Help me assemble cheap server

Do you've any plan to make money (you said something about business) out of it or just hobby kind of server setup? If I were you I will start with basic hardware with RAID1 (trust me server do not need lots of hard disk space). Make sure motherboard support 4 hard disks (2 SATA connections) and 4/8GB RAM. This way you can upgrade RAM, hard disk and other stuff as per your requirement later on.

My first FreeBSD server was lowend Celeron based with 2x18G scsi hard drives and 1GB RAM. It hosted around 40-50 websites for my various client including mail server with shared 10Mbps port.

HTH
 
ok, here's my (so far) final setup

HDD: 3x 3,5" SATA 500GB 7200rpm 16MB Barracuda 7200.12 Seagate ST3500418AS - $197.16
CPU: Athlon II X3 400E 2,2GHz 1,5MB sAM3 AMD AD400EHDGIBOX - $136.82
Motherboard: sAM3 AMD 790FX SB750 ATX Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P - $153.50
RAM: 4GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC Kit of 2 Crucial CT2KIT12864BA1339 - $66.44
PSU: 500W ATX 12cm Thermaltake W0294 - $100.53

Case: Midi ATX 500W Black Intertech IT-CA-01_BLACK_SL500 - $69.87
CPU Cooler: Alpine 64 Pro Arctic Cooling 11000129 - $16.08
HDD cooler: 3x two fan Xilence COO-XPHD.2F.B - $21.46
Click to expand...
+UPS

Total $760.99 (506.84Eur), from which $132.32 is tax


Yes, I have plan how to make money...
Probably the biggest problem will be taxes and everything related.
In Latvia we have HUGE mess right now.
 
I hope your government will accept new law, about needed capital to start company.

Currently to start company you need 2000Ls (4 245.38USD), if they accept new law, I will only need 100Ls (212.26USD)

can you feel the difference? No wonder our economy is currently ****ed
 
excuse me for bumping in and giving my two cents ;-)

- Your motherboard supports 2xPCIe x16 which is good for crossfire video cards setups (gamer related) , something you will not need on your server. More over, to reduce power consumption your server will be headless, i.e. no graphics card installed.
- The motherboard series do not support ECC buffered RAM
- The thermaltake psu has 2xSATA 4xMolex and the reviews I read didn't convince me.
- Your case has a PSU pre-installed?


My choice:

Motherboard:
GigaByte GA-MA770T-UD3P 88.90€
(same specs as yours only 1 PCIex16)

Memory:
4 GB DDR3-1333 Kit OCZ3P1333LV4GK, Platinum Edition 93.90€
(low voltage, good latencies (CL7 7-7-20) )

PSU:
Cooler Master Real Power M520 69.90€
(Cables are modular, you use what you need, no spaghetti of cables in your case, 8xSATA or 10xMolex )

CASE:
Cooler Master CM690 (3 pre-installed 120mm fans) 64.90€
(Good reviews! Recommended in many cases. )

Boxed cpu fan will be sufficient. Especially with the case's airflow (CM690) . A 'special' cpu cooler implies you want to overclock your cpu.

Don't buy/install HDD fans! This is one of those products nobody should install. (A few yours ago, when I was still repairing pc's, some customer had those HDD fan installed and he complained his pc was 'dead'. The bottom of the HDD (circuit board) was covered in dust. It is more important that your case intake blows over your HDs. (This is for desktop cases, storage servers mostly blow dissipated heat out of the case but their airflow is very different compared with desktop cases. )
Leave a space between your HDs when you assemble. For example the CM690 has 5 HD bays (top12345bottom -> X2X4X where X is a disk)

Please, check the HCG as well for your chipset/controller support. Sometimes, new motherboards are to new for FreeBSD.
I don't have good experiences with onboard realtek NICs, I prefer 3Com/Intel NICs with FreeBSD.

ZFS dedup and compression :)
 
Don't go with a single 5900 RPM drive. You need faster if it is all running on one drive. You also probably multiple drives if you ever start getting the server used.

You may want at least a 400w power supply.
 
Just try to buy second hand servers of 2 to 3 years old. Try to focus on the "better" brands. I have currently four second hand HP DL servers (three DL360G4 and one DL320G5) and they all work excellent on FreeBSD. A DL320G5 in second hand is very affordable and is still a pretty fast machine on the condition there is a Xeon inside. Power consumption of this dual core CPU is 65W.
 
65W tdp
CPU is one thing (okay the xeons have speedstep), motherboard, harddisks (scsi, 10k or 15k rpm), and so on.
In the end, a server consumes more power which reflects on your electricity bill. Then, a disk or fan dies and because of the second hand nature, no rma or guarantee contracts. Replacement parts are not cheap even when they are second hand.
Although I have as well good experiences with HP, SUN and supermicro servers as long as they are not too exotic or the latest series.

An example calculation:
1 kWh = 0.15 euro cent (example)
power consumption system under full load 250 Watt (example)
365 days * 24 h = 8760 h * 250 W = 2190 kWh * 0.15 euro/kWh = 328.5 euro a year.
Anyway, I would stick to Killasmurf86 config as it is.
Maybe I would use other harddisks (Western Digital GP, has rpm throttling) . I just bought 12TB of those 2TB WD GP disks especially for the rpm throttling and the native 4KB blocks.

Sorry for digging up this thread.
 
Now I got cash.... in 2-3 days I will order this [in 2 days MB will be available for ordering]. Since I started this thread some hardware was not available no more... some new hardware appeared etc....

Today I created new list of what I will order based on knowledge gained in this thread:
MotherBoard: Gigabyte - GA-790XTA-UD4
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 2.2GHz 45W - AD600EHDGIBOX
RAM: OCZ 2x2Gb, 1333Mhz, CL7 - OCZ3P1333LV4GK
HDD: 3x WD Caviar GP, 640GB, SATA II, 32MB - WD6400AADS
PSU: Giga Byte 550W 12V - GE-P450P-C2
CASE: 24ZX6-BPD100-00R
+ 12mm fan

Total cost: 430.78 LVL = 890.11 USD

There still time to modify this setup if someone has better thoughts.


P.S.
What do you think about this RAM? I thinking to either pick this OCZ ram wich has CL7 or Klingston with CL9. I do trust Kingston more for some reason, but CL7 makes me wanna buy OCZ. Price difference is insignificant

EDIT:
ah... and I'll need new USB flash to boot this baby :D

EDIT, or I could pick:
OCZ Obsidian, 4Gb 1600Mhz, Kit of 2 - OCZ3OB1600LV4GK - as i understand from Mobo site i need to plug then in 3rd and 4th DIMM slot....

hmm I'm bit confused, does MOBO support 1600MHz or not....
 
Kingston is definitely one of the better memory manufacturers. I think however you should go for a system with ECC memory considering you will use it has a server.

I saw somewhere this second hand config for sale:

"HP Proliant DL360 G5 Dual Quad Core Performance Model
model:435944-421
- 2 Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor L5430 (2.66 GHz, 50 Watts, 1333 FSB)
- 12GB ECC ram
- 5 x 146GB sas disken 10K rpm hot swappable
- P400i raid controller
- ilo
- redundante 700W hot swap voeding
- 2x gigabit netwerk
- slim dvd rom "

They didn't set a price, except that they would not sell it under 1000 euro. The config looks impressive: the number of disks, the amount of RAM, redundant PSU and last but not least two low power quad core Xeons. New price of a machine like this will most likely be close to 5000 euro.
 
Here are some cheep servers locally for sale{I don't know if they are still for sale, I did email, to find out}

http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/giddi.html - 516.32 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/hjlje.html - 570.01 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/mxlkp.html - 392.4 USD

What do you think?

EEC - no It's expensive to have it..... for starters I want a Cheap server.
And the biggest question is NEW vs USED
 
You said that you plan to do this business from home. Just curious, do you have the necessary bandwidth, ups, etc for that ?
Also do you plan on utilizing a firewall to separate it from your internal network?

Regards,

George
 
Bandwidth is OK. I'll buy UPS... :D
and I will simply buy additional IP for 3$, so it will be completely separate from my home IP
 
killasmurf86 said:
Here are some cheep servers locally for sale{I don't know if they are still for sale, I did email, to find out}

http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/giddi.html - 516.32 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/hjlje.html - 570.01 USD
http://www.ss.lv/msg/lv/electronics/computers/computers/severs/mxlkp.html - 392.4 USD

What do you think?

EEC - no It's expensive to have it..... for starters I want a Cheap server.
And the biggest question is NEW vs USED
Click to expand...

Are those Chenbro servers (the first and the third). I had one but sold it because too noisy and I had to upgrade the BIOS since FreeBSD suddenly hung for no reason. I remember I did this with FreeDOS.
In fact a few weeks ago I sold a custom build server: Tyan motherboard S2892 (two Opteron 275 CPUs, 4GB, two 74GB + two 250GB HDs) in a Chenbro case for 250 Euro. FreeBSD worked fine on this one.
The Dell machine, are those Xeon P4?
Honestly all those machines are little bit outdated and 'too slow' for today. Perhaps a single socket dual or quad core HP (like DL320G5 or G6) or Dell should do the job.

Don't be bothered by UPS systems. That market completely collapsed. I got mine from a scrape yard and it still works fine.
The only thing I always notice (as an engineer) is that many IT people are unreasonable about a UPS. Some want to have it to deliver power for more than half an hour. I simply say to those people, work a little bit harder or add a generator.
 
To make that setup cheap (and get lower power consumption), I would get these:
CPU: Intel e6320/e6420/e6550/e5200 (lowest power consumption)
MTH: Intel G33/Q35 (lowest power consumption) [includes also a Intel 10/100/1000 NIC]
RAM: ramdom stock DDR2 800MHz 2 x 2GB
SSD: random cheap 16GB SATA for base system
HDD: 3 x 1.5TB WD15EADS (ZFS RAIDZ) (or 3 x 1TB WD10EADS for lower power consumption)
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 380W (efficency about 85% on middle load)
psu: (or any other low vattage psu with high efficency)
$$$: $550 - $690
 
vermaden said:
To make that setup cheap (and get lower power consumption), I would get these:
CPU: Intel e6320/e6420/e6550/e5200 (lowest power consumption)
MTH: Intel G33/Q35 (lowest power consumption) [includes also a Intel 10/100/1000 NIC]
RAM: ramdom stock DDR2 800MHz 2 x 2GB
SSD: random cheap 16GB SATA for base system
HDD: 3 x 1.5TB WD15EADS (ZFS RAIDZ) (or 3 x 1TB WD10EADS for lower power consumption)
PSU: Antec EarthWatts 380W (efficency about 85% on middle load)
psu: (or ay other low vattage psu with high efficency)
$$$: $550 - $690
Click to expand...

You're pointing to a couple of excellent price/performance CPU's
like E5200. I built a PC with this CPU for a friend who didn't want to spend too much. Despite its slower 800MHz FSB, I remember one core was faster than a core of my Q6600.
Compare the E5200 to the E8400 you will pay more than double the price for something which is maybe max 50 percent faster.

I often take a look at:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net

I know those statistics are somewhat biased since they were all done on Windows and all different types memories, motherboards, etc...
If you add a price to each device, it's helpful to compare CPUs of the same brand.
 
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