Turion Server???

dgrooms · Post by **dgrooms** » Mon May 22, 2006 5:33 am

I am thinking about building a Turion file server for home use to archive family movies, pictures, etc. I have a promise raid 6 card which I plan to use with the MSI motherboard that is listed as Turion compliant. My main goal here is to limit power consumption as it will be running 24/7. I was also hoping to run Linux on it so that it can serve both PC's and Mac's. Any thoughts on the feasability of this?
Thanks!

Devonavar · Post by **Devonavar** » Mon May 22, 2006 11:45 am

Perfectly feasible, if a bit expensive. Your main power consumers are likely to be your 6 drives. For the record, many people on these forums have recommissioned old P-II systems (or others of that era) that work perfectly fine as a file server. I would imagine that even an original Pentium would be up to the task so long as you can get the RAID card working...

dgrooms · Post by **dgrooms** » Mon May 22, 2006 1:42 pm

The RAID card is PCI Express which is the governing factor, and that is why I am trying to find the lowest power "modern" cpu. Can you think of any boards that have PCI express and run an older processor?

vapb400 · Post by **vapb400** » Wed May 24, 2006 3:06 pm

There are none.

I would personally go with the cheapest Sempron + cheap NF4 board (better SATA performance)

elec999 · Post by **elec999** » Wed May 24, 2006 3:27 pm

How much storage spac do you need. It would be really easy for you to raid two 750gig drives or 500gig. Then you can use any motherboard. Get a new socket am2 sempron, and force the cpu to run in cool and quiet mode all the time.
Thanks

nix-madness · Post by **nix-madness** » Wed May 24, 2006 6:58 pm

dgrooms wrote:The RAID card is PCI Express which is the governing factor, and that is why I am trying to find the lowest power "modern" cpu. Can you think of any boards that have PCI express and run an older processor?

Have you purchased the RAID card yet? As far as I know, not all Promise RAID cards works well with Linux (unless you are prepare to use their proprietary driver). You might want to check out the compatibility here: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

If you have not purchased the RAID card, then you might want to consider a VIA C3 based mini-ITX motherboard and add a PCI 4-ports SATA controller. Those VIA C3 processors can run really cool (<20W TDP; ~1W idle). As a matter of fact, you don't really need active cooling for these processors. But one thing to note is that it has ONLY one PCI slot.

With the PCI 4-ports SATA, you could then run a RAID 5 using Linux's "md" software RAID.

I'm also looking into building one homebrew NAS to store all my family photos and videos. I've plan to start it with a 4-port SATA controller (8-port SATA controllers are expensive in Singapore, I might have to sell my kidney to get it) and expand it later with additional controllers when my need increases. But till now, I'm still not able to find a low power consuming processor (<20W TDP) that can go on a motherboard with 2 or more PCI slots (eg mATX) and gigabit LAN. Yes, there are dual PCI raiser cards available to extend the PCI slot for those mini-ITX motherboards, but I'm concerned about it's I/O performance.

Some people have even suggested to me to use a Pentium M/Celeron M. But motherboards for such processors are not available here in Singapore. In fact most motherboards available at the retail shops here are of the LGA775 sockets.

Cheers

dgrooms · Post by **dgrooms** » Wed May 24, 2006 6:59 pm

I don't need that much space, but I do definetly want RAID 5 or RAID 6 which can be handled by my card. I was curious about the AM2 Sempron. It sounds like a good processor. I assume I can get the lowest power one. Because this is going to run 24/7, I just want to make sure it is as efficient as it can be with 5 or 6 drives.

dgrooms · Post by **dgrooms** » Wed May 24, 2006 7:08 pm

Thanks for the link. I do have the raid cardalready. It is the Promise Supertrak ex8350 which looks like it works. I didn't want to use software raid because I think it would increase the load on the CPU too much, however now that I type this I am thinking that while that may be true, I'm probably paying for it with the processor on the RAID card. I guess I have to get the power somewhere. I looked at the mini-ITX boards but they appeared too expensive and were pretty limited. I found a few with PCI express, but they were ridiculously expensive. At any rate, now that I have the RAID card, I want to have the smalles CPU that can handle the job.

nix-madness · Post by **nix-madness** » Wed May 24, 2006 8:14 pm

dgrooms wrote:Thanks for the link. I do have the raid cardalready. It is the Promise Supertrak ex8350 which looks like it works. I didn't want to use software raid because I think it would increase the load on the CPU too much,....

This is a good card. I have also considered this card for my homebrew NAS. I have to write this card off as it costs around US$520 a pop here in Singapore. This leads me to look at cheaper alternative (eg the Promise SATA 300 TX4, at ~USD100 each), which is not hardware RAID.

However, not being sound like I'm against hardware RAID cards. In fact, I like it and I insisted on them in my corporate servers. Now, you might want to note that if the hardware RAID card fails, you'll have to get the same card again. This is because the RAID functions (eg XOR engine, array configuration, etc) is on the card. A different card may not recognise the RAID array created by another card. And, this would be a problem say 3 years later, as the same model card might not be in production.

Also, with a hardware RAID, restoring the functionality of the server will be time consuming: rebuild raid (time needed to reconstruct RAID); restore the files from its' backup (this is the most time consuming part).

However, with a Linux software raid, if the controller card fails, you just have to buy another (not necessary the same model) card, plug it in, and restart the software raid. Data on the drives will still be intact.

Of course, I'm not saying that you won't need to have good backup practise with Linux's software RAID. All important data have to be backup, no matter what.

dgrooms wrote:I found a few with PCI express, but they were ridiculously expensive.

Yes, I agree with this.

Cheers

dgrooms · Post by **dgrooms** » Wed May 24, 2006 8:19 pm

if I am going to run software RAID 5 with 4 drives at 250gb each with 1 hot spare, how powerful should my CPU be? and how much memory? I don't want the server to be slow.

nix-madness · Post by **nix-madness** » Wed May 24, 2006 9:39 pm

dgrooms wrote:if I am going to run software RAID 5 with 4 drives at 250gb each with 1 hot spare, how powerful should my CPU be? and how much memory? I don't want the server to be slow.

Frankly, I've not seen any performance tests done which peg to the speed/performance of a CPU.

Unless you are going to use your file server to perform other stuff like transcoding, audio/video postprocessing, audio/video streaming, etc. Then, all the modern processors (post Pentium III), should be able to handle software RAID for a single purpose file server without any problems. The most important thing I'll be more concerned with, in the performance area, would be the whole I/0 path (from HDD to PCI to NIC to Switch to NIC at the client).

As for memory for a dedicated file server, 256MB should suffice.

Cheers

elec999 · Post by **elec999** » Fri May 26, 2006 11:19 am

Something came to me. On ebay you can still Pentium 4 mobile cpus, for cheap prices. And some have a tdp of 35watts.
Thanks