Comments on: Home server build, part one – specifications

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:28:21 +0000

What sort of network performance are you looking for? That motherboard has a realtek ethernet chipset on it, which are notoriously bad for network performance, plus they use the CPU for almost everything. If you ever plan on streaming video from your server, I strongly suggest either a different board, or purchase an Intel gigabit ethernet card, preferably PCIe.

By: Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:21:06 +0000

In reply to Tony. Interesting idea, but I'm going for a vanilla Debian install because it's what I'm most familiar with, and ext4 running on top of the RAID array.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:10:35 +0000

What OS are you going for?

my suggestion would be Solaris 11, and ZFS to handle the hard drives…

By: Mark Dennehy

Mark Dennehy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 11:46:26 +0000

In reply to david. 1Tb HDD in a server? Why bother? I can spend €200 and have an external 1Tb drive (In fact, I have, it's sitting here on the table). And then, when (not if) it fails, you're back to square one. The point of this box was to be more than that. 4x2Tb drives in a RAID 10 array won't give you 8Tb of raw storage, only half that - but when one of the drives goes, you don't lose the server immediately, and as it's running its own backups over the net (which takes longer than to a tape drive, so it's handier to stage the backups on this server rather than doing them directly), you get the data security and don't have to lose your work box for very long on the backups.

By: david

david — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 06:18:56 +0000

I built my server for less than £250! brief specs – 4GB Ram, 1TB HD, AMD AM3 chip+motherboard+case+silent power supply 450W+ some extra fans. You spend too much for sure!

You don’t need a dvd drive in a server – only for installing the OS from a disc.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 04:04:25 +0000

That’s the same mobo and CPU I use in my desktop PC