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On a budget
Anybody building one of these on a tight budget has a few options to save
money.
- Use a cheaper Motherboard.
Any standard motherboard will really do. If you buy a cheaper
Motherboard you will be unlikely to get SCSI on-board so you will need to
get a cheap card. You don't need a top of the line SCSI card since the
device it is connecting to can only supply 20MB/s the only thing to make sure
is that it can handle devices on separate LUNS not all cards can. A
different motherboard should also allow you to use normal DIMMs which are
a whole lot cheaper than the ECC RAM which I used.
I only used such a fast dual processor because I wanted the
box to have plenty of spare cycles in case I needed it to take over the duties
of any of the other servers. So only use one processor and it does
not have to be the latest and greatest either.
The cases I used cost almost £1000 by the time you count
the mounting rails and the fact that I had to use the slim CD-ROM and floppy.
My recommendation to anybody who does not have to rack mount the cases
and where size is not such a factor. Is to buy one or more tower cases
I know for example that you can get quite a large tower case from Maplins
for about £50. Which has 6 5 1/4 bays and 3 3 1/2 bays which
would easily take 8 of the drives. Even if you had to use two case
you have just saved about £900.
You could just build the disk portion of the file server
and connect it to the SCSI port of an existing server thus saving even more.
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About the author, Mark Kilmartin.
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