Well, my first concern would be that the board you selected doesn't
seem to have great Linux support. See one of the reviews at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121326
Why not just buy a used machine, or better still, re-use one you've
already got? All my BackupPC servers are old, re-used hardware, and
they work great. And, if you get a machine that is well known
(example: PowerEdge 400SC) you'll be able to google for help if you
have weird issues with the OS.
On Feb 11, 2008, at 7:18 PM, Nicholas Mistry wrote:
For the past couple years I have been constantly researching for a
way to create an inexpensive backup server that gives at least 1TB
in full RAID 1 redundancy while keeping $/GB as low as possible. I
am targeting this deployment for something that i would use in a
home or small business where the users could help themselves to
restoring files (which backuppc does well) and could assist with
offsite rotations by using additional external USB drives. I have
tried this w/ other low power small form factor machines but in the
past i found that they did not have enough driver support or bus
speed to keep up at an acceptable rate.
Recently, i came across an article on the web where someone created
a $200 pc... Using this article as a starting point I think that i
am getting closer to what i want to do:
<http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/01/25/diy-200-dollar-pc>
Starting with the hardware he suggests in the article, I plan to
substitute his drives for larger drives in a software RAID1
configuration we have:
Intel BLKD201GLY2 Motherboard + CPU - $70
1GB Kingston Value Ram - @20
APEX MI-100 Case w/ power supply - $56 (or any case that holds 2
drives).
Two (2) WD 1TB drives.. WD10EACS -- $240each, $480.
Install your favorite flavor of linux with backuppc (CentOS, Fedora,
Ubuntu, Debian) but install a stripped down version w/o the gui and
the like.
Adding up the $ before tax and shipping yeilds: $626 or roughly
$0.62 / GB in RAID 1 using linux software raid or LVM.
Some other thoughts:
I am aware that this is not going to be the fastest box out there,
but you already know that is not what i am going for.
Possibly add an inexpensive PCI Gigabit Card for faster transfer
speeds.
or add a Raid Card to support 5+ drives in a RAID 6 setup to
increase storage to 4TB+ (w/ a bigger case)
Im not a fan of WD hard drives as i have had many fail on me... But
these happened to be the best bang for the buck at the time of
writing this email. I would probably spend a bit more on drives I
know that would last longer.
I am curious if anyone had some ideas , feedback, or has tried to
create something similar. If i try this i will post some info on
my findings in terms of performance and my total experience with
setting this type of system up.
Thanks in advance.
-N
ps: My benchmark is a P2-450 w/ 512MB RAM and 3x500GB SATA drives
in a software RAID 5 config running under debian. Backuppc runs
quite well on this machine and backs up 4 linux servers and 2
windows servers in less than 8 hours at night. There is probably
3TB of data total across all the machines, and after compression and
pooling it comes to around 5-600GB). This system has been rock
solid and has been in production for quite some time now. I run
rsyncd on the linux boxes and use SMB for the windows servers.
This machine is only part of my total backup plan. It exists to
provide users the ability to restore files on their own, or if they
need to pull an older revision.
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