Building a new server....need advice

[DaMaN]

This will be for serving all my pictures, movies and mpegs, etc in my house and neighboring family in the area of my town as well as a folding machine.

here's the specs:

Chaintech K7DD Dual Athlon MPX motherboard
2 X Athlon XP 2100+'s Modded to MP via L5 bridges
2 X SK 700 Copper Heatsinks with 2 Antec 80mm fans atop them both
Lian Li Mid tower case Model PC-6099
w/window & Red cold cathode tubes
Enermax 400 W PSU
512MB Crucial Reggisterred ECC DDR (2X256) * another 512 in the mail on the way
TNT2 AGP vid card
Netgear Nic

And here's where i need advice:

I have the following HD's to put in the Server:
Bear in mind this mother board has IDE channel 3 & 4 and has built in RAID

These will be for storage, etc and take IDE 2 & 3 up
Maxtor 120GB 7200 RPM 2mb Cache
WD 120GB 7200 RPM 2mb Cache
Maxtor 100GB 5400 RPM 2mb Cache
Maxtor 80 GB 5400 RPM 2mb Cache

Should I get optical drives for the server?(i.e burner & DVD Romdrive?) I plan on doing some video ripping, etc and will probably throw my Pioneer DVR-104 DVD-R/W in it.

Also I have the following I could use for OS /Boot:

2X WD 3.4GB 5400 rpm HD's to run in raid on IDE 4 (stripe 0 or 1?)
Are these big enough to hold Win XP Pro? These small drives would be a quick install since the formatting would get done in a jiffy. I have NO experience using Raid. I also have a IDE PCI card I could use as well.

Or use a 30 GB 7200 RPM 2mb Cache alone on IDE 1

I also got a 10 GB WD 5400 & a 4.3 GB Quantum.

I want speedy access across the netork to copy file to and fro as well as stability.

What's the best solution you guys think?

[Judg3]

Yeah those 3.4GB drives are good for XP, but please don't raid 0 them. First off, you'll only have a 7GB drive, which is no big whoop, and you've doubled your chances for failure as well. I think those in a RAID 1 for the OS would be good enough, that way your protected.

As for the optical drives, I probably wouldn't put any in it - but thats just me. You said your throwing your DVD burner in there, odds are thats good enough.

And do you really want to mod your XP's to work as MP chips? I mean, I know it'll save you money but AMD tests their chips, and if they don't think the XP is good enough to run on an SMP system, then I'd trust em with that. Besides, if you can afford a Lian-Li case and a DVD burner you can probably afford the little extra cash to buy the real deal and have your system be under warranty, ya know?

I only ask, because I've built hundreds of MP servers, from 2 to 32 processors, and have read all the documentation on these things.
Modded XP chips on an MP system can throw artifacts into everything from protein folding calcs to video and audio ripping. I'm not saying it happens to everyone, but it does happen. Just something to think about though.

[DaMaN]

i was gonna get a DVD Rom for ripping some video's from work that I burnt from our digital video systems and use the burner to burn the compilations of different rips as examples for distribution for corporate security to view. So I thought DVD-Rom to rip (@16X) and the burner to copy on the fly would this work and what proggie should I use.

Also, Raid 1 is mirror right?



I am just using the modded XP's to MP because i already had them and figured why not put them to use.


thanks for the input.

[Judg3]

Yep, RAID 1 is mirroring. I don't know a whole lot about video ripping and such, I can't really comment on it. But what I can suggest is to rip the video on a diffrent machine, then transfer it to the server over the LAN. That'll free up a whole IDE channel for ya to put more yummy drives on hehe.

Oh, yeah, don't forget to put like drives on the same channel to. Like 2 7200 RPM UDMA133 drives on a channel, your slower ones on a diffrent channel, etc. If you put a 7200 drive and a 5400 rpm drive on the same IDE channel, your basically slowing the whole thing down to the speed of the 5400 rpm drive.
Thats another good thing about SATA, it doesnt have that whole problem hehe.

I sorta thought you already had the 2100's lying around, but I wanted to throw it out there as food for thought anyway hehe.

Still, sounds like a pretty kickass server, similar to what I plan on building.
Heck, my last servers was a dualie P3 1Ghz with 10 80GB drives in a big old Inwin case. TO bad I don't have that kinda money any more though!

This your first MP system? Be careful, they are addictive! You can't stop with just one!

[Sean]

Damn, that is going to be one busy server!

Enjoy it man. I know I have great plans for my family and the server I got (400mhz PII). it works for now, cause it only hosts music. I also have it folding right now too. But, man, is it slow.

I would definately run the two 5400 RPM on raid 1, was it? Whatever mirror was. For redudency. (sp?). I have one 13 GB hdd in the server right now. After I get my new HDD, my 40gig's goin into it. I'm only using about 80% of it now. AND, I created two partitions. One 3.84 GB partition for WinXP and 8.5 gb for music and stuff. The 3.84 partition fits WinXP Pro just fine. I did install a few games (like CS) so I could hsot games. When i did that, i made sure to install on the 2nd partition.

Again, enjoy it. That is going to be one kickass server.

[BillyGoat]

Thats gonna be nice David, you serving port 80 on it, what kinda bandwidth you have?? Anyways if you want some help a couple cervesa's and ill be there... looks like fun