Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Help Me Spec A PC

I’m asking my gamer-friends at work and will be perusing Ebuyer, Quiet-PC et al, but I thought I’d formally post this out here…

I am looking to upgrade my somewhat shabby PentiumIII PC at home. It’s always been a bit flakey, and now is woefully underpowered.

The role of the new machine will be as a NFS server running Solaris, with all of the filesystems being on a single, enormous ZFS raidZ dataset.

To give you a picture of what I am thinking, what I have in mind is something like this:

  • a 64-bit amd processor…
  • chosen to be nearly silent…
  • ie: slow enough to be passively cooled and/or do through-case cooling in a tower case with quiet 12cm fans…
  • big-name, clever mobo which can boot off-of usb flash-drives in a pinch
  • 1Gb ram is considered adequate
  • gigabit ethernet (primary mode of access to storage, sets fairly low boundary on requirement for physical i/o throughput hence software raid-z)
  • between 1 and 2 Tb of redundant storage, eg: 6×250 Gb, 5×500 Gb or 3×750 Gb SATA disks
  • basic video requirement (we’re talking X-windows and GNOME, not Quake)
  • PSU and case to suit, preferably of a kind which will not lacerate you upon opening.

Big questions are: Processor, Mobo, and Storage; there will be cost-burdens by going with many smaller/cheaper drives – cooling, hassle, getting enough SATA ports (because I gather that SATA is point-to-point?) and so forth.

I suppose the simplest big system would be some manner of low-power Athlon, Opteron, or Turion something (whatever, so long as it’s 64-bit) with a mobo that has 4x SATA ports, and then pack it with 500Gb or 750Gb disks.

The point about external booting is for messing-about; booting off an external device that can punt to an on-ZFS root filesystem will get me over a temporary hump until Solaris totally native-boots onto ZFS…

…or, if the mobo still has IDE, then I can stick a fifth, more basic “boot” disk in there…

Any advice? Alas the guys at work have never built anything quite like this before.


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Comments

4 responses to “Help Me Spec A PC”

  1. Stephen Usher
    re: Help Me Spec A PC

    One answer…

    Sun Ultra 40.

    It’s quiet, has 4 SATA bays and is fully supported by Solaris 10. The case is well built and extremely well thought out. It reminds me a great deal of an Apple PowerMac G5 internally. Oh, and you can run it with the side panel off as there’s an internal clear plastic side panel.

    It might break the bank to buy it though.

    Reply
  2. Stephen Usher
    re: Help Me Spec A PC

    Actually, I’ve just looked it up.. the entry-level single processor version is £1700 retail including VAT but without a country kit.

    Then again, I’m sure you have a spare power cord and can pick up a USB keyboard and mouse for far less than the cost of a UK (UNIX) Type 7 country kit so don’t need to waste your money there.

    Reply
  3. cowbutt
    re: Help Me Spec A PC

    Re. CPU, remember that lots of Intel CPUs now have the EM64T 64-bit extensions, so don’t rule Intel out too early. Also, IME, the third-party (VIA, SiS, nVidia) support chipsets for AMD are more troublesome than Intel’s own chipsets for their CPUs. Whatever you choose, you’ll need to replace the stock fan with, for example, a Zalman heatsink in order to run fanless.

    Re. cooling, I’ve been happy with some thermally-controlled case fans from http http://www.koolnquiet.co.uk/. They seem to do the rounds at various computer fairs and have a large range of cooling-related products (including swish cases).

    1GiB RAM is easy, these days. Gbit ethernet is nearly as easy.

    Re. Storage, I’ve just had work buy a 3.2TB RAID. It uses 8 WD4000YR 400GB Raid Edition drives hosted by a LSI MegaRAID 300-8x battery-backed SATA RAID controller. I’ve achieved sustained write speeds of upto 460MiB/s write and 294MiB/s read with an 8 disc RAID0 array. Using the controller’s processor to do RAID5 is slow (~28MiB/s write, ~100MiB/s read) though. LSI aren’t the leader of the pack when it comes to RAID controllers, but they’re pretty good and our preferred vendor had a pre-existing business relationship with them, so they were best for us. 3ware and Areca are also highly regarded. I probably don’t need to tell you to check Solaris compatibility before buying.

    Intel onboard graphics are good enough for X, these days. If you’re determined to go with AMD, I guess you’ll want a ATI or nVidia AGP or PCIexpress card from the bottom of the range. Check Solaris compatibility with that, again.

    Re. cases and power supplies, here you generally get what you pay for. These days, I’d be inclined to buy the PSU seperately (and especially for a system like this which is likely to have fairly high power requirements); there are loads of reviews out there a mere google away. My last wheeled case+350W PSU were about 65GBP each back in 2002. I certainly wouldn’t go any cheaper than that. That said, I bought a 30GBP PSU-less case from Maplin recently and was very impressed with the internal design and finish. The external styling is a bit l33t (blue LED-illuminated fans), but there you go…

    HTH!

    Reply
  4. Stephen Usher
    re: Help Me Spec A PC

    You may be interested in this link..

    http wcdata.sun.com/webcast/archives/06D00640/

    Reply

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