I finished building our new Home Media Server this week. Here's the component list:
- Antec P180 case (new)
- ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe motherboard (new)
- P4 1.6A FSB400 Northwood
- Enermax 400watt PSU
- 512Mb Crucial DDR memory PC2100
- Zalman 7000A AlCu cpu cooler with fanmate
- 1 HP CD-RW drive
- 1 Seagate Barracuda 80Gb PATA disk
- 1 Seagate Barracuda 250Gb PATA disk
- 4 Samsung SpinPoint P120 250Gb SATA-II disks (new)
- Matrox Millenium G450 dual-head AGP 4x graphics card (ebay)
Our previous server was the PC written up in Quiet PC Project 2003. However, it couldn't hold enough hard disks, didn't support SATA or Gigabit ethernet so I figured it was time for a major upgrade. I had also had troubles with the IDE controllers being flakey.
After an extensive search of current motherboards and cpu's, I decided to re-use the P4 1.6A 400FSB Northwood. The server really doesn't do a lot of work so it didn't make sense buying anything high-powered that runs hot. The 1.6A is one of the coolest running chips around. I was really tempted to go with a Socket 775 board for a bit of future-proofing and to get a ICH7R southbridge but the Prescott cpu's that go with it are terrible. I also found DDR2 memory to be quite expensive too. It was tempting to go with an Athlon 64 but I eventually figured I should re-use as much kit as possible. The only new bits are the motherbard, case and Samsung hard disks.
For the new motherboard, I settled on an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe which is a revised version of the board I used in Quiet PC Project 2004. I was hoping to find something with an onboard graphics controller but none of them came with all the other features I wanted. My previous P4P800 Deluxe had proved to be a good board so I went with it's new sibling.
For the case, I've splashed out on a silver Antec P180. A lot of thought has gone into the design of the airflow in the case and it's big enough to hold all the disks I want. Not many are. I toyed with the idea of going with a proper rack-mounted server case but I'm doubt any of them are designed to run quietly and you pay a hefty premium for them.
Into the case went an old Enermax power supply I had kicking about. Unfortunately, it's not very quiet nor does it have any intelligent fan control. It would be nice to replace it with something better but I was trying to keep the expenses down. Routing the cables around the P180 is a bit of nightmare. The PSU is at the bottom of the case in its own chamber so routing is messy and non-trivial.
It was a close call between going with Seagate Barracuda's or Samsung SpinPoint's. The SpinPoint's are the preferred disk among Silent PC enthusiasts and I liked the fact it supports SATA-II. It came out well in a roundup of 250Gb drives on StorageReview.com Unfortunately, 250Gb is the largest they currently produce..
One of my pet peeves at the moment is sourcing graphic cards that use a minimal amount of power. The server doesn't need any 3D capability and I run it in a headless configuration anyway. Really, a server shouldn't need a graphics card in the first place. With PCI express, it's a real nightmare as everything seems to be geared for 3D.
After a bunch of searching, I settled on the Matrox Millenium G450. It has a nice small passive heatsink, only uses about 7 watts of power and Matrox still provides recent drivers for it. I found one on ebay for £12.
Putting all the kit together was straightforward but installing the software turned out to be a nightmare. I was plagued with freezes.
I won't bore you with the details but I believe I finally sorted it out by installing the Promise SATA378 drivers at the beginning of the Windows Server 2003 install (aka F6) rather than at the end. It took quite a few days of experiments and a lot of pain to figure that one out.
But I'm happy now. I used Windows Server 2003 to created a RAID 5 array out of the 4 250Gb disks giving me a beautiful 698Gb of fault tolerant storage. Speedwise it's good enough for what I need.
I'll be using the other 250Gb PATA disk for temporary backups and video files. It's main purpose is to act like a hot spare when one of the RAID 5 disks eventually die.
So I've now got a reasonably quiet, high capacity, fault-tolerant server. It's running Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 as a web server and file server. I'll soon run it as a print server too. Most important of all, it runs SlimServer as a music server and I can now expand my collection.