Another "What hardware would you recommend?" thread.

[malbec]

We had a thunderstorm today. My PC will no longer boot now. I swapped out power supplies without success. I think it is simply time to get a new machine. So....

I am looking at building a media server that will sit in the basement with extenders (MVPs and hopefully an HD version if Jeff comes through for us) as the means to access the data. I have looked at a variety of premade setups and they either are made with cheap parts I don't care for or they come loaded with features I don't need (e.g. a top notch graphics card, etc.). So, I have come to the conclusion I must build to make me happy.

So...
1) Case recommendation (I am looking for a tower I can throw multiple hard drives in. It doesn't have to be too pretty as it will reside in the basement, but good ventilation would be desired)
2) I am thinking the Intel Core 2 E6700 seems to be the optinmal processor at this point in time. Reaction? Needs are the usual (Transcoding HD to MVPs, commerical scanning, video conversions, video editing via Bob Phoenix's plug in, etc.)
3) Motherboard? Would like gigabit networking, and ideally more than 3 PCI slots. Sounds like it's not worth a FSB greater than 1000MHz yet. I have heard good things about Asus and Gigabyte boards...
4) I am thinking of Windows XP as I have a copy of it. Memory? 2GBs?
5) To help limit power requirements while maintain a reasonable budget, I am thinking two SATA II hard drives (something like a 200GB drive partition for the system, music, and photos and then a 750GB drive for the video (I need this much room right now so smaller is not an option)). The 200GB are a dime a dozen, but the 750GB seems to be a bit of an industry battle ground. Recommendations? I am thiking Seagate.
6) How stupid am I if I rely upon the integrated video support on the motherboard since the server will never be hooked up directly to a TV?
7) While in the basement, quieter is certainly preferred. So, if there are power supply recommendations...

Thanks!

malbec

[mayamaniac]

1) Any case where it allows air to be pulled from the front and pushed out through the back will be good for cooling the components inside. I personally own a Thermaltake Armor case and it keeps all the drives very cooled. It can hold up to 12 drives plus an optical drive.
2) I think intel C2D E6600 is good, but E6700 is even better.
3) I own gigabyte boards and think they are great. Intel boards are good options too. Make sure they have lots of SATA2 ports so you don't have to get extra SATA2 controllers. I saw one intel board with 6 SATA2 ports.
4) WinXP Pro is best for compatibility. 2G of RAM is good, any more is unnecessary for WinXP.
5) Go with Seagate 7200.10 perpendicular SATA2 drives. The more/bigger, the bettter.
6) Doesn't hurt to have built-in video on the motherboard for a server, saves you money on the graphics card.
7) I have this PSU, and it's not the quietest, but its not loud. There's a fan speed control on the unit, so you can set adjust it there.

[bcjenkins]

Don't forget a good UPS with surge suppression. APC for me. Also for more than 3 PCI slots (meaning 4 or more?) you are into thin territory.. I had a requirement for 4 and wound up with the Asus Commando after purchasing an Asrock first because it was cheaper.

The Asrock had a 100mb adapter on board and that was quickly saturated with multiple HD streams, etc. It would not take a PCI-express add on either and the last PCI slot was rendered useless by a capacitor. The Asus is running like a champ. I am also using both onboard nics in a teamed mode too. The only drawback for me was lack of onboard video so I bought a cheap pcie card to throw in.

The thing to keep in mind, if it is for a server in the basement with no playback features needed, you don't need to install any audio device (disable in bios) and leave the graphics adapter at vga drivers. There is no need to install anything more complicated and open up to driver issues.

B

[Polypro]

Consider Windows Home Server (CTP ends in November, but supposedly it'll be available as an OEM install for a decent price). Sage works fine on it I hear, adding hard drives is stupid simple, you can duplicate what you want, and it images every computer in the house. (No 64K Clusters though, right guys?). It's been solid for me (I'm not running Sage on it however). I like WD drives with Molex power...I *HATE* SATA power connectors. Whatever MB you get, read the threads about that board on the mfg's site, or enthusiasts sites...I love my P5W-DH, but without the ASUS, ExtremeSystems, and Anandtech boards, it would have been a PITA to get solid and smooth.

P

[elaw]

Also you might consider buying two 500gb drives. Cost the same as one 750, and you get 1/3 more storage!

Of course this could change next week!

[valnar]

Originally Posted by malbec

I am looking at building a media server that will sit in the basement with extenders

I just did this same exercise, and I love my new Sage "Server". Although my requirements were slightly different than yours, I bought a real Supermicro server board, but it cost more money. Some of my other recommendations are below.

Originally Posted by malbec

1) Case recommendation (I am looking for a tower I can throw multiple hard drives in. It doesn't have to be too pretty as it will reside in the basement, but good ventilation would be desired)

Go with the Cooler Master Centurion 5. I has a plethora of drive bays which I use for removable hard drives (I RAID'ed my box) and is a tool-less design.

Originally Posted by malbec

2) I am thinking the Intel Core 2 E6700 seems to be the optinmal processor at this point in time.

I bought the E6600, which is the minimum to do what you want without overclocking. No objections to the E6700.

Originally Posted by malbec

3) Motherboard? Would like gigabit networking, and ideally more than 3 PCI slots. Sounds like it's not worth a FSB greater than 1000MHz yet. I have heard good things about Asus and Gigabyte boards...

You'll get a lot of recommendations here, and ASUS and Gigabyte are two of my favorites too. However, since you won't be sitting in front of it, get something with integrated video and the right amount of slots that you need. Getting more than 3 PCI slots will be costly. For a server'ish board, I highly recommend the Intel DG965WH. Three PCI and PCI-E 1x slots should hold you awhile, plus the Intel Gigabit NIC is the best around.

Originally Posted by malbec

5) To help limit power requirements while maintain a reasonable budget, I am thinking two SATA II hard drives (something like a 200GB drive partition for the system, music, and photos and then a 750GB drive for the video (I need this much room right now so smaller is not an option)). The 200GB are a dime a dozen, but the 750GB seems to be a bit of an industry battle ground. Recommendations? I am thiking Seagate.

I like Seagate and Hitachi drives best. Hitachi's run a little cooler.

Originally Posted by malbec

6) How stupid am I if I rely upon the integrated video support on the motherboard since the server will never be hooked up directly to a TV?

Exactly. Good idea. Do load the video drivers though, and throw UltraVNC on it.

Originally Posted by malbec

7) While in the basement, quieter is certainly preferred. So, if there are power supply recommendations...?

Corsair or Seasonic. Antec for cheap.

-Robert

[valnar]

Manufacturers can't invent capabilities that don't exist. The chipset usually dictates what is available, how many slots (lanes for PCIe) and other functionality. It's possible to add more, but it's costly.

Here is one motherboard that gives you 4 PCI slots on a basic G965 chipset. The downside? They took the IDE ports to do it. None to speak of.

-Robert

[paulbeers]

I just rebuilt my system with an e4300 and overclocked it to 2.4ghz. Now I get perfect HD playback on my MVP's if only I had more than 5 channels here unencrypted channels in Des Moines. Ho hum. I built my system with a Gigabyte P945 chipset board, but I recommend the P965 chipset as it seems to be the consensus favorite amoung web reviews. Seagate is always my hard drive recommendation. Hard drives die. At least with Seagate, you can get a new one free if it breaks within 5 years (better than 1-3 like most other manufacturers). Just my .02 worth.

[jprine01]

I'd just like to bump other peoples recommendations mostly.
"Cooler Master Centurion 5" is a great case and you can't beat the price.

The Intel 945/965 Chipsets will do you good, Gigabyte makes quality products. ASUS makes good designed products but they always cheap out on some generic part that screws it up for me. Foxconn is good.

"Corsair or Seasonic. Antec for cheap." Corsair and Seasonic are the best quality, its worth spending extra money in my opinion. I just got a new Corsair 520w it is very nice and basically silent.

For CPU with HD transcoding and all the other background stuff going your going to want to be fast. I know its over a month away since your computer is broke you probably wont be able to wait, but in July Intels Quad 2.4 will be 250$ down from 550$.
For now I would go with a E6600, 0.2Ghz is never worth 100+$ If your chosen motherboard has good settings and you spend the time researching overclocking settings, you can make the E6600 (225$) reach X6800 (currently 970$) speeds without topping it out.

Seagate 7200.10's especially in 500GB size is the way to go. If you were going to spend 300+ on 200+750 i would get 3x500 since you have a full case to work with. Also when you get a bunch of the same drive you also have the benifit of being able to raid them later on for speed and to protect yourself against data loss from a failed or failing drive.
Some people will post bad experience with their raid 5 speed, those are always software raids, or bad hardware raids. I have 5x500gb drives on a Areca 1230 Raid PciExpress card (not cheap) and get over 220MB/sec sustatined and 800MB/sec burst transfer rates accross the whole span of drives and no effect to seek time. You just can't do that without hardware raid, even with raid0 stripe.
There are cheaper versions with less ports, I went with the 12 port because I plan to go at least 8 drives and the 8 port model didn't have expandable memory or a cpu as fast.

[jprine01]

I guess I should of said, I'm using a Gigabyte 945 chipset board with intigrated video that has 3 PCI slots, and the PCIexpress16 slot for the optional video card I am using for the Areca Raid card.
It is extreemly stable, I don't reboot for months.

[malbec]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! If you don't mind, on to round two...

1) Motherboard: I have my eye on the ASUS Commando, comments?
2) Memory: 2GB - Corsair twin2x1024-6400c4, comments?
3) Video Card (since motherboard doesn't have it inegrated due to chipset): ASUS EN7600GS SILENT
4) Hard Drives: You guys talked me into 5 500GB Seagates 7200.10
5) Case: Cooler Master Centurion 5
6) Power Supply: Need a little help here - suggestions on wattage? Also, any gotchs I need to be aware of with new boards having not only 24pin supply but also another one for? Suggestions on efficiency?
7) Processor: You talked me into saving $100 with the E6600
8) Heatsink: Is the one that comes with the processor good enough, or do I need to track down a Zalman?
9) The motherboard has integrated RAID 5. Is this software RAID? If so, suggested RAID card?

Thanks!

[bcjenkins]

Here's what I put in mine:

1. CPU INTEL|C2D E6420 2.13G 775 4M R - Retail
2. ASUS Commando LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
3. Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
4. ASUS EAX300SE-X/TD/128 Radeon X300SE 128MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video
5. HIPER HPU-4K530-MS ATX12V v2.2 530W Power Supply - Retail
6. LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner With 12X DVD-RAM Write Black SATA Model
7. ZALMAN CNPS9500 AT 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan/Heatsink
8. Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound

Lot's of people are happy with stock cooling. If you won't be over clocking, then probably nothing to worry about. I am not actively overclocking, but I wanted to have a better cooler and memory incase I need to bump up the speed to compensate for transcoding.

The RAID is Intel ich8, if you want a true HW raid look at 3-ware/AMCC. Personally, my next purchase will be a secondary machine to run the un-raid. As far as PS goes, you need to size it based on how many devices you'll eventually put in there. This board supports an 8 pin connection but works with 4 too. (Is this for really big supplies?

B

[jprine01]

1.) Looks good.
3.) I was looking at a picture and its hard to say if the heatsink will block the PCI slot above it. It does not sound like your using it for playback I would get something cheap. The more powerful cards seem to get hot just sitting around at desktop in my experience.
These cards only take one slot, are new generation with onboard memory, have no fans, and about $50 on newegg:
Sapphire X1050 256 PCIExpress VGA+DVI - TV out
Gigabyte 7300GS 128 PCIExpress VGA+DVI - HDTV out
MSI 7300LE 256 PCIExpress VGA+DVI - TV out
EVGA 7100GS 256 PCIExpress VGA+DVI - TV out
ASUS 7300LE 128 PCIExpress VGA+DVI - HDTV out
Anything like those basically, I dont know if you perfer ATI or Nvidia drivers. I use both all the time so it really doesn't matter. Nvidia seems to be better for sage playback, everybody pretty much agrees ati has better desktop/2d quality. Both companys keep changing the driver control pannels around to screw with us Ok Anyway..

5.)That case has a 80mm intake on the bottom I would not squeeze the 5th hd in the floppy spot. For all those HD's your going to need something like this Silverstone 4x 3.5 into 3x 5.25. I have the Lian-Li version of that with 4 of the raid drives and they stay very cool. With 4 on top and one on the bottom this gives you 1-3 free hd bays. Now that your up to 100$ minmum for the case you have allot of options. Like a case that already holds 5+hd with good cooling.
I was just looking at the Antec Nine Hundred ~$140, it just has 9 5.25 bays, and comes with 2 - [3x5.25 into 3x3.5 w120mm fan cage] and you can arange them however things best fit. Plus they put the powersupply on the bottom, I have a Lian-Li with a power supply on the bottom and it work out nice. I could not take all those blue leds though, I would cut them out/use different fans personally.
A few other options like that for around the same price (I see most of them have led fans though )
All depends on how far you want to go. Those cages work really nice, and adapt any case to hold lots of hds but 50$ a pop ads up fast. So a expensive case that already does the job may be worth it.
Just for example: If you got 3 of those Silverstone cages to adapt that Antec Nine Hundred (about the cheapest case with the most 5.25 bays) to hold 12 drives it would cost $300ish. For that price you can get something really really nice and still have 5.25 bays left like this: LIAN LI PC-201B

6.)Anything above 500watt should be plenty for core duo overclocked, powerful raid card and 8hds etc. You dont need the really high wattage until you get the power hungry video cards and especially doubling them up. Its all about stable voltage and low noise (noise in the power not from a fan). A Corsair 520 is better then a generic 700w. (It has the 24pin, 8pin and 4pin for mobo, and modular connectors for the components.)

8.)The stock coolers are good at cooling even with some overclocking, the only reason to replace would be noise. They are temp controlled, quiet at idle and get loud when they are working hard and the case is already warm.

9.)Integrated raid5 is pretty much always software raid unless your looking at a $500+ server board. You'd be better off running them as just a bunch of drives then using the raid5. If you want only some of the data to be redundant you could do Raid1 with 2 drives. This wont really have a negitive effect on speed (+read -write speed) but you loose half your size.
For a few hundred bucks you can get a good quality 4port hardware raid5 pci-express card. Giving you 4x500gig w/1500gig useable as well as speed. You can use the other 500 for your system drive i guess (make a partition). They have a onboard processor that does all the calculations nessisary (raid5 is much more complex than raid1 or raid0), and onboard memory to hold data as it is being sent out to each drive. The card can transmit and receive data from your computer as fast as the interface (pciexpress) can handle so its only limited by the number of drives and the processor on the card. On software raid the system is activating the drives though drivers, and using the system cpu and basically no memory to do calculations. Sometimes the sata chip (silicon image etc) does not like writing to more then one drive at the same time and slows things down that way with software raid. The only difference between a motherboard that support raid5 like that one, and software you can install on any old computer to do software raid5 is that i guess the bios on the sata chip has the software that tells your cpu what to do instead of software thats loaded with windows. The speed is about the same either way too slow to use with sage.

I am bias against Areca because I have one, but its never had a single problem. The drivers are completely invisible to windows (meaning no bulky drivers, no garbage loading on startup) everything just works on the card and it shows up in windows as a SCSI drive, the bios/setup software has every option you could want for changing your arrays around. I've only ever had one question for support and they got back to me quickly.

The 11xx models are PCI-X which is a completely different slot from PCIExpress (just making sure nobody orders the wrong thing)
On some benchmarks the Areca cards are faster then SCSI raid with equal number of drives.
They basically have 3 series of cards.
$330-550 1210/1220 - 4-8 256MB onboard
$700-999 1230/1260 - 12-16 256MB DDR SODIMM expandable to 1GB w/extra features like LAN port on back for external configuration without running anything on the PC.
$$$ 1231/1261/1280 - 12-24 faster CPU 256 DDR2 DIMM expandable to 2GB w/LAN


If I had to go with a different brand i would probably do 3Ware. Costs are about the same.

[bcjenkins]

Don't load any drivers for video. VGA is fine for a server. Also, skip audio drivers too. Not required to playback anything. While we're at it, I wouldn't install any codecs or change SageTV playback settings from default. I inquired with SageTV about this once, and the response I received was if you are not playing locally, there is no benefit.

Bottom Line: Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be.

B

[valnar]

I still recommend the Intel board over the ASUS Commando for a server, unless you really need that fourth PCI slot. No need to put a hot, power hungry video card in a server. Plus then you don't have to worry about it blocking any of your other slots for your tuners. With the advent of the HDHomeRun, you won't need any slots for your HDTV needs.

I use a Highpoint RocketRAID 2320. It's a lot cheaper than an Areca/3Ware and performance is more than adequate for recording TV shows. It supports OLE/OCE just like the big boys. Despite what some may say, it *is* a hardware RAID card, it just doesn't have it's own processor. It uses the hosts processor - but its still a better design than the integrated RAID solution on the ICHx chipsets. With a Core2Duo, you've got cycles to spare. I've never had a problem with it keeping up while transcoding or doing anything else on my E6600. Of course if you have the money to spend, then get the Areca.

The Corsair 520 should be fine for your PSU needs, and the stock Intel HSF is fine too.

Robert

[valnar]

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

Don't load any drivers for video. VGA is fine for a server.

I have to take issue with this. Loading video drivers won't hurt anything, and it makes remote control of the server more palletable. 640x480 is painful!

Robert

[bcjenkins]

Don't know about you, but I can run 1024x768 with stock drivers from MS.

I have a tissue for your issue.

B

[valnar]

Originally Posted by bcjenkins

Don't know about you, but I can run 1024x768 with stock drivers from MS.

I have a tissue for your issue.

B

Ahh... Then you don't mean VGA (640x480).

Robert

[bcjenkins]

MS calls it "Standard VGA graphics adapter"

[malbec]

Thanks again! A few last comments/questions before I seal my fate...

1) I reviewed the MOBO again and am sticking with the ASUS over the DG965WH as the ASUS looks like it is more conducive to overclocking than the Intel board. I am not planning on tackling overclovking immediately, but it seemed worth the extra $.
2) Dumb question, I think someone was politely trying to point out my ignorance. How many drives does one need for RAID 5? Just four?
3) I have decided to hold off on the RAID for now and just get a single 750GB Seagate 7200.10. I currently have 2-200GB, 2-160GB and 1-40GB drive in an old Polywell case. I am thinking I can fit all of that on the 750GB drive for now and hold out for a sale later. Also, I have had a bad taste in mouth for RAID in general and am rethinking it (lost everything on RAID 0 a few years back - I understand RAID 5 and the redundancy/back up you get, but the complexity of the recovery has me bothered).
4) To plan for the future, I think I will pay up for a larger case now. This one seems to have a good following and is on sale at CompUSA this weekend for $100.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129021
5) On the RAID thing again, I need some education on PCI Express. The ASUS board comes with two PCI Express slots. The footnote says they are ran in a x16 and x4 configuration. The video card I am grabbing (and most of them seem to be this way) is a PCI Express 16x. The RAID cards appear to be PCI Express x8. Am I screwed here?

Thanks again for all of your help and reat insights! It is much appreciated!