Technology for Mortals

Well, most of that

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0266876

I was going to buy the same drives, how ever, I felt the need to wait on the cost due to the fact that I need to purchase some other items first.

nt

This is quite timely, thanks! I was looking to replace the CPU on my server, I think this one fits the bill perfectly, at a price I love!

J.Ja

Why not do an AMD Config?

I’d like to reiterate your point about PATA: about a year ago I decided to copy back all my archived movies from stacks of burned CDs, so I hooked up a second CD drive to my computer on the same ribbon as my first CD drive. However, I soon realized that this approach took exactly TWICE as long as reading from 1 drive.

Needless to say, I got frustrated, and learned a thing or two about PATA. Also, this was before the very recent times of SATA optical drives, so there really wasn’t any other options for me other than doing it 1 CD at a time.

AMD’s 780 chipset has no RAID-5 support. The Intel P35 ICH9R chipset is one of the best integrated RAID solutions on the market. See the performance numbers here http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=484 for the ICH8R. The ICH9R is even better than the ICH8R.

AMD CPUs lack SSE4.1 instruction set which is necessary for fast video encoding. AMD’s desktop and mainstream server performance is lagging. Although one can argue that the CPUs offer a good value for the money, AMD quad-core CPUs consume more power in IDLE than Intel quad-core CPU consume at PEAK power. For a machine that will be left on 24×7, energy efficiency becomes even more important.

AMD memory architecture is faster but that comes in to play for multi-socket or High Performance Computing applications. Neither of these advantages come in to play in this application.

Based on this assessment, AMD was not selected for this project.

George Ou

945 chipset motherboards may not (probably won’t) support Intel 45nm CPUs because it’s too old of a chipset.

If you’re talking about the $70 Allendale dual-core CPU, that should work on a 945 chipset motherboard provided the BIOS is reasonably up to date.

George Ou

Bagha, I have used multiple PATA drives before, but only using a dedicated PATA port per optical drive. The problem here is that motherboards only have 2 PATA ports most of the time. You might be able to get 4 PATA ports on some older motherboards or you can add a PATA PCI controller. The problem is that the cabling for PATA is much harder than SATA cables. While you might have to pay a $5 premium on SATA optical drives, it’s well worth it.

George Ou

Hey George,

How did you get all the stuff in the 5 TB system to work on a 330W power supply? Even at 80-plus, I would expect to need at least 500 or 600W for a beast like that.

Also, in looking around for ICH9R reviews, I’ve seen some accounts of people whose RAID arrays have suddenly stopped working or disappeared, and they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get them working again. Have you experienced any issues with the ICH9R chipset?

Great article, though.

The load for the system without the hard drives would be around 140W peak output which translates to 175W peak input power (power you measure at plug). When you add the hard drives at peak power of 9W per drive (measured input power), that is an additional 54W for all 6 drives added to the 175W number which is 229W. 229W is 183.2W output power to the system components. You’ve got an extra 147W safety margin to work with even when it’s worst case with your CPU, GPU, and hard drives are all cranking full power at the same time. The reality is that you’ll never be cranking the hard drives when you game which means realistically you’re looking at 202W peak input power while gaming and the power supply will do over 400W input.

The 330W peak output PSU would have a peak input of 412W since it’s an 80% efficient PSU.

I’ve tested this type of system on a single hard drive on the Sparkle SPI220LE 1U 220W PSU and even that is well within safety margins. But once you do the worst-case measurements and do the math, you realize how silly a 500W PSU is. Not only are you wasting money but you’re wasting power because your PSU is too big to handle an 80W load efficiently.

Chris, PSUs are rated by their output, not their input. What’s more, quality PSU ratings are for continuous output, not peak.

The single biggest draw in a PC is the GPU, and even those aren’t that high if you’re not playing a game.

That Seasonic is plenty of power.

The reality is that 99.999% of the time when someone says that a person needs 500+ watt PSU for a system, that person could get buy with far less. Any modern quality brand PSU of that class can handle 8800GT SLI with plenty of headroom.

I’ve got a e4300, 2HDs, 8800GT and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it top 200W pulled form the wall. I believe my PSU’s efficiency rating is roughly 75%.

The key is whether or not you buy a quality PSU. At some point, we went from saying you need an outrageously high wattage PSU if you buy a POS one (because they’re always over rated) to you need that much for a high quality PSU. I sometimes think the people who say this stuff work for the PSU companies (or own substantial stock in them).

George, this may be a duplicate post and somewhat off track but after much searching on the internet I couldn’t be completely sure about a small, inexpensive MSSQL server. I wanted to know your/the blogs comments if the GA-EP35-DS3R mother board could run the following raid drive setup for a SBS 2003 R2 premium server runing the 32 bit version of SBS. The SATA2 controller (the 2 – purple sata ports) set up first as 2 channels of raid1 for the 2003 server os and swap files as the "C" drive and then use the 6 yellow ports of the ICH9R for 3 successive pairs of raid 1 to form 3 channnels of disks for the MSSQL 2005 database to form the "D" drive with write back caching enabled . Files/OS/programs that need to be loaded would be by rare/initiail use of a USB CD/DVD rom and the power supply is a I-Star 400 watt dual redundant hot swap power supply with an added additional intel pro gigabit lan card.
I know that if there is a failure in the system, that the data base would become corrupted. However, the only single point of failure is the mother board itself with everything else redundant including an external UPS, but thought that going to an expensive battery backed up sata raid card wouldn’t give me that much additional protection for this inexpensive system ( ie the sata raid card has almost as much chance of failing as the MB) FOR preventing database corruption in case of a hardware/power failure. The server is incrermentally backed up every 4 hours and if 4 hours of data is corrupted it can be corrected by just re-adding the workstations data to the incremental backups during a recovery in a system that is used approximately 14 hrs/day. Can all of the ICH9R ports be configured at once for the 2nd "D" drive or should they be done in pairs? Any comments, positive or negative are appreciated. Chuck Menz

Mr George Ou-Slightly off topic– Raid setups–: Can the 8 sata ports on the be configued on the GA-EP35-DS3R for a small,low cost, SBS 2003 premium server in the following order with the OS installed 1 st as a raid 1 on the 2 sata II ports as the “C” drive and then successively, 3 channels of raid 1 in successive pairs on the ICH9r controller to get some redundancy and increased I/O to MSSQL database for the “D” drive. I realize this doesn’t protect if a hardware failure (mother board/power supply) leads to an interupption during a write cycle and the subsequent database corruption but battery backuped sata multichannel raid controllers are quite a bit more expensive. I am using a dual redundant power supply (for cleaner power and added reliability–leaving the MB as the only single point nonredundant part for failure and I think equal to the failure rate of the expensive raid controller). Sorry for off topic but couldn’t seem to find anything on web searches to address this and you’re a strong proponent for the use of the firmware raid of the ICH(*)R controllers and multiple channels of raid 1 over raid 5/10 systems for small systems. Chuck Menz

You can configure RAID using Windows 2003 drivers for the ICH9R so yes, you should be able to use it in Windows Home Server. You can configure any combination of RAID you like. And yes, it does not have battery backup so enabling write back cache can cause data corruption if the power goes out during the write job. This is probably not ideal for a production server so I would spend the money on a RAID controller with battery backup.

George are the battery backed up raid controllers that that much more reliable then the combo of a good ups into dual redundant hot swap power supplies into the motherboard then raid controller itself? Not to belabor the point/post but it seems to me that it is then a question of the reliabliity of the motherboard vs. the reliability of the battery backuped raid controlller— as everythig else is duplicated and or can be shut down prior to corrupting a database on a write cycle.

It doesn’t matter if the power supply and motherboard shut down, the RAID controller will hold the data in its memory using the battery backup. When the power gets restored, it will complete whatever write job it was attempting before the power got cut.

Here’s my 5tb of doom.
http://terry.rudys.net/?p=500
Using Mac OS X. Only uses like 30 watts of power, since its not RAID, the drives sleep all the time and use almost no power. The drive with the particular movie I am watching is the only one that spins up. Quiet, and low power, no heat, conserves drive. I only have one dvd ripper on there (no big waste of DVD recorders). I used all my systems and then ripped locally and copied over afterwards. Took longer of course, but after the initial push of copying, you don’t have wasted hardware. This is all in a closet and feeds a couple of AppleTVs in the house. Mac lets you turn on/off automatically so it turns on @ 6pm when we come home, turns off at 6am when we leave the house, and stays on (spinning down when not needed) during the weekend. Simple, basic.

Hi George,

I’m not a "hardware guy", so I must apologize in advance for my ignorance.

It is a great article – and has given me a perfect starting point for archiving my DVD collection. I do have one – or two – questions though:

My collection of DVD’s currently stands at around 1200, and looking at the numbers, 5TB is not going to cut it. After initial burning, I don’t see a great need for the 6 DVD burners, so my question is; Could I acquire more TB’s by substituting additional drives, using the same SATA interfaces that were being used by the burners? If so, does that need any additional cooling/power requirements? If that’s not an option, could you recommend an alternate configuration?

Quite honestly, I’d rather spend the $$ on a nice HTPC than on more shelving….

Many thanks,
Graham

@George Ou
I am looking at doing a setup similar to this, but a lot of time has past since you originally wrote this article, any ideas on specific hardware upgrades you would do now that dual quad cores are out? Or are you still recommending the same setup.