How To: Power Efficient & Low Budget Home Servers

[herosima]

Hey guys,

I'm currently looking at how to set up home servers, primarily as a file server and print server. And I realise some people are also interested in such setups as well.

Servers as what most people know are like for enterprise and the cost of such setups are not feasible for home uses. However, home servers do not need to be expensive and high end hardwares.

So this thread is meant for those who want to set up home servers and have spare components which they can use to set up a home server enough for their use. It also meant for people who wants to use power efficient processors usually used for laptops which will help to reduce the power consumption.

Hope this will be useful for many people.


PS: Those who are well-versed on such stuffs are welcomed to contribute to this thread. After which i'll update the first few posts i've reserved below to be updated. Thanks

[cprossu]

as silly as it seems, building servers from spare parts is actually a real challenge-especially if you want it to be reliable and quiet.

tip 1 : Capacitors
Do not use any components which have leaking or bulging capacitors! (these are the little plastic covered metal cans that sit on the board) This includes capacitors on any component from the power supply, to the motherboard, to the video card, and sometimes including other devices as well (ei capture card)
The power supply for any server (or desktop IMO) is not the place to skimp as you will be likely running it 24x7x365. This means you want a overbuilt power supply that has quality electrolytic capacitors in it (Japanese makers of capacitors are generally considered the best, Chinese the worst <due to a botched espionage attempt to steal the electrolyte formula of another manufacturer>) , quite frankly anything else will tend to have capacitors which break down/leak in about a year of sustained use. I've had good luck with corsair's PSU's, as well as Delta, NMB, Zippy, and Enermax in that regard-
Faulty capacitors can also land on your motherboard and video card, so it's best to keep an eye out when selecting components. Good brands of capacitors include nippon-chemicon (has brown, blue, or green casing, a "Y" or "X" vent on the top, and a crown like logo on the side) , rubycon (has black or royal blue casing, usually a "K" or "X" vent on the top, and has the name "Rubycon" on the side), panasonic (has black casing, usually a "T" vent on the top, and has an [M] logo on it in a box on the side), and hitachi (has black or blue casing, usually a "X" vent or a vent covered with a black plastic disc, and a hitachi star logo on the side)

tip 2: Cooling
Heat is the enemy of electronic components, be sure to keep them as cool as possible for the longest period of reliability: having a near silent computer can be done, but remember, for every extra degree C you have above the normal operating temperature, the possible failure rate of certain components goes up exponentially. the key is to move a large volume of air, not necessarily at a high rate of speed to reduce noise levels, use large 120mm fans whenever possible, as for the most part they don't spin at the same high rpm's that little fans do (and the ones that do put out a heck of alot of air). Undervolting fans is fine. Passively cooling a computer or power supply is one of the worst things you can do for the components. ducting made of high temp cardboard or plastic can help manage where air from fans go and can change the acoustic properties of a case too. If you make (or use) filters on your case, make sure they are easily accessible, that they are cleaned regularly, and that they flow well enough for whatever fan you are using. When running your server, make sure to dust it out frequently, this will keep temperatures low and help maintain bearing and grease life of fans in your system.

more tips later,

[-Oz-]

See, i've been interested in doing this but I also want to make it use only a small amount of power. I currently just use my htpc and desktop as file/printer server and they work but if I did it as a big server which lots of space and such I'd want it to be as low power usage as possible.

Tipset also probably has a lot to say on this but he's on vacation this week.

[David]

You can use XP as a "server" allowing you to use power management. XP isn't "Enterprise" class, but very few people need the additional features of a server OS.

[bdgbill]

You can use XP as a "server" allowing you to use power management. XP isn't "Enterprise" class, but very few people need the additional features of a server OS.

Isn't a file server a good first project to learn Linux? I have a spare P4 system with no OS sitting under my bed and have thought about doing this.

The price of another XP license would buy another 500 gig hardrive. I "flunked" linux on my first try two years ago (the aborted Myth TV project that brought me here) but all the good things I have been hearing about Ubuntu are tempting me to have another go at it.

[-Oz-]

bdgbill,

I have minimal experience with Linux but recently setup two ubuntu webservers that are running amazingly. They have not had a minute of down time since their inception and I can remotely do everything. Ubuntu really made everything easy (i didn't get myth setup right either). The systems are super stable and actually see windows shares way before other windows computers do.

[cprossu]

tip 3 : Reliable hard drive space
get as much hard drive space as possible for your budget, if you are serving video from it, a little extra space now will save lots of cursing later, 500gb hdd's have hit the wonderful $110-$130 mark, and the 750gb hdd's are sitting right around $170-190 (or at least those made by seagate anyway). older motherboards may not have support for hard drives > 300gb, or even >30gb, so make sure if you are using an ancient motherboard that it supports it, or find a controller card (either good old Parallel ata or Sata). As a general rule of thumb, leave as much physical space between hard drives as possible, and see what you can do about giving them some moving air as a little goes a long way to extend the life of your hard drives. also avoid the temptation to utilize power saving to shut the drives off as it will just decrease the hard drive's total life and increase the latency for wanted information. For low power situations, laptop sata drives are quite capable throughput wise, small, and not very power hungry, although in situations like those, I like putting the operating system on a flash card and use hard drives just to store data since space is at a premium. Also with flash cards, as they have a limited write life, keep writing to them at a minimum, they are not good for any sort of caching or swaping. If just storing lots of video and data which you can replace easily, don't bother with things like RAID, however if you have a web server, then use something like Raid 0+1m which although requires 3 drives, will give you benefeits of both raid0(striping) and raid1(mirroring) and allow you to rebuild one drive of the set from another: CAUTION! this means you need another almost identical drive to use if one of your drives fails. Since DL-DVD is around, at least make a square1 backup so you can gain a functional machine again should the unthinkable ever happen.

tip 4: the processor
Selecting the processor is one of the more interesting aspects, but to do this (especially if you're the king of a nice junk pile of parts) you need to decide what you want to do with it. If all you want is a file server, all you need is a pentium II/K6 class system with >=128mb of ram with enough pci slots to accommodate whatever hard drive controllers you intend to use and a 100mb or 1000mb ethernet card (or wireless if you are adventurous), if it needs to do something more than just be a file server, say serve a internet website, than a P3/AthlonXP class or better will serve quite a few folks without showing weakness, make sure it has gobs of ram, good ethernet controllers, and most importantly, a suitable internet connection. If saving power and cramming it into a very small space is what you want to do, there are several platforms to choose from, the Via C3 if you don't need any cpu power, mobile Core2's and Centrino's if you do, and EE Athlon64X2's if you don't mind a uATX or bigger board (if you use a64x2's make sure you install the proper powernow drivers for your operating system, as they have mature active multiplier control on both cores that can really take a dent out of the power it consumes and heat it puts out. You can also experiment with undervolting the processor to further decrease the heat output and power consumption).

more tips to follow

[BobBuilder]

I appreciate part of the post was about building a server from spare parts but I suggest you take a look at this.

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=74

The QNap TS201 is a small low power linux box, (which you can telnet to and have full access), its a raid1 box with file server, print server, web server, upnp server, lots of stuff.

I dont think you could build a low cost, low power reliable server from spares, so by the time youve bought the extra bits you need you could probably have bought this box anyway.

There are other single bay,non raid options for even less money as well if you look around.

Im soon to purchase one myself as I lost some of the family photo's through a corupt backup recently so wont have too much trouble convicing the wife of the sense in investing in a small home raid1 file server

Bob

[herbs]

Yep i agree I have a NAS box nothing like the one in the link but it serves (Pun intended) my needs. I have a NSLU2 with a hacked firmware.

[David]

Isn't a file server a good first project to learn Linux? I have a spare P4 system with no OS sitting under my bed and have thought about doing this.

The price of another XP license would buy another 500 gig hardrive. I "flunked" linux on my first try two years ago (the aborted Myth TV project that brought me here) but all the good things I have been hearing about Ubuntu are tempting me to have another go at it.

I was looking at it in terms of a dedicated GB-PVR box. Linux works well for file and print servers.