similar to hot-swap etc. though)

You also need to consider air flow (temperature), power requirements, physical location of server and so on.

Personally I like large servers with internal HDs, but insufficient information to make clear suggestions

[Killgannon]

This is mainly a home server, that would go with me into the future and do whole home things. It won't have as intensive of of access as a Database Server might, but it will house MP3s/movies/etc for all the computers in my home (other servers just means stuff im playing with) and since i do listen to music/have movies or TV shows on ALL the time, it would be in constant use.

As far as OS, I meant Linux in the most general term (ie. not windows), and havent fully decided on an OS yet.

I'm looking at that Antec case and saving it for use later. 6 3.5" slots doesn't really give me THAT much room for drives, unless I start doing 2TB drives... which may happen as there would only be space for 5 storage drives (I'm a firm believer in separating OS from data...)

This is a project for me that won't all be completed at once, I need to get all the initial major things, and then in the future add storage as it comes on sale... so right now I'm mainly looking for case suggestions

edit: I currently have ~2TB of space (RAID 0 NAS, and RAID0 Hdd's in my main box), and it's quickly filling up so thus this idea