Small business NAS build - help/recommendations

[batfastad]

These are the drives I was looking at:
dabs.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.1 500GB 7200RPM S300 32MB (ST3500320AS)
Or possibly the enterprise version for an extra £20 each... Seagate Technology - Barracuda® ES.2

In a RAID 6 array, we can have 2 drive failures and still be ok

I just need some mb/memory to match this processor, and I'm all set:
Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 Socket 775 2.4GHz (800MHz) L2 2MB Cache Retail Boxed Processor - Ebuyer

Excluding only motherboard/processor/memory I'm at £1080, the budget is £1500

[batfastad]

Awesome, thanks for those suggestions!

Slimline DVD drive as in one of these:
dabs.com - LiteOn 8X DVD+/-RW IDE Slimline Black (DS-8A1P-021C)

That Chenbro case doesn't have an external 5.25" slot for a full-size optical drive.

[LegacyOne]

Slimline DVD drive as in one of these:
dabs.com - LiteOn 8X DVD+/-RW IDE Slimline Black (DS-8A1P-021C)

That Chenbro case doesn't have an external 5.25" slot for a full-size optical drive.

Maybe you should link to the case your thinking of getting/have?

IDE support on new motherboards is poor.

[batfastad]

Yes sorry, I thought I had initially posted all the info, but turns out I wasn't allowed to post links until I had more posts.

The case I've been looking at is this...
Server Case UK - 2U Rackmount Server Chassis - 8 SATA/SAS Hot-Swap - No PSU - 19"Rackmount Cases, Server Cases, PC Cases, Power Supplies, 1U, 2U, Blade Servers, Disk Array, Rackmount Keyboards

Would getting the mATX board you suggested, make any difference to the shape/positioning of the PCI Express slot?

[Lourdes]

EDIT: I did think the difference in USB 2 and Firewire on Macs was because of some dodgy tactics by Apple which makes USB look far worse... making people buy firewire devices and forcing manufacturers to pay Apple the firewire license fee. I had heard that Firewire 800 was very very fast though, so it might be worth sticking a FW800 PCI card in there as well.

I'm just not sure about tape. At any one time the amount of data we would need to back up would be maybe 60GB. That would be everything we're working on at that moment, so that would smash across eSATA pretty rapidly.

No, USB2 is really just very slow and firewire isn't that much better. GO with ESATA - in answer to your earleir question, eys you can get converters for motherboard SATA to eSATA backplates.

[LegacyOne]

Yes sorry, I thought I had initially posted all the info, but turns out I wasn't allowed to post links until I had more posts.

The case I've been looking at is this...
Server Case UK - 2U Rackmount Server Chassis - 8 SATA/SAS Hot-Swap - No PSU - 19"Rackmount Cases, Server Cases, PC Cases, Power Supplies, 1U, 2U, Blade Servers, Disk Array, Rackmount Keyboards

This would need a suitable motherboard for this Rackmount type Server Chassis which are normaly Xeon based.

Something like a CM Stacker with added 3,4 or 5 drive Hot-Swap Modules in the 5.25” bays would be better & cheaper.
CM Stacker
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
5 Bay SATA Hot Swap Rack fits into 3x5.25" Bays
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

[batfastad]

Hi everyone

A quick update.
So I did a bit of digging around in our server cabinet and found that our e-mail server is currently occupying a huge 5U case, for no real reason!

So the plan changed slightly. I no longer needed a case, since I'll move the email server into a different case.
And since I've got this 5U case going spare I decided to follow LegacyOne's suggestion and go for hot-swap modules in there as well.

I found a company span.com which have a good selection of 4 drive 3x5.25 bay hot swap units, with all the cool backplane stuff included ready for the 3Ware card. So 2 of those gives me 8 hot-swap bays.

I also chose to go for a more recent RAID card... http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9690sa.asp

For motherboard I went with a Tyan i3210W... http://www.tyan.com/product_board_spec.aspx?pid=591)
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo E4500
Memory 4GB.... http://www.dabs4work.com/productview...QuickLinx=4PDN

I feel like I'm slightly missing out on processor goodness, with the motherboard able to do 1066MHz FSB and the processor being 800, but it's only a file server so I'm not too bothered.

But in total on this I've come in £400 under budget, which is excellent. Now I just need to get it configured and running!

Thanks everyone for your help and advice!
Ben