Rob Oplawar
November 9th, 2008, 07:39 PM
I have about $1k burning a hole in my bank account and more on the way.
It's time for me to start planning my data server/media center.
What I want must have:
Room for lots and lots (and lots) of hard drives. I now have more than 1 TB of DVD quality video, and now I'm itching to move up to HD. I've already suffered one hard drive failure that nearly cost me half my movie collection- luckily I was able to backup most of it before the drive really failed.
So tentatively I'm thinking I want to have it on a RAID 1, because I cannot abide data loss and it's much better than periodically running backups.
I want a minimum of a 1.5 terabyte capacity to begin with, with room for expansion, and 500gb HDDs are the best price/capacity, so this means I need room for 6+ 3.5" drives.
Good ventilation. The hard drives I'm looking at, Western Digital's Caviar line, tend to run hot, and without spending the money on proper cooling I'm likely to spend more just replacing failed hard drives.
This thing will be sitting close to my entertainment center one day, so it oughta be quiet. That means fewer, bigger fans, and that means a well ventilated case.
Access to all that storage. This is where I start to lose my computer nerd cred. I need the data on all these drives to be accessible by any computer on my network. I'm vaguely aware of a few ways this can be done- they can be network drives that actually live on the network with a minimal hardware/software interface for each one to connect it. That, or, they can be attached to a server which provides an interface to the network. I like the server idea better, because that would also allow me to access the data from the internet (I'm not gonna mess with SSHing into my computer on my home network to access the data).
So, I'm really only familiar with home computing and gaming hardware, which doesn't support many hard drives on a single mobo, but I figure there must be server boards designed specifically to access dozens of drives.
Quick data access. So, I'll be putting Blu-Ray movies onto this server. I could store them in the blu-ray format, which would mean the server would have to be able to software-decode it in real time and stream the result, or I could encode it in DIVX or something when uploading to the server and stream that; either way, I need to be able to watch HD movies.
This means: reasonably fast processor and a decent amount of ram, along with a good motherboard.
Flexibility. It's likely this machine will become my primary web server, simply because of convenience. So, I'll probably need to be running apache with php, subversion, and mysql, but in all honesty, my 1995 era machine is doing that just fine, so I don't think I need to worry about it.
But, I might also one day like to use it for a render server as well, and while I won't be building that capability in right now, I'd like to leave this machine open to easy upgrade for that purpose.
Also on the flexibility side of things: I need to be able to easily upgrade this server's hardware. This should be a given, but actually a lot of the media center and case designs that I see don't lend themselves very well to the ease of upgrade that I like.
Case in point: My XPS was basically not upgradeable; I had to replace a whole lot of hardware in order to do what would otherwise have been a small upgrade. In my current computer sitting in a Thermaltake Armor case, I periodically swap out hardware for better newer stuff. So: no custom fit components, no components designed to work with a particular brand, etc.
I also need to consider the software that will be driving this thing. Obviously I will be running some distribution of linux; the question is, which one. Probably Ubuntu, but I don't want to rule anything out. The operating system needs to act both as a media server and a web server, so I need open access on my local network and strict security on the web. Now that I think about it, that just sounds like a bad idea in general, so it may in fact be better to implement this as two different machines.
I need to be alerted automatically to hard drive failure; the hardware RAID should always give me access to my data instead of cutting off access to one hard drive until its partner is restored, but without some sort of alert I might not even notice that the drive had failed; I am a terrible server administrator and tend to go weeks or months without logging into the machine to check on its status.
This server will also act as my backup point- the subversion repository will live here, and other things that I don't keep version controlled will still need to be backed up here. This should probably be managed by some backup software that keeps track of what files have been backed up and when, but I don't need to necessarily be able to access the backup directly except when restoring. Ideally I should be able to run backup software on a machine connected to the network, and the software will communicate with the data server to make the backup.
I might like to eventually store nearly all of my data on this server, leaving all my other machines with nothing but programs and operating systems on them, and I'd like to streamline this interface as much as possible.
So, that's my Christmas wish list, as it were; I'm not going to even think about starting this build until late December, giving me plenty of time to make sure I'm going the right direction with it. I've already got some ideas on how I'm going to build this, but before I write them down, I'd like to hear some of your suggestions.
I can't wait for this thing; once all my data are on this machine and off my other machines, I can finally clean them up and get them to their top performance/accessibility.
It's time for me to start planning my data server/media center.
What I want must have:
Room for lots and lots (and lots) of hard drives. I now have more than 1 TB of DVD quality video, and now I'm itching to move up to HD. I've already suffered one hard drive failure that nearly cost me half my movie collection- luckily I was able to backup most of it before the drive really failed.
So tentatively I'm thinking I want to have it on a RAID 1, because I cannot abide data loss and it's much better than periodically running backups.
I want a minimum of a 1.5 terabyte capacity to begin with, with room for expansion, and 500gb HDDs are the best price/capacity, so this means I need room for 6+ 3.5" drives.
Good ventilation. The hard drives I'm looking at, Western Digital's Caviar line, tend to run hot, and without spending the money on proper cooling I'm likely to spend more just replacing failed hard drives.
This thing will be sitting close to my entertainment center one day, so it oughta be quiet. That means fewer, bigger fans, and that means a well ventilated case.
Access to all that storage. This is where I start to lose my computer nerd cred. I need the data on all these drives to be accessible by any computer on my network. I'm vaguely aware of a few ways this can be done- they can be network drives that actually live on the network with a minimal hardware/software interface for each one to connect it. That, or, they can be attached to a server which provides an interface to the network. I like the server idea better, because that would also allow me to access the data from the internet (I'm not gonna mess with SSHing into my computer on my home network to access the data).
So, I'm really only familiar with home computing and gaming hardware, which doesn't support many hard drives on a single mobo, but I figure there must be server boards designed specifically to access dozens of drives.
Quick data access. So, I'll be putting Blu-Ray movies onto this server. I could store them in the blu-ray format, which would mean the server would have to be able to software-decode it in real time and stream the result, or I could encode it in DIVX or something when uploading to the server and stream that; either way, I need to be able to watch HD movies.
This means: reasonably fast processor and a decent amount of ram, along with a good motherboard.
Flexibility. It's likely this machine will become my primary web server, simply because of convenience. So, I'll probably need to be running apache with php, subversion, and mysql, but in all honesty, my 1995 era machine is doing that just fine, so I don't think I need to worry about it.
But, I might also one day like to use it for a render server as well, and while I won't be building that capability in right now, I'd like to leave this machine open to easy upgrade for that purpose.
Also on the flexibility side of things: I need to be able to easily upgrade this server's hardware. This should be a given, but actually a lot of the media center and case designs that I see don't lend themselves very well to the ease of upgrade that I like.
Case in point: My XPS was basically not upgradeable; I had to replace a whole lot of hardware in order to do what would otherwise have been a small upgrade. In my current computer sitting in a Thermaltake Armor case, I periodically swap out hardware for better newer stuff. So: no custom fit components, no components designed to work with a particular brand, etc.
I also need to consider the software that will be driving this thing. Obviously I will be running some distribution of linux; the question is, which one. Probably Ubuntu, but I don't want to rule anything out. The operating system needs to act both as a media server and a web server, so I need open access on my local network and strict security on the web. Now that I think about it, that just sounds like a bad idea in general, so it may in fact be better to implement this as two different machines.
I need to be alerted automatically to hard drive failure; the hardware RAID should always give me access to my data instead of cutting off access to one hard drive until its partner is restored, but without some sort of alert I might not even notice that the drive had failed; I am a terrible server administrator and tend to go weeks or months without logging into the machine to check on its status.
This server will also act as my backup point- the subversion repository will live here, and other things that I don't keep version controlled will still need to be backed up here. This should probably be managed by some backup software that keeps track of what files have been backed up and when, but I don't need to necessarily be able to access the backup directly except when restoring. Ideally I should be able to run backup software on a machine connected to the network, and the software will communicate with the data server to make the backup.
I might like to eventually store nearly all of my data on this server, leaving all my other machines with nothing but programs and operating systems on them, and I'd like to streamline this interface as much as possible.
So, that's my Christmas wish list, as it were; I'm not going to even think about starting this build until late December, giving me plenty of time to make sure I'm going the right direction with it. I've already got some ideas on how I'm going to build this, but before I write them down, I'd like to hear some of your suggestions.
I can't wait for this thing; once all my data are on this machine and off my other machines, I can finally clean them up and get them to their top performance/accessibility.