Silent terrabyte storage/server - how?

[ukiro]

I've had a look around among previous threads, but can't find anything that covers my specific needs, so I'll start a new thread. If I've missed some old posting that covers this, feel free to point me to it.

PURPOSE:
I'm going to switch to a laptop as my main computer, and thus need a new solution for the storage that's previously been in my desktop box. The storage needs to be available 24/7 and I'm 97% sure I want to go with RAID5 (although I'm willing to listen to arguments against it). It will hold many hundred GB of music, so it will likely be in the livingroom and hence needs to be very, very quiet.

These are the different solutions I've been thinking about, with pro's and con's for each one:

1. Regular ATX tower box
PRO:
[*]Can be silenced by placing disks in 5.25" slots with some sound dampening suspension gear
[*]Easier to supply good yet near-silent airflow if the case allows 120mm fans
[*]Huge selection of motherboards
[*]Easy to expand if I need to add more features to the machine
CON:
[*]More difficult to hide due to size
[*]Biggest power draw of all solutions
[*]Since I'd probably go with a mid-range CPU in this scenario, cost will be somewhat higher than the other options

2. mATX in HTPC chassis
PRO:
[*]This lets me use it as a HTPC if need be
[*]Lower power draw (or is mATX about the same as ATX?)
CON:
[*]Will probably need to have disks in 3,5" slots which makes it more difficult to soundproof them
[*]Cooling might be noisier
[*]For a decent chassis, this appears to be slightly more expensive than an ATX tower (disputable)
[*]HTPC chassis limits CPU cooler options due to height restraints, so this could be noisier
[*]Depending on chassis, might limit choice of PSU

3. NAS (with basic server functionality for FTP etc)
PRO:
[*]Very small, easy to hide
[*]Low power consumption
[*]Hot-swap, in case I'd ever need it
[*]Slightly lower total cost
CON:
[*]Limited usage, can't be used for media encoding, ftp/web server, etc (though there are exceptions)
[*]No native audio out, need to use some sort of uPnP setup
[*]Some of these seem to make a lot of noise (The otherwise tempting Drobo for example)

4. VIA ITX
PRO:
[*]Low power consumption
[*]Can be run fanlessly, probably making this the most silent option of all (drives might need a fan though)
[*]Slightly lower cost than (m)ATX
CON:
[*]No ITX chassis will hold 4 harddrives - can they be mounted in ATX boxes? (i.e. do mounting holes match up?)
[*]None of these boards seem to have RAID5, so the only PCI slot will be taken by a SATA-RAID card, limiting expansion options and adding some extra cost
[*]Low processing power for media encoding etc


And to decide among these, here's my prio list:
1. Silent
2. RAID5 with room for 4 disks
3. Able to run as FTP / HTTP server
4. Some flexibility in case I want to expand the use of this machine in the future


...so, if anyone (against all odds) made it this far, what would you do?

 

[Blain]

Refurbished Dell mid-tower from ebay + add-in RAID card and Samsung HDs...
PRO:
1. Cheapish
2. Quiet
CON:
1. More bulky than NAS unit
2. Low "coolness" factor

 

[jpeyton]

Blain's solution is definitely the cheapest and easiest.

If you don't mind putting a small premium on silence, go with option 2.

Don't go with a chassis that is too small; you need room for your drives, heatsinks, and fans.

Pick a chassis with room for a standard ATX PSU and one rear 120mm exhaust fan.

Pick up at least one Yate-Loon DSL12 120mm fan and a cheap Zalman fan controller to drop the fan down to 5-7V.

This part is important. For a CPU, I would recommend a low wattage 65nm Athlon X2 3600+ AM2. Both AMD and Intel have energy efficient CPUs, but AMD has vastly better idle power management. Your server is going to be on 24/7 with a majority of the time spent at idle, and AMD drops the idle clock speed of the CPU all the way down to 1GHz at reduced voltage. I have a Core 2 Duo PC, and the lowest idle clock is 1.6GHz at a higher voltage. Since the X2 and the C2D are both 65W CPUs, having an almost 40% reduction in idle clock speed directly translates to an a similar percentage reduction in wattage power consumption. Computers running 24/7 really rack up the power bills, so I'd try to wring out every watt possible.

There are also a lot of good mATX motherboards for AMD CPUs that have good onboard video (GeForce 6150 or better), many with DVI built-in. Intel's onboard video options are poor in comparison. For a server, having Audio/Video/LAN built-in is preferred (from a power consumption standpoint), but having good onboard video for HTPC use is a bonus.

Stick with Samsung for the optical and hard disk drives if silence is your goal. That would mean you want 3 Samsung T166 500GB SATA2 drives for 1TB RAID5.

For an ATX PSU, stick with Seasonic or Corsair for silence.

The entire setup should have two fans total. One fan in the PSU unit, and one fan for the rear case exhaust. A simply constructed duct/shroud over the CPU heatsink to the rear exhaust fan will be sufficient to cool the CPU.

Check out http://silentpcreview.com for more information.

 

[Blain]

What RAID card?

 

[ukiro]

jpeyton: Good advice about the AMD processors, thanks.
I have already decided on the 500GB Samsung drives (since I already have one and I like it) and the same thing goes for optical - I'll move over my existing samsung drive from the current tower. The Corsair 520 PSU was also my top contender already since looks to be the best available balance between performance and silence. Cooling the CPU semi-passively was already a plan; I looked at the Thermalright 120-thingamajig when considering a C2D, and I'm happy to see that it is compatible with AM2 as well.

For the case, is it worth the effort to go for something fancy like the Lian-Li PC-V1100B which is built for silence, or should I just pick any nice looking case and handle the silencing myself?

 

[jpeyton]

Originally posted by: ukiro
For the case, is it worth the effort to go for something fancy like the Lian-Li PC-V1100B which is built for silence, or should I just pick any nice looking case and handle the silencing myself?

That case is built around the premise of acoustically dampening the sound of normal PC components. If you're already choosing silent components, it's really not necessary. Get whatever case you want, as long as it fits your components, PSU, fans, and budget.

I would highly recommend this case.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Blain
What RAID card?

 

[ukiro]

Blain: I haven't had any proper look at what RAID card I'd choose if I were to go the VIA ITX route, but the seller I'm looking to buy through has the HighPoint RocketRAID 1740 at an OK price. (Note on the seller thing: I'm in Sweden, which is why I won't be using newegg etc.)

EDIT: I'll use mobo RAID if I go with ATX or mATX. Arguments against that approach are welcome though, but the extra cost is a deterrent.

jpeyton: That's a nice case and I've considered it, but it only has two 5.25" bays, and I want at least four so that I can suspend all the drives with some vibration dampening mounts, such as these (Sorry, couldn't find a link in english, but you get the point.) Currently I'm considering the Gigabyte Triton 180 as it has five 5.25" bays which allows me to go 4x500GB plus optical drive. It also seems to be set up for pretty good airflow, and the price is pretty good (the equivalent of <$70 here in Sweden).

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: ukiro

EDIT: I'll use mobo RAID if I go with ATX or mATX. Arguments against that approach are welcome though, but the extra cost is a deterrent.

Currently I'm considering the Gigabyte Triton 180 as it has five 5.25" bays which allows me to go 4x500GB plus optical drive. It also seems to be set up for pretty good airflow, and the price is pretty good (the equivalent of <$70 here in Sweden).

Go with the 1740 and Poseidon. :thumbsup::laugh::thumbsup:

 

[Zap]

For quiet, few fans, low heat output components and a case designed to be quiet. I like my Antec Solo because it comes with some very good damping solutions for hard drives, plus the main panels have dampening materials on them already. Use a PSU that is known to be quiet (Seasonic S12?) and known quiet fans (few as possible and undervolted). In my Solo case I'm using the grommets for more secure mounting but it still mutes my drive considerably since these are really soft grommets unlike the harder rubber ones normally found in cases. It also comes with drive suspension mounts which is the ultimate in making a drive quiet, at the cost of only holding three HDDs that way instead of four using grommets, plus doesn't mount as securely. I also use a Scythe Ninja for some passive CPU cooling.

Originally posted by: jpeyton
For a CPU, I would recommend a low wattage 65nm Athlon X2 3600+ AM2. Both AMD and Intel have energy efficient CPUs, but AMD has vastly better idle power management. Your server is going to be on 24/7 with a majority of the time spent at idle

Silent PC Review compared two near identical systems from HP and found that the AMD system did indeed have the best idle power usage. It used around 50W at idle! :Q This was a dual core CPU with 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive, but using integrated video and not a PCI-E video card.

So, use an x2 3600+ Brisbane CPU and enable Cool and Quiet. Each hard drive "costs" around 7-12W of power usage, so fewer and larger hard drives would be better. Use a motherboard with integrated video, or the lowest end video card you can find in the dumpster that doesn't support (or has really crappy) 3D graphics.

My own file server/router is a mobile P4 that is undervolted with a PCI Tseng Labs ET6000 video card, a PCI NIC (plus onboard), 400GB and 500GB JBOD drives, CDROM, super low RPM NMB fan on CPU and a Fortron FSP300-60GLN power supply that supposedly does 80% efficiency. My power draw through a UPS is around 80W or so measured with a Seasonic Power Angel.

 

[Evadman]

You want a NAS. Check into the Infrant NV+. It supports up to 2 TB at the moment. It also supports streaming to squeezeboxes and the like and can act as a media server as well. Can also do print server functions and mine is very quiet. It also does FTP and web server (static pages) If you want super quiet they make a fanless PSU for it too. I can barely hear mine. Also, it can be expanded nearly infinitely. Just plug another USB external drive (up to 128 of them) into one of the 3 USB ports or a powered hub and you are go to go. on USB drives it supports linux file formats or FAT32 ones.

There are also plans to open up root access to it, for things like dynamic web pages though tomcat and apache, and database stuff such as MySQL and postgre or anything else you can do on linux.

The nas also supports changing sizes of the array. The disks can be swapped out one at a time to larger ones; so you can start with 250 or 500 GB's now and move up to the new 4 TB ones when they come out

Cost is higher than you may expect though. Mine was about $2100 including 4 750 GB seagate drives. The NV+ itself is about 600, though the NV can be had for about $100 less. The difference is that the NV+ comes with some backup software from a 3rd party and has a LCD on the front that displays status like %Used and if it is booting, bla bla.

Originally posted by: Blain
Go with the 1740 and Poseidon. :thumbsup::laugh::thumbsup:

If you really want to go with a full server, I would go with a highpoint 2220x not the 1740. the 2220 has online capacity expansion (adding drives or adding bigger drives) and the processor on the 2220x is faster. That and you can go with 8 disks instead of 4. The PCI-X connector is also backwards compatiable with PCI so you can start with a cheaper dell box now and move up tot he big leagues if you need more speed witha PCI-X server board. The disk was definitely the slowest part of the server that I had, and with 14 drives I could max out the gigabit connection out of my server with 2 2220x cards and a spanned raid5 array across 250Gb disks. The NAS will go slightly over maxing out a 100 mbit connection.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Evadman
If you really want to go with a full server, I would go with a highpoint 2220x not the 1740. the 2220 has online capacity expansion (adding drives or adding bigger drives) and the processor on the 2220x is faster. That and you can go with 8 disks instead of 4. The PCI-X connector is also backwards compatiable with PCI so you can start with a cheaper dell box now and move up tot he big leagues if you need more speed witha PCI-X server board.

The 23xx (PCIe) series makes more sense for consumers unless you want backwards compatibility with out-dated hardware and are willing to sacrifice PCI bus bandwidth and introduce a performance cap for that off the bat.

The OP has mentioned on-board, which can be fine in some cases. However, I'd suggest thinking ahead and leaving a suitable PCIe slot free for a possible upgrade in the future.

E.g. Asus P5B-VM DO. Has 1 x16 and 1 x4 slots free (on-board video), and 6 on-board ICH8R (ICH8DO) slots, which allow a max of 4 drives in a single array.

The nVIDIA 430 chipset has very hit & miss RAID 5 performance IME (mostly miss), so I wouldn't recommend this unless you're willing to stick to a 3-drive limit (which performs well-enough IME).

If you get a cheap PCI video card elsewhere (fleabay, computer shop discard bin, etc.), and don't put anything that's bandwidth-intensive on the PCI bus, you have more options for motherboards/chipsets.

 

[ukiro]

Originally posted by: Evadman
You want a NAS.
/---/
I can barely hear mine.

This unit has come up a few times in my "research". But "can barely hear mine" might mean something else for you than it does for me. At what distance? In what environment? I'm really, really picky on noise for this build =)

BTW, what I want HTTP for is to use a PHP-based interface for handling audio playback from the server (creating/sorting playlists, etc). By the sound of it, the NV+ currently won't let me do that.

Originally posted by: Evadman
If you really want to go with a full server, I would go with a highpoint 2220x not the 1740.

What would be the benefit, if any, of putting in all that extra money for a dedicated RAID card as opposed to using the motherboard chip?

Again, thanks for the replies guys (or gals?). Your input is very appreciated. So far I'm kinda leaning towards an AMD mATX rig with integrated graphics and motherboard RAID in that Gigabyte case I mentionde earlier, but I have yet to investigate an option I left out in the initial post: a mobile CPU. That would lower my power draw quite a bit and still let me do some hobby level media encoding, install whatever server stuff I want, etc. The problem is that motherboards seem to be very rare.

 

[jpeyton]

Originally posted by: ukiro
What would be the benefit, if any, of putting in all that extra money for a dedicated RAID card as opposed to using the motherboard chip?

Again, thanks for the replies guys (or gals?). Your input is very appreciated. So far I'm kinda leaning towards an AMD mATX rig with integrated graphics and motherboard RAID in that Gigabyte case I mentionde earlier, but I have yet to investigate an option I left out in the initial post: a mobile CPU. That would lower my power draw quite a bit and still let me do some hobby level media encoding, install whatever server stuff I want, etc. The problem is that motherboards seem to be very rare.

Depends on how critical your data is. Most often, the cheap built-in RAID controllers on consumer-level motherboards will corrupt your arrays, and that's a big deal with you're talking about RAID5.

The only built-in controllers up to snuff are the ones on workstation/server motherboards, but those motherboards obviously carry a price premium for a reason.

Skip the mobile CPU thing altogether. Socket AM2 will be forward compatible with more power-efficient next generation CPUs as well, so you'll have a clear upgrade path for your server. For example, AMD should be releasing their new 45W Athlon X2s in the next few weeks; those drop the operating voltages even lower.

BTW, I've heard excellent things about this motherboard in regards to HTPC use. The built-in GeForce 7050PV has high-quality HD decoding, built-in HDMI/S-Video/VGA out, dual-display support, HDCP compliant, and it overclocks well for a mATX motherboard.

 

[Matthias99]

What would be the benefit, if any, of putting in all that extra money for a dedicated RAID card as opposed to using the motherboard chip?

Software (whether through the OS, an onboard controller or a non-hardware add-in controller card) RAID5 will make your CPU work harder while transferring data. The harder the CPU works, the hotter it gets, and the more cooling you need. Whether this will be very significant depends on how much data you are transferring and how often you are doing it.

A hardware RAID5 card will put out some heat, but they're usually passively cooled.

Depends on how critical your data is. Most often, the cheap built-in RAID controllers on consumer-level motherboards will corrupt your arrays, and that's a big deal with you're talking about RAID5.

Sheer FUD. If the motherboard hardware's stable, onboard or software controllers (or software RAID) are no worse than dedicated hardware. And if the CPU/RAM/northbridge aren't stable, you're eventually going to corrupt something even if you have an "uncorruptible" hardware RAID controller.

Again, thanks for the replies guys (or gals?). Your input is very appreciated. So far I'm kinda leaning towards an AMD mATX rig with integrated graphics and motherboard RAID in that Gigabyte case I mentionde earlier, but I have yet to investigate an option I left out in the initial post: a mobile CPU. That would lower my power draw quite a bit and still let me do some hobby level media encoding, install whatever server stuff I want, etc. The problem is that motherboards seem to be very rare.

I believe you can run "mobile" Athlon64s in most desktop motherboards without a problem as long as they use the same socket. It just requires support for the lower voltages in the BIOS. However, power draw for the 'desktop' 65nm Athlon64s is VERY low if you underclock and undervolt them. There is also a 90nm 3800+ X2 with 35W(!) TDP. And as mentioned above, there are 45W 65nm ones coming out sometime soon.

 

[erwos]

I would stick with a Thecus or Infrant NAS box. Build your own is going to come out more expensive for the (relatively small) amount of storage you're talking about.

 

[ukiro]

Since I am in the luxurious position to postone this build a few weeks, I think I'll wait for the 45W CPU's - didn't know those were coming as I have been way out of the loop for a long time.

Matthias99, I too think that I'd have heard more about on-board RAID corruption if it was a common phenomenon. If you OC recklessly I understand it might happen, but this rig will run at stock speed (or less!) so it shouldn't be an issue.
Also, I'll skip the mobile CPU plans - for Intel C2D I have yet to find a mobo with RAID5 and the CPU's are so pricey it's not going to be worth it.

jpeyton, thanks for the info on that mobo, it seems very rare (yet not unobtainable) here in Sweden, so I hadn't come across it before. My only complaint would be the lack of IEEE1394 and eSATA, but that one's a contender for sure.

 

[ukiro]

Originally posted by: erwos
I would stick with a Thecus or Infrant NAS box. Build your own is going to come out more expensive for the (relatively small) amount of storage you're talking about.

You're very right, and that is sort of bothering me, especially seeing as my budget is tight since I'll be buying a new and pretty high-end laptop at the same time. But then the argument could also be made that for maybe "just" $200-300 extra over the NAS will buy me a much more flexible rig that can be used for way more than just plain storage (even though that is clearly my main objective). It would also give me the nerdy pleasure of building a new machine, which is a value that should never be underestimated =) But yeah, the NAS option needs serious consideration. If I want a computer in my livingroom I can just take the laptop in there.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: ukiro

Originally posted by: erwos
I would stick with a Thecus or Infrant NAS box. Build your own is going to come out more expensive for the (relatively small) amount of storage you're talking about.

You're very right, and that is sort of bothering me, especially seeing as my budget is tight since I'll be buying a new and pretty high-end laptop at the same time. But then the argument could also be made that for maybe "just" $200-300 extra over the NAS will buy me a much more flexible rig that can be used for way more than just plain storage (even though that is clearly my main objective). It would also give me the nerdy pleasure of building a new machine, which is a value that should never be underestimated =) But yeah, the NAS option needs serious consideration. If I want a computer in my livingroom I can just take the laptop in there.

Another consideration with the "build your own option" is that you're going to be using Linux, which is time-consuming to set up if you don't have prior experience, or Windows, which is probably less time-consuming, but forces you to buy a very expensive PCIe hardware RAID card. Embedded NAS boxes are basically plug and play in comparison.

A four-bay RAID 5 enclosure will net you 1.5TB. If that'll last you for a long time, go with that. But if you're going to go higher, you'll need more serious hardware.

 

[Evadman]

Originally posted by: ukiro
This unit has come up a few times in my "research". But "can barely hear mine" might mean something else for you than it does for me. At what distance? In what environment? I'm really, really picky on noise for this build =)

I don't have a decibal rating, but I am sure you can find one. It has one fan, and it runs at variable RPM based on server load. It is not silent, but it is much quieter than anything else I have that has a fan even under full load.

Originally posted by: ukiro
BTW, what I want HTTP for is to use a PHP-based interface for handling audio playback from the server (creating/sorting playlists, etc). By the sound of it, the NV+ currently won't let me do that.

You are 100% correct, it currently can not do that. Someone may write a plugin for it at some point, but I would not buy the NV+ if having that capability is a requirement.

Originally posted by: ukiro
What would be the benefit, if any, of putting in all that extra money for a dedicated RAID card as opposed to using the motherboard chip?

Lower CPU usage (thus quieter if you have a load based fan), higher throughput (more bandwidth out of the server) and the ability to run RAID5 that is software independent (move drives out of the machine to another machine. The 2220x is also designed to actually go in a server. Using onboard RAID on a consumer level board is asking for trouble, especially if you don't make backups. Like jpeyton said, sooner or later you will corrupt an array. With a consumer level board, it will happen much sooner as the consumer level board is likely not rated for 100% uptime, and has a higher bit error rate than something designed to go in a server and be forgotten. Despite what Matthias99 says, you will be more likely to have issues with a consumer level board. Same reason that there are enterprise storage rated drives. If a $30 chip could do the job of a $200 chip, why does the $200 chip exist? You must be getting something for it or no one would buy the $200 one.

The question really comes down to how you want to spend your money. You can go cheap on the array, but you better spend that money on backups. Personally, I would rather spend the money on the solution up front than later. However you may want to go cheap now, and go with a backup plan when you get more available cash because you are willing to accept the risk of a failed array. I am not saying one solution is always better than the other, you need to look at your circumstances and decide yourself

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Evadman
The 2220x is also designed to actually go in a server. Using onboard RAID on a consumer level board is asking for trouble, especially if you don't make backups. Like jpeyton said, sooner or later you will corrupt an array. With a consumer level board, it will happen much sooner as the consumer level board is likely not rated for 100% uptime, and has a higher bit error rate than something designed to go in a server and be forgotten. Despite what Matthias99 says, you will be more likely to have issues with a consumer level board. Same reason that there are enterprise storage rated drives.

Did you see the Google report on the reliability of "enterprise" drives vs. consumer drives? The enterprise drives did not do better.

I've seen corruption with a Highpoint 2320 controller, whereas I haven't seen corruption with some other controllers, on-board and otherwise. I'm not concluding anything from this other than that the Highpoint is not always corruption-free either. Fortunately, I have a full backup, and was able to do binary comparisons, and re-copy the affected files.

I also have a "real server" motherboard-based system running a "real server" OS which likes to re-boot every month or so by itself, whereas my consumer systems don't.

None of this stuff is perfect, and at the level of home use / personal budget constraints, IMO you're likely to be better off not counting one expensive solution to be perfect, but rather being able to deal with systems which are not.

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
BTW, I've heard excellent things about this motherboard in regards to HTPC use. The built-in GeForce 7050PV has high-quality HD decoding, built-in HDMI/S-Video/VGA out, dual-display support, HDCP compliant, and it overclocks well for a mATX motherboard.

Have you seen any data on its RAID 5 write performance? The closest data I've been able to find is this, and it's not very good:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/19/.../page10.html#sata_transfer_performance

 

[IBuyUFO]

If you guys are interested in the drobo then you can get a $25 discount off the unit by using this referral code REFDAVIDL.