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Background:We wanted a large >= 1TB file server mostly to store backups. Well I looked at some commercial options and most of them came in at about $20000, and lacked the ability to be easily expanded. The only option to expand a lot of the commercial options was to add another unit and split your data across two of them. It was the lack of easy expandability that actually won the day. A lot of the commercial options are very similar to what I build, a lot of them even use the 3ware cards which I was considering. Well at about this time I noticed an article mentioned Slashdot titled "Build a Terabyte file server for under $5000". Excellent!! Next Previous Contents Planning:Controller:I was well into planning the file server following the same plan as mentioned on Slashdot when I ran into the first problem 3ware who make the IDE RAID controllers had announced they were no longer going to produce them (thankfully they have reconsidered this move). Well this was no good - what would I do if any of them ever failed? It was around then that I noticed a new comment on the original article which mention the IDEPlex made by Alcita (who are now called Unicore Technologies). These looked perfect, they would even allow the box to be greatly expand at a later stage which was one of the down sides of the 3ware cards. These devices allowed you to plug up to 8 IDE devices into it it would then make each device show up as a different LUN on a SCSI ID. This method would allow for 56 drives to be attached to each SCSI channel. (8 devices per ID, and up to 7 devices on the SCSI channel) 
The one and only downside to the IDEPlexs that I have so far encountered is the fact that they only allow transfer rates of up to 20MB/s but since these boxes were almost always going to be accessed across the network I didn't feel this was really a problem. Drives:This comes down to Performance or price. For performance I would have gone for SCSI drives but with a 73GB SCSI drive coming in near £1000 and a 100GB IDE drive for about £200 (I was buying a fair number of them). For this system the capacity was the main factor and since the IDE drives had a higher capacity this swung it to IDE. Well the IDEPlexs won't support the newer ATA133 drives which would have allowed me to use 160GB disks. The highest capacity ATA100 drives available at the time was 100GB (IBM and Maxtor now have a 120GB ATA100 drive available which you could probably get for about the same price) I decided to go with Maxtor drives due to having good experiences with them in the past. Case:I knew the case would have to take at least 8 drives. And I would preferred to find a case to hold 16. It was after some searching that I came across the IPC-C4DE case as sold by PCIcase. 
This was a monster of a case. It could hold 16 IDE or SCSI (an option when ordering) drives as well as space for a CD-ROM and Floppy drive. Admittedly the CD-ROM and floppy had to be of the slim variety but this was not a problem as PCIcase could supply this with the case. Also the case supported 13x12 inch Motherboards so I was not limited in my choice of motherboard. The case also had 3x225W power supplies configured in a N+1 hot swap configuration. 
This picture only shows one power connector but I happily found that the actual case has two power connectors for fault tolerance. This is not going to be a nice quite computer that you can leave beside you desk. There is total 11 fans. 3 x 80mm fans in front cover. 3 x 120mm fans behind the drives. 3 x 40mm fans in the PSU 2 x 60mm fans on the CPUs I can already hear some of you think "my god but what size is this case". Well the case comes in at a respectable 4U. It is no deeper than any other Rack-mounting case I have seen. And in fact when it was fitted it was smaller than some of the DELL PowerEdge servers which it is sitting beside. Motherboard:This is one place where money could easily be saved. I went for a Supermicro Super P3TDE6-G this is a massive 12x13 inch motherboard. It holds two Pentium III CPUS and takes ECC RAM. It also has built in network card and also two 160MB/s SCSI channels. CPU:For the CPUs we decided to fit this with two Pentium III 1GHz CPUs This was for the simple fact that we wanted the box to be usable for other tasks whenever needed. Memory:Well we had no choice but to use ECC RAM since the motherboard required it. We fitted 1GB of RAM this would allow for a fair amount of caching of data and also allow it to have enough memory to run other tasks. Other Hardware:The motherboards came shipped with video cards designed for 2U slim cases so I had to get some basic video cards for the server, The SCSI and network card was already on board so I didn't have to worry about them. I needed a second network card since the box would be dual homed, for this I choose a fairly basic 3COM server NIC. Next Previous Contents About the author, Mark Kilmartin.
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