Dreaming of a Back-up System
Well I took some time today to put together a back-up system. Figured I would post this for two reasons: the first is for you guys to critique it, the second is so I remember what I configured.
First I will start with the Motherboard/CPU. At the end of the day I will need this server to perform some major encryption on my data and be able to keep up with network streaming. So I chose the ABIT AW9D LGA 775 Intel 975X ATX Intel Motherboard. This can handle a Core Duo 2 chipset with an awesome Thermoltake quiet heat sink.
This motherboard was chosen because it has a PCI Express card which I will need for the RAID card I want. I have gotten screwed over on that damn Promise Card with no linux support SX4060. So I went with a good card the Adaptec 2169300-R PCI-X. Seems to be out of stock currently, but it is a 4-port SATA II true hardware RAID controller. And it is supported by OpenBSD, which will be my OS of choice. But it seems that Adaptec has lied to OpenBSD about documentation and they don’t recommend it. Great…. I will have to decide out of the OpenBSD Hardware list.
I now have to agree with Joe. The 750 GB Seagate drives are overpriced. So I went with four 500 GB Seagate Perpendicular Storage drives. This should give me 1.5 TB of RAID 5 storage which I will put into three 5.25″ using this hot-swap 4-bay SATA holder.
UPDATE: Turns out the LSI MegaRAID is supported by OpenBSD. This might be the card that I will be getting.
Finally I come to the case. It took me a very long time to figure out what kind of case I wanted. I wanted it as small as possible but allowing me to add the necessary harddrives. I contemplated building my own but the problem with that is micro-atx boards with pci-express support seems impossible.
The case that I found was the LIAN LI PC-G50A Silver Aluminum, its a mid-tower but that should be good enough. It looks slick and has enough fans to keep it cool.
Total cost: $1700. Which means that it is exactly the same price as a NAS solution by Buffalo or NASReady. Oh well.
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August 21st, 2008 at 11:22 pm
[...] for quite some time I’ve been dreaming of a perfect backup system. Luckily my current RAIDbox at work was no longer cutting the mustard so I decided to [...]