[geeks] Itty-bitty Server build last night...

[Lionel Peterson]

Hello all,

Last night I put together a low-power file server for our vacation home (which has limited power, the house has 100 amp service), and I wanted to share a few things bout the build:

 - The low-end Dell Dimension 2350 turned out to be a good choice
   for the server. I stuffed in a Gig of RAM (the max), pulled the
   CD-ROM and HD, and then started adding bits...

 - First I added a low-cost SATA controller[0] (SATA-150, as this
   is a PCI-only machine), three-in-two SATA hot-swap bays[1], a
   Gigabit Ethernet adapter[2], and a brand-new 80 Gig IDE drive for
   the boot/OS. Everything fit great (I was worried about the SATA
   hot-swap bays)

 - Fired it up, installed Windows Server 2003 R2 x86 (32-bit), but
   neither networking port was discovered (I had to load the Netgear
   drivers from the CD in the box, then download WinXP drivers for
   the built-in audio and Ethernet adapters).

 - Aside from the fan for the hot-swap trays, the machine is very,
   very quiet, and the hot-swap trays and RAID card work great,
   though the activity lights on the trays are constantly
   flickering - any ideas (the drives are initialized, partitioned,
   formatted into a firmware-based RAID5 array of nearly 1TB (I
   decided to go with 3x 500 Gig $89 Hitachi SATA drives instead
   of the odd drives I have lying around)?

 - I put the system, including the 18" flat panel display on my
   Kill-A-Watt power meter, and running "full-bore" the system
   uses around 180 Watts, with the monitor off, it drops to about
   100 Watts (non-sleep mode). That seem pretty good for a system
   that wasn't designed as a "green" or "low-power" system.

 - The SATA card had "native" support for RAID 5, not just RAID 0,
   1, or 10 as the Mfg. web page described - a nice suprise). There
   is talk on the web about re-flashing the card to work with
   Solaris, but it mostly older posts - I'll have to try it myself
   and see... I think the RAID function won't be supported, but
   I suspect the chipset (SiI3114) is well-supported.

To recap, I wound up with a 2.0 GHz Celeron server w/1 Gig RAM, 3x 500 Gig SATA drives in hot-swap trays, no optical drive (pulled for the hot-swap bays), dual Ethernet (10/100 and Gigabit ports), and faux "hardware" RAID 5 storage array, all in a quiet package that uses about 100 Watts when running headless...

I just thought I'd share - but does anyone know about the constantly flickering activity lights on the hot-swap trays?

Lionel

[0] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124020
[1] http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0266843 (not exactly what I used, they don't carry it any more)
[2] http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/720774/GA311-Gigabit-Ethernet-PCI-Adapter/