A file server for home (Part 2)

In this second part of "A file server for home" I will introduce a few factors which I am currently considering in making the decisions about what my file server will eventually look like. Monetary constraints: That money would be a factor is so obvious it is almost overlooked. It is the single most important contributor in any business decision, and while one might be tempted to think that power users have a large budget for computer spend, there exist a certain culture among many hackers, particularly in the "over-clocking" community, in which one try to make the most of the least through being clever in stead of by throwing money at the problem. While I am not into “over-clocking”, I can still respect the art from the sideline. I am looking for a cost-effective way to achieve resilience and stability, and the principle remains: I will try to build the best file server possible while spending as little as possible through (hopefully) being clever with configuration decisions. With this in mind I am going to try to do two things: I will attempt to reuse what I have, and when I cannot help it, I will buy components with an upgrade path and maximal life expectancy. Physical Constraints: One of the implied ideas of a file server is that it is going to be used to house a number of disk drives in the chassis. Keeping in mind that I want to reuse some of my existing hard drives and want future expansion capability, it is clear that the chassis must not be too limited in terms of the number of drives that it supports. I had a look at the cases that I have lying around in my garage, particularly a lovely, if somewhat older, full tower case. Unfortunately none of them are ATX form factor compatible, and I will have to use a motherboard which supports SATA hard drives, which implies that the motherboard will be fairly new and therefore will be an ATX form factor board, which effectively eliminates the use of any of the unused cases that I already have: Hence the need for a new chassis. I started searching and reading reviews on web sites, and one thing that frustrated me was the limited space for installing hard drives in many cases - Most top out at 8, sometimes no more than six drives are supported, and that is counting the bays to be used for CD/DVD and floppy-disk drives. Only the very expensive cases support ten or more disk drives. Additionally, I hoped to find a case in which the disk drives are side-accessible so that I would be able to service drives without having to resort to removing the graphics card, etc. As luck would have it I found someone who wanted to sell a case because it was too large and too heavy to carry around to LAN parties. The case in question turned out to be the Thermaltake VA8000. With a native capability to house 14 drives and the ability to be extended further by using special drive bay modules, it was an almost perfect fit to my requirements. On checking the condition of the case I found that there was some scratches on the side panel, the keys are missing and the front doors would no longer latch into the closed position. These are all really minor issues, and while cleaning the case I discovered that the little magnets meant to keep the doors from swinging open had just fallen out and were stuck to metal parts elsewhere in the chassis, so that was easily sorted with a bit of crazy-glue. What is more is that the case's monstrous size makes it easy to access the drives even with a bunch of cards installed, despite the fact that the drives are not side accessible, so this chassis is going to form the perfect basis for my file server. In fact this case deserves a full review on its own, so watch this space for an upcoming post on this topic. I still need to finalize some of the other components for this server, but currently the items that I am considering are the following:

• Motherboard: I have a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI motherboard which I am currently using as my desktop "workstation". The SLI part is way overkill for a server, but this motherboard sports no less than eight SATA ports and two IDE controllers, for a maximum of 12 drives.
• CPU and Memory: Seeing that I will need to replace the motherboard in my desktop and the new motherboard is unlikely to use the same socket type, it means that my existing processor and memory will be freed up, and will serve just fine in the server. Therefore the server will inherit my existing AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor and 2 GB of DDR400 memory.
• Graphics card: This motherboard does not come with an on-board graphics card, so I will have to provide one. My existing card is a Gigabyte GV-3D1 dual 6600GT, which would be totally overkill for any server, but might not be compatible with whatever new motherboard I eventually get for my desktop. I will test the GV-3D1 on my new motherboard and if it works it will stay in my desktop and I will just use an old PCI graphics card in the server. Otherwise I will use it in the file server purely to prevent it from being wasted, and then I would need to start evaluating what to buy for my desktop, though that is an entirely different discussion in itself.
• DVD-Writer: The drive I have right now is a very capable LG Lightscribe, but is slower on some media formats, particularly the DVD "minus" variety of disks. I will buy an extra DVD-writer, and then decide which one of the two goes into my desktop, and put the other one in the server. This is not something that needs to be decided now, but it will depend on what my usage pattern turns out to be: Will I be writing more disks on my desktop or will I need it more often in the server to make backups...?
• Tape Drive: I am hoping to find a tape drive to ease the backup process, ideally either an LTO 3 or LTO 4 drive. This is something that I will add to the file server when I find a suitable device.
• Hard Drives: The server will start off by inheriting the six disk drives currently in my desktop system, these being: an 80 GB IDE drive, a 320 GB IDE drive and four 160 GB SATA drives. More drives will be added over time as and when required.
• Power Supply: Hard drives do not actually use huge amounts of power. It is typical for a drive to use around the 10W mark, while during peak usage or start up they drives can use up to about 30W each. Hard disk spin up is staggered, and if I assume that out of about 10 potential drives I am unlikely to often have more than one drive operating at peak performance at any one point in time, with maybe two more drives operating at around the 20W mark and the rest mostly idle at 10W, I will realize around (7*10) + (2*20) + 30 = 140 W for the disk drives. The graphics card could potentially peak at anything from 20W for an old PCI card to around 100W if I were to use the GV-3D1 card (I don't expect to ever see the graphics card in the server peak but I will use peak values here just to be safe). The CPU, RAM and Motherboard chip set adds another 150W during peak usage, bringing the total to around 400W. This is peak usage, but a 500W power supply gives me some head-room for movement and in any case you do not want to operate at the limit of a power supply's capacity as it is a likely source of instability. A good power supply is something that I will need to purchase.

The Gigabyte motherboard has got one caveat that I need to mention: Four of the SATA ports are provided by a Silicon Image SI3114 controller, which does something non-standard to the disks connected to it. What I have found is that with drives that I have previously used on the SI3114 the partition table is not recognized when you try to use them on a different SATA controller. This also happens if I try to use one of these drives in an external USB enclosure like the NexStar III SATA enclosure that I have. On the other hand, disks which were previously partitioned while connected on the nVidia chipset's built-in SATA controller is recognized on other motherboards and in my external enclosure without any problems. The reason why I mention this is that if the motherboard ever should fail, I will be in trouble because these controllers are not present on to many motherboards, and so, unless I can get another motherboard with the same type of controller, I would have a hard time reading the data from the disks that were connected to the SI3114 controller. I must admit that this is not something that I have been able to verify yet, but there is this risk. Note: All of the motherboard SATA ports are set to operate in JBOD mode, which allows me to select how I want to set up the RAID in software, and also allows me to change the RAID layout later. I also still have to make a final decision on what operating system to use. I would be a poor Solaris fan if I did not at least consider Solaris as an option, but in my experience it is just more suited to a server environment where the applications you want to use are unlikely to change much and all well supported under Solaris. OpenSolaris offers me the same capability to set up zones and ZFS file systems, but many applications are easier to get to run under OpenSolaris. Seeing that I will want to use the server for several other purposes besides simple file sharing and because I have not yet identified the actual software that I will use, I will eliminate Solaris at this point just because it will be too restrictive in future. If file serving was the only purpose, then it would have been perfect. I will also eliminate Windows because it is not free, too difficult to configure, doesn’t have enough free software, and is just generally a pain to work with. If I were to use Linux I would have trouble getting ZFS to work - the Linux ZFS port is not nearly stable enough for my liking. This means I will probably have to use OpenSolaris. The decision to use OpenSolaris is not yet cast in stone, but it looks like the right choice because I will be able to set up Zones/Containers and I will be able to use ZFS features like snapshots and raid-z. The four 160 GB disks that I have will nicely make up one raid-z "stripe". For the rest of the disks I will need to find an optimal way to configure them, but I still need to investigate the optimal way to set up the disk. I am also considering is to get the free Foundation Suite Basic disk management software as I know it very well and it too provides simple and online management of disk space. In part three of this series I will go in depth in how I selected an operating system for this file server.

A file server for home (Part 1)

In this first part of "A file server for home" I will cover my situation and how I decided that I need a file server. In a follow-on "part 2" I will get into the actual implementation. I am the type of person who fixes their computer when it is not broken - For me it is all about learning about the computer: how it works, how it can work better, and what else I can make it do. Re-installing the operating system, upgrading, testing any interesting sounding programs that I chance upon on the internet, it is all part of the game. All of this means that my data is at constant risk. I could make a mistake when I re-partition a disk, or a misbehaving piece of software could cause havoc with my data. To make matters worse, all of my data is at risk of failure of an actual disk drive! And I often enough get my computer into a state where it is unable to boot for a few days - this instance being a good example. Now you must understand that the content of my hard drives represent many years' worth of collecting shareware, downloading documents, Linux install disk images, recording logs of my online activities, stored email archives, my digital photos and much more. Replacing this would be all but impossible! The only answer is to take the data out of my computer and save it externally. The first question you may ask is why don't I just make backups? Oh I do.... It is just that I fall behind in keeping my DVD-R based backups up to date, and in any case, CDR and DVD-based backups have been known to be fallible. Each disk that I do make contains a little bit of everything, some photos, some documents, some shareware and what not else, which makes organizing the collection of backup disks another nightmare. What is more, to take a single full backup will take a stack of about 160 disks. So basically taking backups to DVD is just simply not a viable option. A very simple alternative option would be to just get a Home NAS device, but I have discarded the idea as too expensive, too inflexible, and too limiting. There is an alternative which will better meet my needs: A dedicated file server. Actually the word "dedicated" needs to be qualified, as you will see soon enough. Building a file server PC provides me with the following benefits:

1. I can build a DVD or tape drive into the file server to take backups directly without going via the network for the times when I need to dump some files onto a removable media. This can not be done with NAS devices.
2. I can add many disk drives to a PC - my current motherboard supports 12 drives without the use of S-ATA port multipliers or even USB-based drives, and additional S-ATA controllers and/or port multipliers can be added for even more disk drives. Very few NAS devices actually support more than two drives or even allow you to extend a raid array.
3. Existing NAS devices share the data via SMB only. Being a Unix and Linux user I want to have directories shared via NFS and possibly other protocols in the future.
4. I could install and run programs on a file server, for example to make the machine act as a streaming media server. Granted, some NAS devices already includes this functionality, but you're limited to whatever functions it comes with - you don't have the freedom to replace the software with something of your own.
5. A PC file server can potentially do other non-file server things, such as being a print server, Scan server, Web server, Mail server, Folding-at-home station, and of particular interest to me, a web proxy and DNS-caching server.
6. A PC file server can have multiple network ports for better connectivity; it could even have a WiFi port.
7. NAS devices do not commonly provide RAID-5 disk protection. A PC would support any level of RAID and hot-spare drives to boot. RAID-5 in software is often criticized as being "CPU-heavy", but in an idle file server I'd just be happy to give that processor something to do! Mirroring is too expensive for my "home-user" size budget.
8. Many NAS devices don't support power-save or sleep modes for the drives. I believe that it is important to turn the drives off to extend the life-time of the drives, particularly in an always-on server.

Essentially one of the advantages of a dedicated file server is that it does not need to be dedicated, it can do other things besides! One must of course also consider what you lose when you go for a computer acting as a file server rather than a nicely build NAS appliance:

1. To some the physical appearance of an appliance is appealing, but in my case the server will sit tucked away in the corner under a desk, so I do not consider this important.
2. NAS devices usually have some form of online disk replacement and array re-building, but I can afford the downtime to replace drives and while doing maintenance.
3. A NAS device is simple and probably fairly stable - you just press the button and voila ... it is running, while with a server you have some instability and, due to the added complexity, more chance for things to go wrong or stop working. Being the hacker that I am, this is possibly a good thing rather than a bad thing, but don't tell my wife.
4. And finally, some may consider the portability of a NAS device an advantage.

There is one other important consideration, at least to me. With a PC based file server I would be able to log in on the server and do file maintenance directly on the server. To re-organize the directory structure and layout with a NAS device would require me to copy the files back-and-forth between the device and a PC. In particular, moving files from one disk or partition to another will often require the files to be passed via the network twice. This would be slow and in practice it would probably cause me to not actually get around to sorting my data (which is currently in a very sad state of disorganization). With a server I would be able to log on into the server and then perform this organization directly on, and internally to, the server. This is important because I am more likely to actually do the data organization when it doesn't have to pass over the network the whole time, and as a result my data will be better organized and therefore ultimately more useful! I am now in the planning stage for my file server. It will probably have around 1TB of usable disk space to start off with, made up mostly from my existing hard drives. But I will talk about the design and implementation in part 2 of this little series, so keep watching this space! (In other words, add it to your RSS feed aggregator)