I am beginning to regret not doing a quick format 4 hours in and only 50% done
.
This morning I was noticing that both my local hard drives where done to under 10GB of storage left. I have been thinking about getting a SAN or NAS device to place on my LAN but the hardware seems to run around $1000 without any hard drives so today I priced out a new server PC with built in RAID 5 and 4 300GB drives, it only came to $1100. The advantage of a NAS device would be the simplicity of just plugging it in and dumping files to it, but a new PC also give me the ability to play around with the next version of MS Exchange and SQL 2005 in 64 bit mode.
A budget server with almost a terabyte of storage:
| 1 |
ASUS A8N-VM CSM motherboard (on board RAID Video & LAN) |
101.00 |
| 1 |
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ |
165.00 |
| 1 |
Antec Sonata2 ATX quite Case w/450 (black) |
118.00 |
| 1 |
Kingston Value RAM 1GB DDR 400Mhz |
97.50 |
| 4 |
Seagate 300GB SATA/3GB NCQ |
550.00 |
| 1 |
Floppy drive (to install RAID drivers) |
10.50 |
| 1 |
LG 16x DVD ROM Black |
25.20 |
| |
|
$1067.20 |
The case and power supply were not what I originally picked but it worked out and I really like the case. It was nicer to work on then my other Antec case. The floppy drives even got their own cage
.
I really didn't want to get a floppy drive but that was the only way to give Windows access to the RAID array during the boot process, and to make the RAID array the boot drive. It may have been better to have a dedicated boot drive instead, time will tell if I made a good decision.
Why did I mention the new version of Exchange as a reason to buy a new computer? The new version of Exchange is going to be 64 bit only, getting an Athlon 64 lets me install Windows 2003 64bit to play with. It will also be interesting to see if my applications and framework work the same on SQL 2005 64 bit too.
More pictures, all a bit grainy as I forgot my camera was set to 1600 ISO from the night shots.