Need advice on small file server

Jamin · Post by **Jamin** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 5:29 pm

I would like to build a file server with a small footprint. I have built a couple full ATX PCs in the past and had to modify them later to make them quieter. I would like to make this as quiet as possible from the start and have been researching for about a week. My requirements and desires are as follows:

1) I would like a small footprint machine to act as a full time file server and part time web surfing/email checking computer.
2) The machine will be powered on 24 hrs a day, but idle for 95% of the time.
3) I would like to keep this project as cheap as possible, use as many existing parts that I can, and make it as quiet as I can without spending a fortune.
4) My data will contain digital photos that I do not want to risk losing. Although I back up my data to CD, I can go 6 months without backing up my data. I would like to use 3 hard drives in my system. One WD 30G drive for the OS (linux) and two WD 80G drives in a raid 0 configuration for the data. I already have the drives working in another system.

I am thinking about using one of the via epia mini iTX motherboards. I would like to build a machine similar to one of the Humidor projects that I have seen. I have a wooden box that is a bit smaller, 9.25"x7.25"x6" (WxDxH), that I am considering using. I am not opposed to buying a case, but would rather save the money if I can. I am not sure if I can fit the mobo, power supply, and 3 hard drives in the box since I have not purchased the motherboard yet or taken the power supply out of my other machine. I am looking for any advice on the best way to build my machine to keep the cost down and to keep it as quite as possible. I have the following questions:

a) I do not know much about power. What is the minimum power supply I would need for a mini iTX motherboard and 3 hard drives? Could I use one of the fanless 55W PSU kits, my own generic 300W ATX power supply, or should I purchase another power supply?
b) If I go with a fanless PSU, will I need some type fan to get rid of the heat? Or, is the heat produced by the 3 hard drives and motherboard such that I don't have to worry about it?
c) I'm considering the fanless epia 5000 motherboard because it doesn't produce any noise. With the 3 WD hard drives (and possibly PSU), would I notice the noise from a CPU fan if I upgraded to the epia 800 motherboard?
d) Considering noise, heat and space, should I even bother trying to build a case out of my wooden box, or should I just buy a new one?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

tm · Post by tm » Mon Mar 10, 2003 5:54 pm

Jamin wrote: 2) The machine will be powered on 24 hrs a day, but idle for 95% of the time.

That can change, you can run F@H on it

4) My data will contain digital photos that I do not want to risk losing. Although I back up my data to CD, I can go 6 months without backing up my data. I would like to use 3 hard drives in my system. One WD 30G drive for the OS (linux) and two WD 80G drives in a raid 0 configuration for the data. I already have the drives working in another system.

I'm curious as to the choice of using RAID 0. Are you thinking of using linux's raid to do this? If you're looking at backup/restore, CDs are not so good for two 80GB disks, depending upon how "live" you need that data to be, as well as having to keep track of all those CDs. If your concern is a disk failure, RAID 1 would be a better configuration for those two disks.

Jamin · Post by **Jamin** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 6:01 pm

I'm curious as to the choice of using RAID 0. Are you thinking of using linux's raid to do this? If you're looking at backup/restore, CDs are not so good for two 80GB disks, depending upon how "live" you need that data to be, as well as having to keep track of all those CDs. If your concern is a disk failure, RAID 1 would be a better configuration for those two disks.

I'm sorry. I mistyped. I am using linux's raid 1. My CD backup is selective. I do not backup all my data, just the data that I can't afford to lose.

dbri · Post by **dbri** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 7:27 pm

3 hard drives + an epia board will not run off 55 watts. look up the power needs of these products, including your Hard Disks, they are on the web. add them up.

http://www.westerndigital.com/products/ ... el=WD800AB

example take this WD 80gig drive. spinup = 17 watts!!!
three of these its gonan take you around 50 watts just to get the hard disks spindle going. seeking = 14 watts, read/write = 8 watts. again,
thats 42 watts/24 watts if you have 3 of these.

Justin_R · Post by **Justin_R** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 9:25 pm

I'll try to answer your lettered questions, and provide some additional tips.

Jamin wrote:a) I do not know much about power. What is the minimum power supply I would need for a mini iTX motherboard and 3 hard drives? Could I use one of the fanless 55W PSU kits, my own generic 300W ATX power supply, or should I purchase another power supply?

The only chance you have of running three hard drives off of the Morex PSU is if you use laptop hard drives, but they're prohibitively expensive. It's not anywhere near as elegant, but your generic PSU should work fine; if you want to quiet it down, you can undervolt or change its fan.

b) If I go with a fanless PSU, will I need some type fan to get rid of the heat? Or, is the heat produced by the 3 hard drives and motherboard such that I don't have to worry about it?

It depends on the size of the case. If you go with something small (say, the size of a Shuttle XPC or smaller), I'd say that some sort of airflow is pretty necessary when you have three hard drives. In a bigger case, an additonal fan would certainly be helpful, but it probably wouldn't be necessary.

c) I'm considering the fanless epia 5000 motherboard because it doesn't produce any noise. With the 3 WD hard drives (and possibly PSU), would I notice the noise from a CPU fan if I upgraded to the epia 800 motherboard?

You know, given how noisy WD drives are, I don't think you would. But see my comments about that below.

d) Considering noise, heat and space, should I even bother trying to build a case out of my wooden box, or should I just buy a new one?

Even if you did manage to fit all the stuff you want into a box that small, it would get too hot without some noisy cooling, so I'd say buy a case and save yourself the disappointment.

Here's my addtional advice:
When you really want a quiet system, starting with a truly quiet hard drive is absolutely imperative. I'm not sure by which criteria you picked Western Digitial hard drives, but no WD drive is known for quiet operation (with the possible exception of their made-for-media-player OEM-only "Performer" drives, which I'm not even sure exist). Given your particular requirements (low performance, low heat/power, quiet), your best bet might be the 120GB 5400RPM Samsung SV1204H, which is very popular amongst the TiVo-modding crowd for exactly those reasons. (It also has a three-year warranty.) The most popular quiet drive here at SPCR is the 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda IV, which is commonly available in 80GB and 40GB sizes. Since you'll be using software-based RAID, you shouldn't have the RAID-incompatability problem that many users encounter with their Barracudas. In short, unless you absolutely know you'll be comfortable with the noise level from 3 WD hard drives, you should buy something else instead.

As for what cases to consider, the Chyang Fun MiniCube listed at mini-itx.com jumped out at me as the best solution for you. You should be able to mount three hard drives in it fairly easily (1 in the normal HDD position and two cross-wise where the optical drive would sit). The included PSU is powerful enough for the job, and most importantly, features an 80mm fan, which will either be quiet or can be easily swapped for a quiet fan. Most small form factor cases use PSUs with 40mm fans, which are invariably noisy and don't push much air. And here's a convenient bonus: The generous-looking vents in the PSU will allow the 80mm fan to suck hot air out of the case as well, which should insure safe operation for your HDs, eliminating the need for an additional fan.

Good luck building your system!

Tore · Post by **Tore** » Mon Mar 10, 2003 10:59 pm

One solution might be to use two 55W PSUs. A PSU tester can be used to power on one PSU (or I think it's possible to connect two of the cords to tell the PSU it should deliver power (not sure which two)).

I think it would be a good idea to put the OS-HD and one RAID-HD on one PSU and the mobo and other RAID-HD on the other PSU (if you use a mirror-RAID (RAID 1?) of course). That would give a little bonus of having the data on two different PSUs.

You would still need to check the HD power requirements, find low noise drives, and mount them so they would get enough cool air for passive cooling.

blakerwry · Post by **blakerwry** » Tue Mar 11, 2003 9:33 am

Justin_R wrote:I'll try to answer your lettered questions, and provide some additional tips.

Jamin wrote:a) I do not know much about power. What is the minimum power supply I would need for a mini iTX motherboard and 3 hard drives? Could I use one of the fanless 55W PSU kits, my own generic 300W ATX power supply, or should I purchase another power supply?
The only chance you have of running three hard drives off of the Morex PSU is if you use laptop hard drives, but they're prohibitively expensive. It's not anywhere near as elegant, but your generic PSU should work fine; if you want to quiet it down, you can undervolt or change its fan.

b) If I go with a fanless PSU, will I need some type fan to get rid of the heat? Or, is the heat produced by the 3 hard drives and motherboard such that I don't have to worry about it?
It depends on the size of the case. If you go with something small (say, the size of a Shuttle XPC or smaller), I'd say that some sort of airflow is pretty necessary when you have three hard drives. In a bigger case, an additonal fan would certainly be helpful, but it probably wouldn't be necessary.

c) I'm considering the fanless epia 5000 motherboard because it doesn't produce any noise. With the 3 WD hard drives (and possibly PSU), would I notice the noise from a CPU fan if I upgraded to the epia 800 motherboard?
You know, given how noisy WD drives are, I don't think you would. But see my comments about that below.

d) Considering noise, heat and space, should I even bother trying to build a case out of my wooden box, or should I just buy a new one?
Even if you did manage to fit all the stuff you want into a box that small, it would get too hot without some noisy cooling, so I'd say buy a case and save yourself the disappointment.

Here's my addtional advice:
When you really want a quiet system, starting with a truly quiet hard drive is absolutely imperative. I'm not sure by which criteria you picked Western Digitial hard drives, but no WD drive is known for quiet operation (with the possible exception of their made-for-media-player OEM-only "Performer" drives, which I'm not even sure exist). Given your particular requirements (low performance, low heat/power, quiet), your best bet might be the 120GB 5400RPM Samsung SV1204H, which is very popular amongst the TiVo-modding crowd for exactly those reasons. (It also has a three-year warranty.) The most popular quiet drive here at SPCR is the 7200 RPM Seagate Barracuda IV, which is commonly available in 80GB and 40GB sizes. Since you'll be using software-based RAID, you shouldn't have the RAID-incompatability problem that many users encounter with their Barracudas. In short, unless you absolutely know you'll be comfortable with the noise level from 3 WD hard drives, you should buy something else instead.

As for what cases to consider, the Chyang Fun MiniCube listed at mini-itx.com jumped out at me as the best solution for you. You should be able to mount three hard drives in it fairly easily (1 in the normal HDD position and two cross-wise where the optical drive would sit). The included PSU is powerful enough for the job, and most importantly, features an 80mm fan, which will either be quiet or can be easily swapped for a quiet fan. Most small form factor cases use PSUs with 40mm fans, which are invariably noisy and don't push much air. And here's a convenient bonus: The generous-looking vents in the PSU will allow the 80mm fan to suck hot air out of the case as well, which should insure safe operation for your HDs, eliminating the need for an additional fan.

Good luck building your system!

listen to this guy, I think he knows what he's talking about.

johtib · Post by **johtib** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 2:33 am

Justin_R wrote:As for what cases to consider, the Chyang Fun MiniCube listed at mini-itx.com jumped out at me as the best solution for you. You should be able to mount three hard drives in it fairly easily (1 in the normal HDD position and two cross-wise where the optical drive would sit). The included PSU is powerful enough for the job, and most importantly, features an 80mm fan, which will either be quiet or can be easily swapped for a quiet fan. Most small form factor cases use PSUs with 40mm fans, which are invariably noisy and don't push much air. And here's a convenient bonus: The generous-looking vents in the PSU will allow the 80mm fan to suck hot air out of the case as well, which should insure safe operation for your HDs, eliminating the need for an additional fan.

Good luck building your system!

The MiniCube does not feature a 80mm PSU fan, it uses a 40mm PSU fan (which is the curse of the case) and a 80mm case fan if I'm not misstaken.

Best Regards,

Johan Tibell

Post by **MikeC** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 6:59 am

Examine the BreadBox PC. Its PSU & overall design can probably be modded to your needs. As it stands the BreadBox PC is virtually silent, but with 3 HDDs, there is no way you system will be that quiet. You WILL need airflow across those HDDs regardless of case size; it might be doable passively if you design your case airflow right. The box size you mention is way too small to cool those HDDs quietly -- also don't think you can physically fit them in.

The smallest config I can think of is to take the 3 drives, put each on their sizes, and run them front to back beneath the CD drive -- using the Breadbox PC config as your reference. See this pic below:

In the photo, the HDD is actually suspended in a sub-frame below the CD drive, but mounted laterally across the width of the case, and there are openings below the HDD -- the only vents when the case is closed so that all the air has to come in across the HDD, thus cooling it. (See the article for more details.) A large enough opening below the drives might be enough in combination with the 80mm fan in that SFX PSU keep everything cool. You WILL have to suspend or otherwise decouple-mount the drives to get really low noise levels.

I would guess that the total height of the box could be kept just 1~1.5" taller than the Breadbox if you have a flat top box. The breadbox is curved on top and is 6" tall.

tm · Post by tm » Tue Aug 12, 2003 10:08 am

Jamin wrote:1) I would like a small footprint machine to act as a full time file server and part time web surfing/email checking computer.

How small do you want it? The mini-itx boards are great for small, but the requirement for 3+ HDD would be hard to fulfill if you wanted to stick with a "mini-itx only" chassis. But if you're truly after "smaller than a breadbox", then it will generally be a mini-itx based system.

2) The machine will be powered on 24 hrs a day, but idle for 95% of the time.

I see a F@H client in your future then

But seriously, considering it will be on all the time, what's your tolerance for noise?

3) I would like to keep this project as cheap as possible, use as many existing parts that I can, and make it as quiet as I can without spending a fortune.

What do you have in the way of existing parts?

4) My data will contain digital photos that I do not want to risk losing. Although I back up my data to CD, I can go 6 months without backing up my data. I would like to use 3 hard drives in my system. One WD 30G drive for the OS (linux) and two WD 80G drives in a raid 0 configuration for the data. I already have the drives working in another system.

As pointed out by others, WD isn't known for quiet. Also, that RAID 0 does nothing for you in terms of redundancy (ie: if one of the disks die, so goes the data that was striped across it). It just lets you use a bunch of disks as one big disk

What's your current disk usage and what's your anticipated growth? You will be giving up some space for having a redundant setup (with RAID 5 the amount of space is N-1, and RAID 1 is N/2, where N is the number of disks). And CD backup REALLY sucks once you hit several GB.

c) I'm considering the fanless epia 5000 motherboard because it doesn't produce any noise. With the 3 WD hard drives (and possibly PSU), would I notice the noise from a CPU fan if I upgraded to the epia 800 motherboard?

If you go with your WD disks, the noise those disks would generate would totally swamp whatever other noise was coming out of your computer. I think SPCR had an article examining the fan noise from one of the epia boards.

Personally, if I wanted a linux/*bsd file server, I'd go with a standard ATX tower, throw some disks in there, and shove that thing deep in some closet, run cables, and voila, the poor man's NAS! (with my coats and jackets providing the sound dampening)

But since you also want to use this as basically a normal desktop machine as well, my plan may not be desirable

lenny · Post by **lenny** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 10:28 am

Another case to consider is the CheckerCube 2215. I have the smaller version, it's noisy and does not have very good airflow. The 2215 appears to have addressed most of the problems - the PSU fan vents out, for one thing. The "extra" PCI slot cannot be used for PCI card with a mini ITX board (it's for flex ATX I believe), but you can put a blower there and get rid of the two dinky fans. You may still have to replace the PSU fan though. The 1215 that I have has a 80mmx15mm 12V 0.2A double ball bearing fan whose noise specs I couldn't find on the web, but it's noisy even when undervolted. I replaced it with an undervolted Zalman OP-1 because it's available locally, but I wish I'd gotten the Panaflo FBA08T instead.

If you want a faster MB, you can try replacing the HSF on the EPIA-800 with a Zalman NB47J, and let one of the dinky fans blow at it.

Regarding your system, I understand your concerns about data integrity. However, since this is going to be a file server, I would think backing up the system over the network is easily achieved, though you'd still need to initiate that manually, or through some semi-automatic process (Dantz Retrospect, Smart Backup, etc). That way you wouldn't need 3 WD hard drives, and you can consider a smaller power supply.

POLIST8 · Post by **POLIST8** » Tue Aug 12, 2003 10:43 am

I hope this computer will be in a closet that has dampening material.

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Aug 14, 2003 7:20 am

I kind of like Jamin's original idea about the cigar humidor case. It has excellent sound deadening qualities and it is very easy to work on, but then again I'm biased.

Cheers!

tm · Post by tm » Thu Aug 14, 2003 10:34 am

slipperyskip wrote:I kind of like Jamin's original idea about the cigar humidor case. It has excellent sound deadening qualities and it is very easy to work on, but then again I'm biased.

Um, is there a cigar humidor which would fit his 3 disks?

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Aug 14, 2003 5:25 pm

Yes! I call it the Humidor XPC. A cigar humidor the shape of a cube with a glass door in the front. Look out Shuttle.

Need advice on small file server

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