File server for 4-5 people

I

inc

Weaksauce
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Apr 2, 2002
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I am moving into an apartment with some friends from high school in a few weeks, and we are looking into a file server + download station. I want to run debian, they want to run windows so I have been trying to keep that in mind for specs.

I was thinking a single P4 or dual P3s?
256 MB ram (debian) or 512(1GB?) for windows?
We have a cat6 switch, so preferably use that (even though I know it probably wont be able to come close to saturating that line).
SATA? Probably no raid (unless its 5?)

We'd like to keep this as cheap as possible as well, since we are college students, any suggestions?

forgot to mention, any space cpu cycles will be folding for team 33 :)
 
will it be constantly accessed? If not that seems a little excessive. I 1ghz processor could do that.
If it will get alot of use:
2500+ Barton or P4 2.4 1MB Cache
512MB Ram
Any version of linux w/ samba
If it's JUST going to be used for fileservering, maybe consider making it a a firewall too, that being said look at www.clarkconnect.com
 
I currently use a Linksys nslu2 NAS device. It basically attaches a USB 2.0 drive to your network using SMB. Only cost me 75 bucks, neat little device. Hackable too.
 
For just 5 people using it whenever, the load wouldn't even be an issue.

The only thing you will really need to consider are the disks themselves. How fast of a transfer do you want?
 
Brad4321 said:
For just 5 people using it whenever, the load wouldn't even be an issue.

The only thing you will really need to consider are the disks themselves. How fast of a transfer do you want?
Click to expand...
Will probably be used for streaming mp3s and avis.

The only thing I worry about as far as the cpu goes is it will probably have a dozen+ torrents open at one time (how big of an impact will this have on disk throughput?).
 
for torrents you will be limited by your outbound/inbound connection more than your disk
 
defakto said:
for torrents you will be limited by your outbound/inbound connection more than your disk
Click to expand...
Verizon Fiber in our area + landlord saying it would not violate our contract = :cool:

Which also leads me to believe with that pipe disk I/O will be more of an issue.

vapb400 said:
would it be streaming mp3's to 5 computers simulataneusly?
Click to expand...
Possibly, although unlikely. What would happen is winamp would be set to buffer the current song into memory, so it would be one quick burst from the server intead of a steady flow.
 
if you look at my p3 system in my sig. that is used by three people. Its is a dumping station for all of us. we have our mp3/movies/backups/etc on it. I allso use it to host files and a website that gets little traffic. The only time i had an issue with it was when i hosted a few files on hard from it. :p

EDIT: I guess all add, we allso use it has a in hose game server for various games. There are also 2 x 120 gig drives in there too
 
I'd say that your requirements are minimal. I have four machines online here, and an old Abit bp6 with a pair of 450 Celerons is good enough as a file server for this network. Mainly it's for Ogg Vorbis files, but often all four machines are playing different music at the same time. My main concern would be having a reasonably fast drive which isn't a problem, considering today's cheap prices. I picked up a 160GB Seagate for $50, after rebate. I figure a couple of hundred dollars, a few trips to your junk box, and you're set...case and all.
 
My old (FreeBSD) file server, doing about the same things, was a single K6/3+ 450 with a fast IDE drive. :) I upgraded to a dual PIII/500, then a dual PIII/733EB, simply cause I had the parts around. The OS is still (and will probably always be) FreeBSD.

For doing unencrypted streaming stuff your CPU load will be about nothing. The only motivation for even bothering to upgrade my file server is cause I move a lot of data over scp/sftp/rsync over ssh/https/other SSL-encrypted channels and was running in to a CPU limit; basically the CPU would top out doing the encryption long before the network bandwidth became an issue (on GigE, anyway)...I still have the problem, even with dual 733s, but it's not nearly as much of an issue now.

What's nice about SMP for a file server is I can be hammering one CPU doing something that requires a lot of work (like encryption), but still get decent response from the machine both locally and remotely.

mosin's setup sounds pretty similar to what mine is, except I'm running 2x WD800JBs in RAID1 these days.
 
for a file server you don't needa big processor, you need a good harddrives setup and alot of ram and you'll be fine.
 
defakto said:
for a file server you don't needa big processor, you need a good harddrives setup and alot of ram and you'll be fine.
Click to expand...

How much ram do you recomend? I have a P3 800Mhz i'm going to use as a fileserver to stream music/movies/pics to 3 systems in the house but never 2 at most at once. I had 128 in it before and I had issues with lag spikes during streaming along with sudden disconnections. Idk if this is attributed to the ram or not.
 
n64man120 said:
How much ram do you recomend? I have a P3 800Mhz i'm going to use as a fileserver to stream music/movies/pics to 3 systems in the house but never 2 at most at once. I had 128 in it before and I had issues with lag spikes during streaming along with sudden disconnections. Idk if this is attributed to the ram or not.
Click to expand...

What OS?
 
if it's windows based i'd recommend at least 512, that gives you some play room, more can never hurt. Linux based you can probably get away with 128 or 256 or maybe even less( i don't have much linux experience) if you're not using X.
 
i use a p3 733 with 512MB DDR2100 RAM, and it runs Fedora Core 2 and a couple other linux distros-- i use NFS and SAMBA filesharing, and it works just fine.. I can run applications off of it over the network with little to no problems..
 
We have an old file server at work. Has a P3 700. OS is on a pair of mirrored drives, storage is on 4 drives in RAID 5 the SCSI card has 256MB of cache.

It doesn't get much use now, as we have 3 newer larger capacity file servers. However some users still access it and us techs throw images PCs on it. It does the job and I I don't see it as the limiting factor in file transfers. Keep in mind if you use it to crunch you'll experience latency.
 
inc said:
Will probably be used for streaming mp3s and avis.

The only thing I worry about as far as the cpu goes is it will probably have a dozen+ torrents open at one time (how big of an impact will this have on disk throughput?).
Click to expand...


The file server I built for the office has dual P3/866 chips, and a big software RAID 5 array under Linux. It serves 30 people, handling files, MP3s, and their Windows "profile". It sits there twiddling its thumbs more than actually DOING anything.

Even with 10 or 20 people listening to MP3s at once at 256 kbit/sec each, that's still only 320-640 kilobytes/second. I imagine that if I got all 30 employees watching a different very-high bitrate AVI at the same time, there might be some slowdown - but realistically, that just doesn't happen. When the Star Wars trailer came out, we put it up, and sent out an email. Nobody had any problems viewing it. :)

Having two CPUs really does help the responsiveness under load - especially if you're doing gigabit networking, where the number of interrupts can greatly affect performance on a single-proc machine. Between firewalling, the IP stack, the SMB application layer, and disk drivers, there's no problem taking advantage of multiple CPUs under load. Of course, that's under Linux, I can't say how well Windows would take advantage of the hardware.


steve
 
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