Server duty - will these parts hold up?

N

ndruw

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 7, 2006
Messages
246
I've got an old PC here that might be getting server duty next year at college

specs are
Pentium 4 (at 2400 mhz, runs about 50-55*F idle, not sure on load)
ASRock P4V88 mobo (bought for about $50, very generic board, but has never crashed)
80GB WD (will be boot drive, rarely acessed)
420 ThernalTake PSU (should I replace this so full-time server?)
Generic CD (will also be rarely accessed)

Plan on adding
4x 250GB Hard drives (Raid 5)
Raid controller card (PCI bus)
Gigabit Ethernet card (PCI bus)
New PSU? (enermax?)

My questions are:
-Will the Ethernet card and the Raid controller make a bottleneck in the PCI bus?
-What are the chances of the specified motherboard crashing on me
-What are the chances of the CPU (is a Prescott btw) dying on me during 24/7 use for about 3 years at those temps
-Does anyone else have file/game servers that have used generic hardware like mine with long uptimes? If you do, please tell

This will hopefully be running full time for file serving for me and game serving for the college network. If you could answer my questions up above, it would be very helpful.

(if OS used is needed, it will be Debian Linux)
 
My desktop, basically your specs, runs 24/7 pretty much, with a Prescott in it. The only major problem I see is your PSU. 420 may not be enough to power all those HD plus the comp under load. I would bump it up to at least a 500-550W (they are not that expensive). I also have a POS duron, that I put togather form the cheapest parts on the Egg (cost about $150) that runs 24/7 without issue. Your temps do seem a bit high though, you sure you have adequate cooling there? I might consider popping off the HS and giveing it some AS5.

My presoctt ran with the heatsink hlaf off for almost a year before I noticed the pins were nto pushed in fully (DOH), and it seems to live fine.
 
thx for the reply, i actually have the ceramique arctic silver on there now...maybe my temp monitor is bad?

EDIT - retested the temps, the temp monitor i was using before is bad, temps were ~10 degrees lower, so hopefully the chip will live
 
the total wattage makes absolutely no difference for a power supply when talking about multiple hard drives.

Amprage is what you want to be looking at. Generally, Thermaltakes have very decent amp ratings on their 12v rail. I ran 4 hard drives off of a 235w psu for a year...
food for thought
 
Hard to answer...."Server" duties...but the amount of horsepower is totally irrelevant unless we know what it will actually be running, and what kinds of loads it will have.

"Game server"...what game? Quake 1? (a Pentium 75 with 16 megs can handle that)...Battlefield Vietnam 64 player? (Would need at least a dual 2GHz, over a gig of RAM, a high end server grade NIC, etc etc).

File server?...

Well...first...lets step back..."College LANs"..do you know the school policies for this network yet? Do they implement QoS and packet shaping...so that peer to peer warez sharing software gets dropped, games get the back seat, etc? VLANs to all the dorms so most people are rather segmented?

Besides the horsepower specs...what about the specific brands and models of your hardware. Asus motherboard.."Check"..good stuff. The RAM...hopefully handled properly and is something that's guaranteed compatible with your motherboard. Not just "Any old PC3200 DIMM should work"...but a specific one that's tested, approved, and guaranteed to work in your motherboard. Hard drive....are they good 3 year or higher business grade drives, like WD Caviars, or Seagate 'Cudas? Or WD Raptors? or are they some budget 1 year drives like most Maxtors, or Quantums (same thing now), or Seagate U series or WD Proteges? How well have they been handled? Gonna run her on a battery backup unit?
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Hard to answer...."Server" duties...but the amount of horsepower is totally irrelevant unless we know what it will actually be running, and what kinds of loads it will have.

"Game server"...what game? Quake 1? (a Pentium 75 with 16 megs can handle that)...Battlefield Vietnam 64 player? (Would need at least a dual 2GHz, over a gig of RAM, a high end server grade NIC, etc etc).

File server?...

Well...first...lets step back..."College LANs"..do you know the school policies for this network yet? Do they implement QoS and packet shaping...so that peer to peer warez sharing software gets dropped, games get the back seat, etc? VLANs to all the dorms so most people are rather segmented?

Besides the horsepower specs...what about the specific brands and models of your hardware. Asus motherboard.."Check"..good stuff. The RAM...hopefully handled properly and is something that's guaranteed compatible with your motherboard. Not just "Any old PC3200 DIMM should work"...but a specific one that's tested, approved, and guaranteed to work in your motherboard. Hard drive....are they good 3 year or higher business grade drives, like WD Caviars, or Seagate 'Cudas? Or WD Raptors? or are they some budget 1 year drives like most Maxtors, or Quantums (same thing now), or Seagate U series or WD Proteges? How well have they been handled? Gonna run her on a battery backup unit?
Click to expand...

oh sorry - i should have said it will be a 20~man CS:S server, and QoS isnt a problem if all the transferring packets are gonna be on campus. By the way, we can run servers here, and get 3GB download and upload every day

yes it is a caviar harddrive (has been decent quality for me, so the extras i add will be caviars as well)

the RAM has been in it for a year no problems too - although it is value stuff
 
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