
Home server build, part one - specifications - markdennehy
http://www.stochasticgeometry.ie/2011/07/27/home-server-build-part-one/
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KevBurnsJr
That's way more CPU & RAM than you're going to need. 850W is A LOT for an idle
machine. Fortunately, you won't draw anywhere near that without a graphics
card.

Let's do some math.

Say your machine draws 250 Watts (~2 Amps). That's 6 KilowattHours(kwh) per
day.

The US. national average for electricity is $0.112/kwh (as high as $0.31 in
Hawaii) <http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html>

Electricity for your machine will cost 6 * $0.112 = $0.67/day (on average)

That's $245.28/yr

These days you can get integrated Atom boards with up to 8 SATA ports.

Less power, less heat, less space. <http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2>

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markdennehy
Kev, I could definitely do this on less CPU, less RAM, less power, and
possibly less money (some of the parts for the custom small atom boards are
more expensive, pound-for-pound, than their mainstream desktop counterparts).
But the moment I hit any extra task, my spec would be all out of whack and I'd
have to rebuild the box. No thanks, I'll accept a higher initial spend and a
less-than-optimal running cost as insurance against the time and effort I
spend keeping an infrastructure box up and running over that time period.

To give you some math back, my time on salary comes to a net of
(approximately) €20/hr (and yes, it'd be far higher if I was contracting,
thanks). Lets say a hard drive goes because I bought a different PSU which was
closely matched to the spec but it's a friday model so the 12V line was kinda
struggling. Now I have to buy the new hard drive, have it shipped, install it
and rebuild it; that's going to come to 1-2 hours of my time in total on
repairs, and probably three to four days where I don't have my infrastructure
here which comes to around 24 hours of my time where I'm being put out because
of a hardware failure. That's €480 worth of my time, against about $163/yr in
running costs (because I really doubt this will be pulling 250W continously).
Think of it as health insurance - yeah, odds are you'll never get back
services equal to what you paid for, but that's not really the point...

~~~
qw
It only costs you €480 if you lose time that would otherwise be spent at work.
But I understand (and agree) with your point of losing time. If you use it for
as your media library, 4 days with only standard TV broadcasts can be boring
:-)

~~~
markdennehy
Even more boring when you don't have a TV in the house qw :)

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Karpy91
320GB drives dedicated to the OS seems like a bit much, no? The power supply
is also overkill, you don't need anything close to 850W to run that box. This
could certainly be a lower cost build.

~~~
markdennehy
320Gb is definitely more than needed, but look at the disks on the site; the
smallest drive there is an 80Gb Western Digital, but it costs £29.10; the
320Gb Seagate costs £28.66. /shrug Hey, if they want to charge less for a
320Gb than a smaller drive, I'll take the 320Gb.

As to the 850W, darn right I don't need all of it right now, but (a) I want
the PSU nowhere near its limits when running two RAID arrays; and (b) I'll be
adding in disks in the future to increase storage space as needed; I don't
want to have to buy another PSU or worry about stressing the PSU at that
point. It's relatively cheap future-proofing.

~~~
vietor
Few notes from someone who's built way to many home, and other, servers.

You made the right call on the drive, low end hard disk prices hit a wall
pretty hard which leaves them looking a bit silly.

You're vastly overestimating the amount of power required to run the disk
arrays, even at peak spin-up loads. The only way you could fit enough hardware
into that chassis to come near using that PSU is multiple high-end GPUs.

If you're going to build a home server it's almost always worth investing in
an AC power meter if you don't already have one.

Nearly every PSU operates most efficiently somewhere in the middle of it's
power range, operating a high power PSU at 20% capacity will use notably more
power than a correctly sized one. Take a look at any PSU review over at
silentpcreview.com, they do good efficiency testing.

~~~
niels_olson
> Nearly every PSU operates most efficiently somewhere in the middle of it's
> power range, operating a high power PSU at 20% capacity will use notably
> more power than a correctly sized one.

One note from a physics major who's first job out of college was a the
electrical officer on a frigate: this applies to all electrical devices. This
sort of "over-supply solves all problems" attitude is quaint when it's a home
server. It really sucks when under-loaded 1MW diesel generators shit the bed
almost weekly on deployment in the summer. Any idea how much hot-dark-and-
quiet sucks when you're bobbing like a cork in the middle of the ocean in the
summer? Now imagine you're the person that 250 hot, cranky people expect to
fix it. Why? because some "contracting expert" in the Pentagon decided to
"over-spec" the generators 25 years ago.

~~~
markdennehy
Niels, the PSU in this build actually does operate most efficiently in the
40%-60% load region according to its specs; it wasn't just a rule-of-thumb.

Also, the lower you load it, the easier it gets to cool, according to its own
specs. Which I take as a nice bonus.

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kev009
This seems like a waste of money and environmentally unfriendly for little
gain especially with the given list of taks from the article.

Ex-enterprise gear or a retired/second-hand PC would be a lot easier on the
wallet (and much higher quality for enterprise gear). Add a couple new drives
in a mirror and you're good to go.

Low power 1U atom or amd fusion builds are the one place new hardware makes
sense to me for a home server.

~~~
markdennehy
Ex-enterprise gear or a retired or second-hand PC would indeed be easier on
the wallet and able to do the job. However, since I had neither, nor a way to
get either...

And yes, Atom builds could handle NAS loads easily enough, no disagreement
there; but add in the backups and other tasks, and you'll start reaching the
limits of the platform. This isn't just a NAS box, this is the main server for
the house.

~~~
kev009
You are willing to ship things based on this build, so don't be to quick to
dismiss. eBay, Craiglist, and other regional list sites are the go to places.
Say you spend $400 USD equivalent on an older Opteron system and a generous
$200 to ship it. You're still coming out ahead and would have a higher quality
engineered system IMHO. Just something to consider in the future.

NAS, backups, web development, etc aren't going to stress an atom. I/O will be
your enemy far sooner in most conceivable server scenarios until wide RAID
arrays or SSDs enter the picture.

~~~
markdennehy
In the US, I'd definitely be going with newegg, craigs and other places kev;
but in Ireland, well, places like scan are about as good as it gets. Ebay is
an option as well, but the build takes longer; I have a week's vacation to get
this done in for various personal reasons - so having the parts here now is
worth the 10% I'd save on average if I spent a month hunting down bits on ebay
and shipping them seperately.

And buying an older system on ebay and shipping it... er, no, I wouldn't be
doing that locally in Ireland. I'd get an overpriced, heavily kicked system
unless I was very lucky, and to quote a google sysop, hope is not an
acceptable plan :D

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rbancroft
that icy box thing looks cool. I have been looking for something like that for
a while, trying without luck to use some other non-backplane devices that
haven't fit properly in the case, or have pieces broken off after very light
use.

As for the other comments about environmental friendliness, well it's not that
bad. Running old enterprise gear will more than likely use a lot of power. The
processor and power supply in that build are a bit overkill, but I think it is
overall ok. You could get a 45W version of the processor and I bet that power
supply won't be using more than 10% of its capacity, so yes it might have
efficiency issues. 80Plus certification only measures efficiency at certain
loads, 20% being the lowest, so who knows how efficient that will be at 10%.
But of course you could add a GPU in there, or run a few virtual machines. I
still don't think Atom's are worth it for general computing, as the platform
is pretty limited in terms of expansion (no PCI, seriously limited RAM).

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Cushman
What could inspire somebody to buy 8TB of storage today for ~100GB storage
requirements? It'll be half the price in three months.

~~~
markdennehy
It's 1-200Gb of live data, but about 1.5-2Tb of data that's currently sitting
offline on DVDs which are a pain to access. I generate a fair amount of video
data when training. Plus, as I said, future-proofing. I'm old enough to
remember the "Who'd need more than 640k of RAM?" comment from the first time
around...

~~~
Cushman
Okay, at least in the ballpark then. But I think you missed the point— you're
paying today for storage you won't use until God knows when. How do you
justify that with HDD prices per GB dropping dramatically every few months?

I understand not wanting the hassle of buying a new drive at some point in the
future, but I've a hunch that this is the sort of "future proofing" that makes
your system seem charmingly quaint a year from now.

~~~
markdennehy
It's not the drives I'm future-proofing guys, it's the entire box. And
"future-proofing" doesn't mean "I'll never need new hardware ever again", it
means "I won't need to worry about the hardware in this box again". So I come
back in two years, swap out the 2Tb drives in the RAID array for 4Tb drives
and it costs me half what I'm paying for them now; but I don't have to go
spending extra on a new PSU, case, etc - the stuff whose prices won't have
fallen by much.

~~~
Cushman
I think that's what other commenters and me are getting at, though. The
responsible way to not need to worry about the hardware in the box is to
purchase only as much capability as you're going to to need in the time it
takes before you want to replace it.

But you're wildly overengineering for your needs; you could literally spend
half as much on a system which isn't "future proof", and in two years replace
the entire thing for half again what you paid. So my question, which seems to
be the common one, remains, _why_?

~~~
markdennehy
(a) I don't agree that that's what I'm going to be spending money on in two
years, or that costs will have fallen that far for the entire box (CPU, RAM,
yes; physical box, PSU, no), or even that that money will be available (I'm in
Ireland - check out the news on our economy :) Right now, whether it's better
to keep euros in the bank or to spend them while they still have purchasing
power buying things that will last and can be used seems like a terrifyingly
close decision!

(b) This box's destiny is to go sit in a room quietly and just work. Any time
I spend on it after it's in that quiet room is time wasted, and I'm willing to
spend a bit more (though not a huge amount more) now to save a lot more then.
If I was a postgrad again and my time was low-cost and I wasn't hosting data I
really worried about, sure, I'd pick the newest, shiniest toy and try to make
it work and if it didn't, oh well, I learnt something; but that's not the case
here, I just want a solid box I never have to worry about no matter what else
we throw at it. This ain't the project car in the garage being endlessly
worked on for fun, this is the family estate wagon that's used for the
shopping and getting the kids to school, if that analogy makes any sense.

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Palomides
personally, my home server is a "Seagate Dockstar Network Adapter", a 1.2GHz
ARM box that can run Debian, with some USB disks, and a USB sound card so I
can stream pulseaudio stuff to my larger speakers. Speedwise, the network is
the bottleneck, so having USB disks for everything works fine. I suppose if
you have your stuff wired up for gigabit and really need that much more speed,
going for a box with faster interfaces would make sense, though you can get
ARM plug computers with SATA or eSATA, iirc.

Things it does: NAS for large file storage and backup, pulseaudio sink,
transmission w/ webclient, IRC client (ssh/screen), light home webserving.

I used to have a more serious box, but I found this runs silently, very low
power, does everything I need, and is tiny. Also I got it on woot for $20. I'd
strongly advise a similar setup for home stuff.

~~~
jwn
I like your line of thinking. I just ordered a BeagleBoard today that I plan
to use as a static HTTP server. You've found the Debian ARM port to be stable
and complete? I was pondering giving Angstrom a go first.

I also love the fact that it also runs on less than 12.5 watts!

~~~
KevBurnsJr
I've got an Alix parked under my router and it uses about 0.07A
<http://cgi.ebay.com/270782068385>

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dougb
I would buy a machine with ECC memory, see djb's rant
<http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html> I would also add another 2tb drive and
mirror them.

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jeffool
I love the idea of a home server far more than I do using typical "end-point"
electronics... But one thing I'd love to see a hardware manufacturer make is a
wifi monitor that functionally doubles as a tablet.

Just a light, wifi, touchscreen (with mic, speakers, and cameras) that uses my
desktop, and just streams content to the device. A smart charging stand that
hold it vertical, and you could use it in place of a traditional monitor too.
(Pie in the sky territory: awesome remote abilities that let you control your
desktop over wifi from anywhere.)

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smgoller
The ethernet port on that motherboard is horrible, especially if you plan on
streaming video or moving lots of data onto or off of that server. I strongly
suggest you get either a different motherboard, or buy an Intel card. Given
your design goals, it's worth it, as you'll see significant performance gains
in throughput and cpu load.

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drivebyacct2
Too much storage in the short term, considering a 1.5TB drive has dropped like
$50 in the last year alone. Why 320GB non-SSD for the OS? Seems like a lot of
money for a home server. I spent a little more than that and built a work
horse that I use for data crunching and running VMs to do my day to day
development.

Oh come on downvoters. We're talking about $1300 for a glorified print and
file server. Please tell me I'm not the only one that finds that surprising.

