I want to make a file server to place elsewhere in my home. Basically to get that hard drive noise away from me and support more drives than my machine would likely be able to cool efficiently. I know some people here have drives located elsewhere, so I thought those of you could offer some insight.

Basically, I want something with the bare minimum of hardware that can support a couple normal IDE drives and a large number of SATA drives via SATA controller card(s).

What would be the best way to go around this? Obviously, I plan on expanding this a small amount at a time (like one drive at a time). It's going to take long enough for me to find the disposable income to piece the machine together, let alone outfit it with a bunch of drives.

So, should I just go with a standard PC, and find a case, mobo/CPU/RAM, big-ass PSU, cheapo vid card, and a SATA controller card (one to start)? Or is there some other solution I could look into. *edit* for that matter, for a simple file server, would SATA drives even be necessary? I just figured it would be a little easier to fit multiple drives in there if they were SATA drives and controllers. */edit*

And what are the requirements for a computer that will be doing next to nothing other than serving files to another machine? How much memory do I need? For that matter, do I even need an OS? Is there a way to set it up without one?

Thanks for your help.

*edit*
ps- yes, I was recently asking questions about the server I got from my office. However, there's only 80GB of space, and I don't fancy replacing all the Seagate SCSI drives in the RAID, and the machine is pretty old anyway. I do, however, plan on using it in the future as a web server. I also want to get my other drives out of my current machine.

for that matter, for a simple file server, would SATA drives even be necessary? I just figured it would be a little easier to fit multiple drives in there if they were SATA drives and controllers.

If you want more than a couple of drives in there, SATA is the way to go. However, unless you need to put lots of drives in there right now, you'll probably never need to: if you're like me you'll buy a new drive every three years or so, all of which will cost the same amount and each of which is so much bigger than the previous one that it's not worth running the previous one alongside it.

And what are the requirements for a computer that will be doing next to nothing other than serving files to another machine? How much memory do I need? For that matter, do I even need an OS? Is there a way to set it up without one?

I use a Pentium MMX 233 with 128Mb, which is much more than adequate. That's for Linux, though; you'd likely need more if you attempted to do this using Windows.

Peter

On a related note, anyone have any recommendations on replacement powersupplies/fans/etc that run more quietly? My 2.7Ghz sounds a bit like a 747. I'm far too lazy to run ethernet cabling around the house to get the server out of the room, so if I can shut it up, that's the next best thing.

ms

What, this thread didn't have enough advice on the topic for ya?

I like to think that my PSU is pretty quiet. It's not silent, and I can't be sure exactly how quiet it is, but when I disconnected all my drives and only had the PSU, CPU, and video card fans going, it was a very nice noise level.

I've got an Antec True550. That's right, quiet and 550W. It's worked great for me so far.

I just saw that you asked for all kinds of noise improvement products. Well, the changes I made specifically to improve noise levels were with my CPU fan/heatsink, and the video card fan/heatsink. I'm certain at this point that my CPU HSF was defective. It was incredibly noisey. I then replaced it with this Zalman HSF and not only is it quite attractive (good for the window in my case), it cools very well and is very quiet. I replaced my AIW 9700's fan because it had a very definite whine to it. I went with Zalman again, and added the optional fan which hardly makes a sound.

Other than that, check out www.silentpcreview.com

I also use Antec PSU. I don't know what your configuration needs are but I have bought two rack mountable cases from these guys. They were cheap and held a lot of drives. The construction is heavyduty.

www.plinkusa.net

I use a Pentium MMX 233 with 128Mb, which is much more than adequate. That's for Linux,

Ditto for my fileserver. I'm also port-forwarding my web-server to it. Although I'm only using 10baseT for my network, I find the bottleneck is still in disk transfer speed, rather than CPU or network speed.

I would use older machines for server duty but it's just such a pain to recompile things on them! Recompiling the kernel when it takes several hours is just not fun. I've got a 1.3GHz Celeron with 1GB RAM as my fileserver and it's load average is pretty much 0.00 all day.

Several hours just for the kernel? My 233 machine isn't that slow. Mind you I did upgrade it from GCC2 to GCC3 the other week, and recompiled the whole of userland (including X, Qt, Mozilla, Galeon and Evolution, though not KDE) and it took four days. But I had a makefile for the whole shebang, so it just sat there cheerfully compiling for four days with no interaction needed.

Peter

Nah. I tried it once on a 386 and it took hours. Most of the night from what I remember and you just had to pray that you had the right options compiled in!
Are you using Gentoo?

Nah. I tried it once on a 386 and it took hours.

Oof, I never used Linux on anything older than 486/66.

Are you using Gentoo?

No.

Peter

My first Linux box was a 386sx16, so kernel rebuilds used to be an over night job. And that was when the kernel was a lot smaller and less complex than it is now.

if you're like me you'll buy a new drive every three years or so, all of which will cost the same amount and each of which is so much bigger than the previous one that it's not worth running the previous one alongside it.

I never really responded to this, so I will. You're right about much of this. Every time we add the latest sized hard disk to our systems it seems pointless to keep the others around because they're dwarfed by the new ones. But I keep mine. I'm not sure exactly why. I think it's connected to my dislike for combining drives into larger partitions. I keep one partition per drive, and use it for a purpose. For example, here's the drives I have in my system in the order they found their way in (all the following are Western Digital drives - I just like them):

25GB 5400RPM - spare drive for Tivo extraction. A good size for extracting and converting around 4 to 6 shows before putting them in a more permanent location.

100GB 7200RPM - first drive I ever added to a system. at that point I used it for all additional files (downloads, Outlook store, web sites). I still do.

80GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer - OS drive. Yeah, it's the third drive I've owned. The 25GB drive used to be the OS drive.

250GB 7200RPM 8MB buffer SATA - TV shows. Yup, that's all. I have this thing next to full with 220GB of TV shows, and around 20GB of torrents in progress. This doesn't even include the additional 15 or so DVDR's that also have TV shows on them.


So Peter, you make sense, but I don't think I follow the same behaviour. This is just about every hard drive that I've obtained so far, and I just kept adding them to each other. That's where my noise issue is coming from. Those first two drives are pretty loud, especially the 25GB. I'd like to get them into a seperate box.

I suspect I'll need to simply add and add, as I've become quite addicted to Bittorrent, which sucks up storage space at an incredible rate

40Mb Connor, stock drive in Acorn RiscPC, no idea where it is now
210Mb Quantum, now OS drive in RiscPC
1Gb Seagate, stock drive in Dan Pentium PC, used to triple-boot Linux/Win95/NT3.51, no idea where it is now
5Gb Quantum, now boot drive in Pentium PC, useful when BIOS doesn't like big drives but Linux does
25Gb IBM, now in a cardboard box somewhere
120Gb IBM, current data drive, full
300Gb Maxtor, replacement data drive not installed yet

They didn't make 600Gb drives when I went to replace the 120Gb, but apart from that it's rather neatly factors of 5 all the way. The 120Gb drive is probably headed for a Rio Central once I install the 300Gb.

Peter

I've been considering setting up a file server myself... I don't exactly have a dedicated file server at home, but I do have a few SAMBA shares on both my Linux and Windows boxen. I have thought of going the dedicated file server route, and keeping most of my media files on said file server, but I'm a little concerned about performance. Obviously, having to go get files off the network (be it via 802.11g, 10Base100 or 10Base1000) is not nearly as fast as getting them via the local IDE/SATA controller. But I was wondering if, in practice, how bad this is.

I guess the only way to figure it out is to try it, but what kind of penalty can I expect? The biggest problems I've noticed on my SAMBA shares is not in the ability to get file data fast enough, but in the ability to get directory listings fast enough, especially when the number of files in a directory is large.

So, for best performance, would switching to ReiserFS help? How about using NFS instead of SAMBA? Of course a RAID array will help the cause, but I'm not sure I want to take that kind of plunge yet. In general, what are the prevailing theories on how to best set up a file server on Linux for the best performance?

I'm still waiting impatiently for Linux support for this RAID controller.

ETA is mid Q2 for initial support, and Q3 for full support in the kernel, including 2.6 that is running on my 3rd server.