File Server

[NegativeZero]

I am need of advice and thus decided to consult the learned intarweb computar sages for assistance.

At present, I still live at home. We are a reasonably progressive household - every family member has their own desktop, and three of the four also own a laptop. My father is a huge music buff, with a collection of at least 400 CDs, all of which he ripped a while back in an epic CD ripping project spanning several weeks. My sister is a film and photography enthusiast, and as you know I download far too much anime for my own good.

At present, we have no real backup facility. This can only really be described as 'not good'.

The solution I am currently gravitating towards is a central fileserver. This would be a dedicated box as I don't trust ready-made NAS shit as far as I could throw it. At least 4x750gb drives in RAID-5.

Here are the questions:

• Most of the time there is only going to be one user accessing data - me - however at peak times I imagine load would be spread over a maximum of five and possibly even six if we're getting greedy. As such, what sort of CPU power / RAM capacity should I be looking at to provide optimal experiences, given that I don't own a money tree? RAM is cheap though so that's not really a major issue.
• Given that my family are far less computer literate than they think they are, to minimise the amount of tech support I have to do I need everything to be easily accessible over the network. What's the best platform for the server? Windows Server 2008?
• Assuming the above 4-disk RAID, is the general setup usually to have the actual OS on the array, or on a dedicated drive? Does it even matter?
• Can someone recommend a decent case with room for a fair number of HDDs? I can't unfortunately repurpose any boxes in the house for this.
• At the moment the backbone of our home network is our shitty ADSL2 router, which is plugged into an even shitter old 100mbit switch. So I guess the switch is the real backbone. Anyway, can someone recommend a decent replacement ADSL2+ router with a) wireless (preferably wireless that doesn't drop out if you breathe near it) and b) that isn't made by Belkin, who I suspect employ engineers who would otherwise be reduced to trawling through piles of shit looking for little bits of corn to pick out for dinner

[Jaymz]

Servers don't need grunt in terms of CPU usage. That said, it pays to be careful with what you get amongst the low end shit, because even so called "cheap" CPU's can still suck power just like how any decent hooker can suck a golf ball through a garden hose. The best bet is to go with Intel's Pentium Dual Core, which despite the name, are actually Core 2 Duo's with some bits chopped off to make it all consumer-y. The benefit with these are that they're low power, have two dedicated cores (so rogue processes don't hang your server), and pretty damn cheap. A 1.8GHz Allendale generally goes for about $80 to $90 bucks, and will work in any Core 2-esque motherboard. For RAM, you shouldn't need to go above 1GB, or perhaps 2GB if you run stuff in the background (torrent apps, internal lan webhosting, etc)

For cases and motherboards, well.. Gigabyte offer a great range of full featured, full length motherboards with onboard video and seem to be just about the only mobo manufacturer that does - but really, almost everyone offers at least 4 SATA-II ports nowadays, so you most likely won't go wrong with your favourite motherboard manufacturer, either. In terms of an enclosure, the Coolermaster iTower 930 is probably the best case out there for a no-nonsense quick build fileserver, without needing to spend extra on SATA caddies.

In terms of a server platform, 2008 is nice, but Home Server is cheaper and a hell of a lot simpler for your average Joe. The file serving component has some serious flaws, depending on what you use it for. If it's to store anime and TV shows, it's great, because you only ever read from the server. It's writing the data back on a regular basis that can cause all kinds of dramas. For just pure client backups of every PC in the house? There's nothing else like it on the PC side, unless you have your own Livestate Advanced Server running in the closet.

Regardless of it all, you're going to want to do some serious infrastructure work first, though. If you're sharing files from a single box, you're going to want gigabit everywhere you can get it, and perhaps just go with a normal router (IMHO, all singing and dancing routers tend to suck pretty hard), with some wireless N bridging going on.

[wild]

In terms of a server platform, 2008 is nice, but Home Server is cheaper and a hell of a lot simpler for your average Joe. The file serving component has some serious flaws, depending on what you use it for. If it's to store anime and TV shows, it's great, because you only ever read from the server. It's writing the data back on a regular basis that can cause all kinds of dramas. For just pure client backups of every PC in the house? There's nothing else like it on the PC side, unless you have your own Livestate Advanced Server running in the closet.

If you do happen to be brave enough to venture into Windows Home Server territory, don't expect much. It's about as predictable as a cornered pitbull. And whatever you do, don't rely on its backup feature - that rarely worked for me at all.

I'll stick with a Linux server any day of the week - the setup takes a little more work to get it going smoothly, but it worked quite nicely for me after lots of google-fu. It's not for everyone though.

I'd probably recommend WS2008 just on WHS' issues alone. Sure, most of its issues can be worked around, but do you really want to risk the reliability and safety of your data just for some automatic backups and a fancy interface?

As for other questions: any recent CPU should be fine, but I'd probably go for a Core 2 Duo of some description. My fileserver ran on an Athlon X2 4400+ without breaking a sweat. 2Gb+ of RAM is cheap these days, go with that as a minimum. RAID setup depends on your RAID card, or lack of one. Software RAID under Windows requires a seperate OS drive iirc. Most hardware RAID cards support booting the OS from RAID - if you decide to use a RAID card though, avoid the cheap silicon image stuff - you want a decent 3ware or similar controller, which will set you back a few hundred bucks.

The Coolermaster Stackers are nice cases for fileservers. And as for routers, a few manufacturers are starting to come out with pre-N routers with gigabit ethernet, which should be suitable.

[NegativeZero]

I have no problems with a Linux server, it's the rest of the family I'm worried about.

[wild]

tbh if they're only using it for samba filesharing, then it's pretty much the same from their point of view, and pretty maintainence free unless it breaks. And unless they're technically minded, then they'll be coming to you for help if it breaks, Linux or Windows.

The only difficulty would be backups.

[NegativeZero]

It would mainly be used as a backup server plus configured in RAID-5. Anything they absolutely positively must have forever should be burned to DVD-R or something. As such automated backups of the redundant backup is probably unnecessary. It's not as if we're talking about mission-critical business records or something here.

My experience with Linux and the way it generally hates hardware RAID controllers really puts me off using it. Plus the fact that it's a pain in the ass to set everything up and it has to be just right or it won't work. It's enough of a bastard to work with when I'm using it for development at work, really. Since I'm a busy adult with no time for fucking with linux configurations I'd generally lean towards Windows Server regardless.

[Jaymz]

If you do happen to be brave enough to venture into Windows Home Server territory, don't expect much. It's about as predictable as a cornered pitbull. And whatever you do, don't rely on its backup feature - that rarely worked for me at all.

I had the complete opposite, in actual fact. During the beta, and indeed, during my time spent with the final product, I found the backup part not only very dependable, but pretty much the best selling point of the system as a whole. I think a couple of the betas, or one of the RC's had a few issues related to backups, but the final version worked flawlessly for me with a combination of Vista, XP and Server 2003 boxes.

[wild]

I had the complete opposite, in actual fact. During the beta, and indeed, during my time spent with the final product, I found the backup part not only very dependable, but pretty much the best selling point of the system as a whole. I think a couple of the betas, or one of the RC's had a few issues related to backups, but the final version worked flawlessly for me with a combination of Vista, XP and Server 2003 boxes.

You got lucky then. WHS managed to backup my laptop alright, but the desktop was another story. It'd always get to 20 or 30%, without fail, and then claim the computer was turned off mid-backup. I would be sitting there and watching the computer, so it's not like it was going into sleep or standby.

Then one day, the WHS icon goes red, and says it's managed to corrupt all the backups. When this happens, there's no magic "delete all the backups" button. I couldn't actually find a way to reset the backup system and start again short of formatting the entire bloody server and reinstalling. So I did, but WHS sure as hell didn't go back on.