Ongoing Building a home media server (1 Viewer)

[AIstudio]

Hi All,
I have read quite a few of the various guides and what people have done to build a media server. I looked at Millhouse's guide etc, Good Job.
What I require though is a little help as i realise this thing is going to be on a lot of the time during the day but asleep at night.

Now I was going to buy some bits n pieces to build this thing from scratch BUT I have just been offered an older dell precision 670 workstation for a little over £150 UK.

Would this be aby good for server use?

I am going to put this into a new tower case or 4u rack mount case. I will have 2 x 8port SATA controller cards controlling around 20 HDD's with two others in raid1 for the OS.

I am just a little concerned about the power consumption of the old P4 Xenon cpu's?? do they use a lot of power??

Anyone have any experience of doing this by recycling a dell

Regards

Kev

PS I realise there are one or two wires changed on the dell power supply's so I may change that so that a normal PSU can be used


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Ok i have had a lot of thinking and what i required from this server and the project has developed somewhat!!!
I just hope the wife doesnt read all this as she would kill me lol.

Anyway here is the spec that I have built up so far.

Case: Supermicro SC846TQ-R900B
CPU: Intel Core i7 920 2.66G
CPU cooler: Artic Cooler Freezer 7 Pro v2
Motherboard: GIGABYTE EX58-UD3R. This has enough PCI and PCIe slots for the cards i have to go in.
Ram: 4GB TW3X4G1333C9A XMS3 CLASSIC
HDD: 8 x 1TB samsung spinpoints and 4 x 1.5TB samsung eco green's
OS HDD: 128GB SAMSUNG 2.5 SATA2 Flash drive
Gfx: 1G GAINWARD 9600GT. I did buy a passive card but it covered one of the Pcie slots and had to send that back.

It has been an interesting and taxing build so far as the case is huge and weighs a ton.

I will post some picks later on as i will take a few.
The reason for the HDD that are in there is that the 8 x 1Tb samsung spinpoints are from my current HTPC and my workstation. Otherwise they would all have been eco green ones.

I am still thinking about power consumtion and I am looking to initially send the server to sleep and wake it up when required. Will have to wait until the server is fully built before that happens.
The main reason for the expensive case is that i looked into buying a full tower and back planes. In some country's this is a cheaper option but not here in the UK. By the time i had finished messing with all the parts required it wasnt far of the cost of the supermicro case anyway.

Anwyay back to work for now will post some build pics later...................


Thanks to all for your input

Kev

 

[jonm]

Any old PC will do as a server really, as long as it'll run the OS you're planning for it. The requirements for a server for dishing out media aren't great really, assuming an average set up with a few clients.

Don't know about the CPU, although "probably" would be my answer, and 20 HDDs will mount up, power-wise, too. Having bought one of those "Owl" power monitoring gadgets and worked out where all my money was going, I'm paranoid about power consumption, and I don't leave *anything* on overnight now...

 

[AIstudio]

Hi jonm,
Yeah i know what you mean about power consumption, starting to look at this myself at the mo as the cost of bills is getting a bit, weelllllll, REDICULOUS in this country!!!
I hadnt thought about the OS yet. I was going to go for a rock solid XP with SP3 setup, BUT, MP have noted that they wont support it in the future as things will move to Vista and 7.
The server will also be used as my server for TV and everything else around the house.
At the moment i have a powerfull gaming HTPC in the front room. As my media is growing at an alarming rate i really want to move the media to a server as well as the tv cards and drives etc. Then my rig in my front room will be a LOT cooler etc.
I was hoping to have all the hard drives spun down unless being used to help with power consumption.
I just dont know if the CPU's in an old Dell 670 will be good enough for vista x64 or 7x64 OS's ???
They do seem like a powerfull little system and would be great at a relatively cheap cost. To put it in perspective, if i buy a motherboard, ram, cpu etc etc it is going to cost a LOT more than £150.
I was hoping to put the 670 guts into a 4u case and just set it all up and install the OS etc. Put it under my stairs and connect it to the network.

If anyone has any thoughts about the Dell and Vista x64 or 7 x64 please shout up before I do something i regret lol.

Thanks

Kev

 

[jonm]

Hi Kev,

I think I misunderstood - are you saying you're going to run MP on this server? I was assuming it was just going to be a fileserver - apologies for the confusion.

I went down the route of a (linux) fileserver in the loft which I used to store everything - even recorded TV across the network from a diskless MP machine in the living room. It worked well, but then I worked out the cost of the fileserver being always on and ditched that idea, so my MP PC now records to a local hard disk again and only powers itself up when needed. My 'normal' electricity consumption is still 6.3p an hour which I still consider too much, but not sure what I can do now to reduce that much more.

 

[AIstudio]

Hi Johnm,
I am going to run the TV server side on the server. The HTPC in the front room (and any other pc's in the house) will be just the MP side installed.
Therefore the server will have all the hard drives and TV cards in it.
At present the TV server side of MP and the user side of MP are both installed on the HTPC as a single seat all in one.
I am a little worried that i will end up with a huge electricity consumption but we don't have the TV on in the front room most of the time. It is only on some evenings and mainly at weekends. We also dont tend to record a lot of TV.
The other issues are the TV tuners. I have a LOT of problems putting the HTPC to sleep and getting TV working again and initially thought leave the server on 24/7. That would solve the wake issues with the TV cards but cost a fortune in electricity.
There must be a solution here???? maybe a network storage solution like a drobo???
Just that the server would also be used as storage for my work files and ftp/web etc.
I could set it to WOL but not sure about the TV cards being ok with that.

Decisions Decisions lol

Regards

Kev

 

[Bagal]

In my experience you'd be better off spending money on a newer more power efficient CPU, I can't speak for the P4 Xenon's but I was using an old P4 3GHz desktop CPU in my server, which at the time had 9 hard drives and 2 DVB-T cards and it was idling at around 130w (this didn't really include the drives as they were set to spin down). This was on 24/7 and over the course of a year my electricity bill went from around £50 per month to £100 per month.

Earlier this year I rebuilt it using a Pentium Dual Core e5200 and upgraded the hard disks to a larger capacity so I could reduce the number required, in total I spent just over £300 but I calculated that I could recoup those costs in about 18 months in saved electricity.

The new server consumes about 60w when idle and is still on 24/7 and the good news is that my electricity bill just recently went down to £60 per month.

 

[AIstudio]

Hi Bagal,
Very good points and it is what I was thinking. I remember my old dual processor system that had two athlon MP's in there and they were REALLY power hungry. Couldn't hear myself think when it was on either lol.
I will have to look into the motherboard and hard drives that i want to use but it looks like the cpu will be either:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8600, S775, Wolfdale, 3.33 GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 6MB Cache, 10x Ratio, 65W
or
Intel Core2 Quad Q9550S, S775, Yorkfield Core, 2.83GHz, 1333MHz, 12MB Cache, 8.5x Ratio, 65W

both are 45nm chips and both at 65W

Just getting a good motherboard for these with at least 2 x PCI & 2 x PCIe also a good board to put to sleep and wake. Also a must is at least 6 x SATA ports onboard.
If anyone has had any good experiences with motherboards to suit sleep etc I am all ears. I have used Asus boards in the past and had nothing but trouble. I have used and Asus Striker Extreme and an Asus Striker II Formula.

Thanks for the info so far it is a help

Regards

Kev

 

[eetaylog]

Hi mate, just read this thread and wanted to add my 2 pennies as ive been through the same process as you before now when deciding how to go about building my server.

1) i would certainly choose a core2 processor over a P4 when considering power consumption as they use a lot less power and run a lot cooler (as pointed out by Bagal above).

2) i noticed that you want to put your server under your stairs? if this is still the case, make sure you take heat into consideration. i put my server under my stairs, and it got very warm in there due to lack of air flow, and consequently the CPU and HDD temperatures used to rocket (and sometimes even cause the server to shutdown due to overheating!). i got round this by adding a huge heatsink (Scythe mini ninja) to the CPU and drilling through my partition wall and adding an extractor fan (which now helps to heat my front room and cut down on heating bills ). Id recommend speedfan to monitor your system temperatures.

3) i would think twice about using software controllers for your RAID setup as they are very unreliable. i had a RAID card die on me last year, and it wasnt much fun losing all my data (~2Tb at the time).

Good luck with this, if you want to see how i put mine together see here. Ive changed a few things since that write-up (such as getting rid of the trunking on the wall, adding the extractor fan and adding a few more HDD's), but its pretty much how im running my system now and im very happy with it.

 

[AIstudio]

Hi eetaylog,

Yes i think I am going to steer clear of the old CPU's as it will cost me a fortune in energy.
I am thinking about heat build up at the moment (after your comments) and thinking of running some ducting through into my kitchen (other side of the wall) It is the coldest room in the house and could do with a little help lol). I am sure the heat from the server would helpout there a LOT
My HTPC warms the front room already lol.

When I say software RAID I was thining Flexraid (no Raid card at all) I was going to use a couple of SATA controller cards from super micro to connect them up. (these have 8x SATA ports).
I lost all my family photos when I also had a hardware RAID controller die The misses is still VERY unhappy with me for that as it was pics of our kids etc.
I have been using FlexRaid on my HTPC to backup nearly 4Tb of data to an external drive. It resyncs once a week and has saved my bacon a few times already. I do like FlexRaid.
My Idea was to fill the server with 1.5Tb drives and my 8 x 1TB drives and use Flexraid to protect them in the event of a failure.
As the data doesn't change that often and is very static I thought that this may be the best solution for me??? not sure but I really dont want to shell out for a Hardware card that can controll upto 20 drives. Unless someone has a very good cost effective solution??
Many thanks for the tips and glad your system is running strongly. Still have some issues with mine mainly my Hauppuage S2 connected through a Diseque switch to a dish with 4LNB's, it cant change the LNB's through media portal at the mo) Hopefully MP will fix it soon
Anyways enough of my rambling.
It is a difficult task backing up LOTS of data without having to spend a small fortune. Like you though, I think that the NAS boxes of today are better than they were but still not good enough for me.
I will use speedfan to control and monitor things
The other things about the server are that it will host my website and also FTP etc so it will be on 24/7
I was hoping to be able to have it go to sleep, but with hosting my own website that is out of the equation really.

Many thanks for the heads up on the heat etc, looking at ducting for it right now


regards

Kev

 

[eetaylog]

Yeah ive heard about FlexRaid, its meant to be pretty good. I thought you meant you were going to use a cheapy software based card for your array, which is what i did, and I got stung!

i also thought about running ducting into my kitchen, which is pretty cold like yours, but dont forget that steam might get into the cupboard if ever the extractor was off and youre cooking, which could damage the server if condensation managed to get inside the enclosure

what about having the server upstairs, and streaming to the living room client over a wireless N network (~200Mb/s)? or even a wired network (~1Gb/s) if youre handy with Cat5e patching? This is what i ended up doing for our laptop client.