Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

<< < (2/31) > >>

superboyac:
wraith:
I can't define a single function for it.  It will primarily be to hold tons of everything.  Videos take up the most space, I'm putting all my movies, all family recordings, etc. into it.  Many of them will be uncompressed, raw stuff.  They take up massive amounts of space.  But I'm also going to do everything else with it I normally do.  Virtual machines, tons and tons of software, content creation, games, arcade emulators, anything I can think of.  I guess I'm just a little tired of needing to build a machine every time i try a project.  I just want one ultimate one now, based around lots of hard drives.

40:
I've not been convinced to use NAS yet, mostly because it sounds to me to be a storage solution with a more restricted OS than full-scale Windows/Linux, and maybe just because I don't understand it or have less control (can't really tell).  I like the Norco units, no real problem there, that's an option.  I also like those ADdonics boxes, and when I was looking into those, the ones with the build quality I preferred were the ones from istardock (see here).  WHy?  They are made of metal vs. plastic.  I need to go through my notes to figure out which sas card expander thing I would need (I still don't really understand how to choose one, but i have a list of recommendations from here and around the web).  The two separate servers might be a good idea, I might even just use my current desktop (which has like a 7.8 windows performance rating  :up:) as the storage server, and the xeon/dual i7 thing as the high-performance vm box, what not.

Shades, I was thinking the same thing about Windows server 2012, I really want to give it a shot.  Especially the latest R2 version (preview version), because they supposedly significantly improved their drive pooling features.

Stoic...that sounds awesome, maybe I'll do something like that also.

superboyac:
OK, so as a less insane/more practical option for the storage, how about this?

The only case out there I could find that is built for this sort of thing is the Addonics Storage IX case:
Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

Then, I need the actual cages to stick in there.  My favorite ones, as I said, are from istardock:
Please help superboyac build a server (2013 edition).

So in the end, each box like this can hold up to fifteen drives.  I'll probably start out with one, then pretty soon move to two.  That should hold me over for a while  :D.

Remaining items for the high performance server:
motherboard
cpu (xeon?, dual i7?)
the card that will allow all the drives to plug in (sas expander?, raid?, i don't know the right term)

tomos:
^FWIW, my small experience with 80x80 fans has been *very* noisy.
Maybe there are quiet ones out there?

Stoic Joker:
Stoic...that sounds awesome, maybe I'll do something like that also.-superboyac (July 31, 2013, 04:35 PM)
--- End quote ---

If you do keep a few things in mind:

* When this thing spins up it is loud as hell (8 Uber fans). We had to build it its own little room with a portable A/C unit ($280 at Lowes).
* Retail on this thing is north of $10,000 - But OMFG is it fast - Tehehe - I'm currently virtualizing Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2013, and 8 other servers on it ... And it ain't even blinked yet.
* The DL380p is a rack unit. Yes you can run it just fine sitting on a table...but it needs serious ventilation, and/or dedicated A/C unit.
* Lenovo also makes a nice Server with the same capacity (and similar price), that I'm running against this one to see who does best.
* Some sort of Hyper-V aware backup preferably featuring deduplication will be needed - Currently I'm up for suggestions on this point.

Stoic Joker:
Forget about 3.5" drives ... The 2.5" are easier to pack in the case and cheaper to run.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page