You may have already have pondered, or may ponder at some point in the future, the answer to the following question: “John, when it comes to file servers, how do you roll?”
Ponder no more; I would like to take this opportunity to definitively state that I roll like this:
Specifically:
- AMD Sempron 2800 on an EpoX 8KDA3J
- 512mb of Crucial DDR400
- Matched pair of Maxtor 200gb, 7200 RPM SATA drives (8mb cache) arranged as hardware RAID 1, 40gb PATA system drive
- Gigantic scary looking Antec case with 400 watt PSU
It’s currently also got the old system drive from Alexandria in it, too. That will disappear once I can move the contents of the 40gb onto the RAID (the 40 used to be the share drive for Alexandria). The Gentoo build on the old system drive was a little confused, but it booted right up. Crazy fast, too.
For the future, I’m hoping to go all-SATA at some point. If I ever build a MythTV box, I’d probably shoot for a terabyte RAID-5 array. But for my current work, 200gb will be just spiffy.
I hope this new knowledge sets your mind at ease.
And I thought my old PIII 400 with 448mb of RAM and 1 40gb IDE hdd was bad ass. Oh but I’m only using it as my domain controller.
isn’t that ram a little on the low end for a server that size?
That looks like my ship! Hey, you stole my ship and painted it black!
Could be. I’m not really hip to what the average sort of config is these days for such tasks. I might throw another half-gig in it if I see it hitting the swap too much.
–riney
Oh, how embarrassing…I never should buy PC cases off the rack…
–riney
I feel bad for my AMD K6-2 500 now…64kb cache for the win!
Is that a sub-woofer behind the case in picture #1?
Yep, it’s for that electroacoustic propulsion experiment I told you about. I have to find a proper amp for it yet. I can’t drive it off of my stereo amp; the impedance doesn’t match up.
–riney