Thread: Server hardware question

I just installed Home Server and I'm giddy over the possibilities. And as I thought about it I realized *GASP!* I don't have near the HDD spare to serve HD movies to the rest of my house. Music, yeah... but HD Movies? No... at least not on the level of how I do things.

To be the overkill and to the extreme type person that I am I now want to build a home server (Building PCs is boring now). So my question is, having hot swap drives, how is that handled? Obviously I can't just plug in a HDD and call it Hot Swap and this is one aspect of hardware that I'm not familiar with. At what level is hot swap handled? Do I need to make sure the motherboard can handle hot swapping? I know I definitly need to get hot swap bays for said server.

Motherboard doesn't have a whole lot to do with it. Just get yourself some good hot swap bays and that's all you need. (Though raptor drives generally won't fit in hot swap bays so stay away from those).

You mean I don't need a RAID card that supports hot swapping?

If you are going to run raid, then you need to run an array that uses enough drives that it can lose one or more in the array without corrupting or losing data (at least a 3 drive array if there's any redundancy). But even then, that doesn't affect the ability to hot-swap. Only what will happen if you do remove a drive from the array.

If you remove a drive from a raid array, then the array becomes degraded. When you plug a drive back into it, if it's a good raid card, then it should automatically begin a rebuild of the array (which can take quite a while).

The raid card I'm looking at (I'll post all the specs once I pick a motherboard) has 8xSATA and supports up to 6 drives in RAID with 2 hot spares. With the 6 drives in RAID 5, I will net over 3 Tbs of space. In theory, if a drive goes bad, the card should rebuild the RAID on it's own and I just get a bad drive indicator.

Case: Centurian 590 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811119152

Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-PDSBM-LN2+-O http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813182126

CPU: Intel Celeron E1400 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116069

RAM: G.Skill 2x2Gb DDR2800 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231122

RAID Card: Highpoint RocketRAID http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115026

HDD Cages: 2x IcyDock 4 bay Hot swap http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817994061

HDDs: 8x750Gb SATAII http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136283

BluRay: LG BluRay player http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827136133

PSU: Corsair 550W http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817139004

And last but not least Windows Home Server http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832116550

As I was picking parts for the build I kept in mind that we're talking about a glorified file server so I opt'd for a slower CPU and mid grade mobo and well... costs were getting high. LOL

Edit- Had to change mobo from a mid grade board to a server board so the RAID card would work. Damn PCIe X4 slot...

You're going to have a fun home network.

I've already loaded up a trial version of Home Server. It's pretty cool. I setup it's webpage so now I can access anything loaded onto the server (Right now a PC) as well as remote into the server itself through the webpage. There is also a small networking program that I installed on my main computer (Came with home server) and it automatically backed up my computer. I'm also suppose to be able to push multimedia to anything on my network so I'll play around with that over the weekend.

If you have a UPnP router (Most are now days) Home Server will configure it for you to setup the website. I can also upload files to my server by drag and drop through a webpage as well.

Pretty much everything was self explainatory if your a little computer/network savvy.