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[benn600]

I literally finished starting the RAID initialization process only minutes ago.  It was quite a process.  I bought 4 320GB drives for temporary backup and have about 10 random drives ranging from 40GB - 160GB.  In the end, I got everything important and a big percentage of my DVDs.  The rest I will rerip later.

I had a bit of trouble initially with a bad main hard drive, which I quickly replaced.

In my old server, with 11 hdds, I was using an Antec 400 watt power supply.  I decided to try it in the new server before spending $150 on a bigger power supply.  Incredibly surprising was the fact that it runs--seemingly perfect--and more amazing is that on my APC UPS, it is showing a very similar wattage usage as the old server-- right around 250 watts!  How can there be so little change after adding another 6 drives and a new processor?!  I was using the Prescott earlier--known for big power requirements.  So I am VERY happy about the power usage--will still get 18 minutes runtime from my UPS and won't have to buy another power supply, saving money.

I'm hoping it gets the RAID array setup asap and then I can start restoring my data.  The server also seems very snappy.  I'm using, surprisingly enough, a Fatal1ty motherboard.  I like it because it doesn't have a parallel port...but it also doesn't have VGA so I'm using a low-power PCI card.

Addition: I ended up choosing the web interface included with the Promise RAID card and am very impressed.  Setup was simple and fast.  It is up to 10% initialized now and I estimate it will take another 20 hours.  When I first had it all hooked up, I left the case lid off and I quickly noticed the drives, especially the side of the case by the drives, getting VERY hot.  Once I replaced the top lid, it could seal properly and pull a lot of air over the drives.  The surface temperature dropped significantly.  I'm amazed how powerful the 5 fans are.

[benn600]

I have a few issues to point out for anyone following my writing with intense desire.

1. Half the LEDs on the case for the drives (1-8) of (1-16) don't light up.  But the lights on each drive work fine.
2. The speed on RAID6 seems slower or on par with my 10-drive Windows XP hacked RAID5.  It's using about 7% of a gigabit connection.

Addition: once I changed the cache mode to the one that is less safe but faster, I am getting plenty of speed.  It appears that it is faster than any amount of data I can throw at it from a standard SATA hard drive over a gigabit connection...the ethernet connection is not the limit.

[benn600]

After a few issues, I think everything is running fine now.  I'm copying data from a USB hard drive at 20% of a gigabit connection, yielding right around 24 MB/second.  That is probably mainly a limitation of the USB drive / single drive, anyway, but that is plenty of write speed for my applications.

At one point, I was noticing that large files (DVD VOB files) were copying much slower--at around 10% or less and it was very wild...1%, then 10%, then 30%...but overall, it would average under 10%.  Hope this is more stable than my hacked Windows RAID 5 was...oh wait, I didn't have a single problem with it.

[johnnyboy]

So is this your final result of all your hardware work then that you've been doing for this last year or so?

Your final solution now is a RAID 6 server using dedicated hardware raid cards and 500Gb hd's?

Is that right?

And as for your stability, no one is talking about immediate stability right now.

This server shouldn't require constant work on your part, it should be built, setup then forgotten about - thats the test of a good server - how long you can leave it for without having to do anything to it, it just is there and working solidly.


If this is a good server setup, no one including you, is going to hear a word about it for years after it's setup and the next mention of it years down the line will be 'oh, a hard drive went, I replaced it, it rebuilt itself and its now working fine again'.

[benn600]

That's the goal!  Interestingly enough, I fear one of the 16 drives may be failing.  When I turn it on, the drive can't get started...so I shut it off and turn it on again, works fine for a long time.  I've had this problem in the past with a different drive.  It will just start going crazy and won't be able to start.  Restarting the computer (power off) usually fixes it, though.

And I can't really tell which drive it is because they are so dense that there isn't an easy way to figure it out.  I suppose if I let it boot up, it would tell me.  But it's working fine now.  My only upset would be if it is one of the 6 new drives I just bought.  Then I should be returning it.  One of the 320 GB drives I bought was DOA so I'll be shipping that back tomorrow.

My hacked raid server before worked fine for 6 months without any issues.

I'm confused.  I read somewhere that, I think it was 16 drives, that RAID 5 will fail after 6 months.  A raid 6 server will run for 25 years.
I think it even said with no intervention.  That just plain doesn't make sense.

Addition: 7TB but I only get 6.36 TB.  I am predicting that I can be fully restored and back up and running completely by Saturday or Sunday at the latest.  It takes a long time to restore all this data.  I've got my music and photos restored so far.

[newsposter]

An overloaded power supply can and will cause drive failures.

[benn600]

Will it ruin them or just not be able to power them?

I'm using an Antec 400w.  Antec seems to do a good job with power supplies.  I have an APC back ups system on it and it tells me the wattage.  Generally speaking, it draws around 250 watts, quite consistently.

However, when I turn it on, it's very strange.  Here are the levels I see it at...with about 2-5 seconds between each reading:
100 watts
150 watts
150 watts
150 watts
480 watts
250 watts...

So it starts quite low while all the drives are spun up--at different time periods.  Then there is a huge jump about < 20 seconds into the bootup process.  But then it stays quite consistently at 250.

Interestingly enough, someone at home was using a blow-dryer on the same circuit and it blew a fuse.  They quickly called me because my three battery backups were beeping like crazy.  Luckily, nothing got disrupted that mattered.

I use a 1500 VA really nice unit for the server only.
Another ~650 VA for the monitor, network switch, wireless, etc.
The third is on my computer I'm using to restore data from (temporary).

Addition: The PSU I'm using is also 3-4 years old.  I probably should replace it but I like the cost of nothing.  I had another free after rebate PSU that I put in the other computer...and it's fine because it has hardly any power draw without 10 hard drives!

[newsposter]

watching how much AC your power supply is pulling is telling you NOTHING about the amount of DC the system is demanding.

You have to add up the DC draw of all of your components.  The mobo/cpu/ram, vid card, raid card(s) and disk drives.  Don't forget to add up any usb devices.

Antec or not, PC Power and Cooling or not, if your power supply is overloaded, things go to hell quickly.

And yes, you can blow components with an overloaded power supply.

16 drives?!?  I'd say 600 watts at a minimum.  And if I was spending the $$, I'd get a PC Power & Cooling psu over anything else.

[benn600]

So...why would I want to spend another $150 on a new power supply when everything is running 100% perfectly as of now?  And why is the AC draw of 250-300 watts inaccurate for measuring total draw on the DC end?  I don't know enough about power to understand why that wouldn't equate.

But like I said, why would I want to do so?  The web site I bought it from personally recommended I buy 300+300 watt redundant saying that the double 300's would provide plenty of initial power while the drives spin up but what if one PSU went out?  300 definitely seems light in that case.

[benn600]

I've had more troubles with this new setup than can be imagined.  This is horrible.  I just shut down the computer and unplugged it because a storm was coming...(shut down nicely)...then it turns back on saying it recovered from a serious error (Windows).  Voila!  This drive is not formatted.  Would you like to format it?

NO I WOULD NOT LIKE TO FORMAT IT.

Luckily I still have everything because I COPIED it.  I am upgrading the firmware/bios on everything now.  This is making me very confused and upset.

Addition: The motherboard has been a bit flaky and I'm wondering if the main OS drive is not doing so well, either.  It just seems like all of these minor problems are adding up and something is causing trouble.  I did call Promise tech support and I must say it is the best support I have ever dealt with.  It was not a toll-free number...but who really cares with cell phones.  I was talking with essentially next to no wait time to someone who sounded like he was native to America and english...and he knew what he was talking about.  We talked for close to an hour with long pauses while we both thought of possibilities.  In the end, I knew it wouldn't be an easy diagnostic fix.  I honestly think the computer wrote something stupid to the NTFS volume before shutting down and that the Promise controller really didn't do anything wrong...by the way, it was still claiming the array Ok.  And it probably was.  I think the NTFS filesystem was the problem.

I was surprised by the tech support because 1) they say...sorry, we're closed.  But if you've registered your product, you can talk to us...oh, now you can talk to us because we're open 24/7 and oh, you don't need to prove that you registered...lol.  From reviews I read it sounded like their support was horrible.  No complaints from me there.

It is surprising that such an expensive and well-supported setup would be so unreliable this far.  I suppose I should have got a "server" motherboard instead of a mid-range standard desktop motherboard.  I'm going to get everything going again tonight and hope this doesn't happen anymore.  I did quickly create a new drive, copy some data, shut down (just like I did before the storm) and it came back fine.  Might have just been one of those days.  Better not happen again.

[newsposter]

I don't suppose you want to compare and contrast your reply #8 and #9 in this topic do you..........

Power supplies are not 100% efficient.   The best, most expensive ones just approach 85%.  El-cheapos are lucky if they hit 60%.

Assuming no other drains on your system, 16 drives into "300 watts" is a hair under 19 watts per drive.

Now add up the CPU, probably close to 50 watts.  Add another 50 for the mobo and ram.  How many fans?  Say 7-8 watts per fan, three fans for 25 watts (more or less).  The slop is probably accounted for with your PCI video card and any USB devices in use.

This brings us down to 175 watts available, 11 watts per drive.

Oh, did I mention that no power supply is rated to deliver its max output constantly?  Those ratings are surge-startup ratings with the surge-startup measured in tenths of a second.

So call your precious, free, PSU a 225 watter, just for giggles.

So 225 watts minus 125 for the cpu/ram/mobo/fans/usb and this gives you 100 watts for 16 drives.  Or a hair over 6 watts 'available' for each drive.

The remainder and/or fine-tuning of the math is left as an exercise for the student.

The wisdom of cheaping out on the most important part of any computer should be evident to all.

From experience, a 250 watt 1U PSU will not reliably run more than 4 drives (Hitachi 200s) in an Athlon 2000+ system with no addon cards, 512 Mb of ram and three fans.

[benn600]

Promise support definitely did not think that was the problem.  The cheap (free) PSU is in a different computer anyway with 1 hdd, 1 optical, ...nothing big.

Well, I rebooted again after copying 480 GB of data and now I see it says 2.3 TB are used and I don't see any of my data.

[newsposter]

Benn, that's my bad, I see that you've got a 400 watt supply in that system.  The maths still hold, just jiggle the numbers as necessary.

Exactly what brand/model of PSU is in your big server and what mobo/cpu/ram config do you have??

Antec has made some good and some really cruddy power supplies, especially in the 400 watt range.

What you need to look for is somthing with at least 2 independant 12vdc 'rails' (four is loads better), active PFC, and "80Plus" certification for efficiency.

Remember that a highly efficient PSU will generate less heat.  That's a Big Plus in any 'well packed' server chassis.

[benn600]

Good information.

I must say that the entire case design has 5 super-powerful fans in the middle.  They pull air through the front case over all 16 hot-swappable drives and the other optical/main drive(s).  It then passes over and between all the expansion cards/motherboard to exit through many openings in the back of the case.  The air coming out the back is hardly even hot!  It feels like room termperature air.

When I have the case open, the suction doesn't work correctly and I feel a noticeably hotter case surrounding the drives.  So the cooling does a good job.  Also, the PSU has two fans in it that pull air into it from inside the case and push it out--basically making me think that the PSU alone wouldn't add much heat to the case at all.

I have ordered the front bezel and rails for the whole case.  This will allow me to keep it all a little safer and mount it nicely in a rackmount.

At this point, I just have the major issue that when I reboot the computer, 50% of the time, I lose all the data on the array.  I am thinking now that I should not use the allocation unit size of 64Kb like I was doing before.  With my previous RAID5 4.5 TB system, I think I used 4Kb allocation unit size.  So, I'm smartest in just following my previous setup as much as possible.

The only concern is that if I do find it stable (NOW), who knows what may happen a while down the line when I am actually relying on its redundancy between backups?  Theoretically, I could keep it running all the time because it has 16+ minutes of battery backup time, but there are always those chances when the power goes out for a long time.

They told me that Windows 2003 Server would run great...then they told me that it can cost around $700.  Yea, RIGHT.  I don't have that kind of money to throw out the window.

[johnnyboy]

Your other option and one maybe worth investigating at this point is using a different server OS - that way you can try totally different file systems, several of which are alot better.

There was an article on /. today about one thats just coming out and all the huge perks and advantages it has.

At least that way you could work out if it was software or hardware.

[benn600]

I have considered it but every other operating system presents huge unknowns.  I have no idea how to do a whole bunch of things I need with Linux/FreeNas/etc.  And I want to be able to run some important windows apps, like Media Center / hMailServer, without having to run a 2nd server.  I know this new computer is plenty fast to handle everything I could ever need at this point in time--compared to my previous server--so I want to utilize its abilities.

It will allow me to save space, power, and lots of management time trying to keep two servers running.

I should note that I'm going to be adding a few more hard drives to the server.  I should top it out at 19 hard drives plus a slim CD rom drive.  There is a chance I may try to add a 20th drive but it's unlikely.  The extra 3 or 4 drives are 320 GB Maxtor drives.

[MrHaugen]

I just read about your trouble with the data loss and your PSU.
I can't say for sure, but I do belive the reason can be the lack of enough power. I had an older 260 (I think) Watt PSU wich ran an Pentium 3 700 MHz CPU, with 1 GB ram. I started out with a few drives. Got the number up to 6. At the 7'th drive black smoke came out of the PSU.

You run 18+ drives? Think about the power consumption on bootup. I just think that 400 watt is way to little. Have you measured it at all?

[benn600]

I'm running 19 drives with a slim CD and floppy on an Antec 400 watt power supply.  When I turn the computer on, it does stagger the hdd spin up but on my APC UPS, it reads out the wattage requirement.  It starts down at 150 and gradually rises until it peaks at 550 watts (or a little more) and then it settles down to 280 watts, where it stays consistently.  If the hard drives are allowed to shut down from the 20 minute timeout (for power saving), then they ARE all turned on simultaneously and I've seen 600+ watts--but the computer doesn't even hickup!

I think it's just a rock solid, high quality power supply (lol).

So I disabled the hdd turn off and now I don't have to worry about the potential for a sudden crash...and the drives probably should stay on all the time because the web server running from them will probably keep them going as ppl access the web site...and someone is almost always accessing the server's data.  And at night podcasts are downloaded.  No point in shutting them off.

It has been rock solid now for quite a while and I just finished re-ripping a few DVDs I couldn't backup and I'm at exactly 3 TB used of more than 6 available...so still under half--very good news.  Don't worry, once I start scanning our 30K + physical pictures in, I'll start eating more of that up.

[MrHaugen]

Allright. Really thought the drives would require more power than that.
But then again. my drives and power supply are rather old. That might explain most of it.

[benn600]

No question about it.  With my 600 MHz Athlon PC I bought many years back, I remember replacing the power supply when I added a second hard drive!

I wonder if more powerful power supplies are more able to handle over power draws.  However, I know most psu's have over draw protection so I would think it would just shut off when the hard drive's spinning up pulls so much power.

I read somewhere that hard drives take 10 watts each.  But, they often say to allow 25 watts each.  10 watts each seems right because I have 19 drives...190 watts + 10 watts for the optical/floppy...200...so about 80 watts for the Core 2 Duo, motherboard, raid card, low-end video card.

[newsposter]

hard drives are closer to 25-30 each.  The only drives I've ever seen that are in the 10 watt range are 7200 rpm drives and some small laptop drives.

memory is about 50 per gig, typically 20+ watts per stick irregardless of the amount of ram on board.

fans are 10-15 each.

and as I've said elsewhere, you have to take the efficiency of a psu into account too.

300 watts ac in, 75% efficiency, that gives you a nominal max of 225 watts.  Most psus are in the neighborhood of 65-75 efficient.  A 75% efficient 500 watt psu should (by your theory and measurements) be pulling well over 650 watts at full load.

If you persist in the fantasy of looking at input watts via a ups monitoring program you have to do all of the math, not just the parts that support your preconceived notions.

And the harder you're driving a psu, the less efficient it is.  As things heat up, you start to get into a failure spiral.  More heat, less output.  more output demand, more heat until you either have a graceful failure (shutdown) or a psu that starts to seriously mess up the voltage and amperage of its dc output and this is what causes weird system behavors and component failure.

Having a ups on the ac input doesn't do a damned thing for this.

[benn600]

Having a ups on the ac input doesn't do a damned thing for this.

No disagreement there.  I'm not expert but I know a few things.  I don't disagree with what you're saying but I find it interesting that you say that the only drives you've ever seen in the 10 watt range are 7200 RPM drives.  lol.  What do you think I'm using?  If I were to buy 10K or 15K RPM drives in the 500GB range (if available), I'd be looking at another $5,000 just for the faster drives and new PSU, etc.

The PSU does get VERY hot but it doesn't seem much (if any) hotter than it did when it was running a barebones power-hungry Prescott chip.  I'm very pleased with its ability to handle this load and I remember when I bought it 4 years ago how I chose to get a little larger PSU for some more money--good thing I did (I guess).

It's also running 5 high-powered, high-output server hot-swappable fans.

I love how the power requirements are adding and adding, yet I am having no problems using this seemingly underrated power supply.  Dare I claim Antec PSU's are high quality?  I'm not one to just blow money on something unless I feel it's important--and I see no side effects at all.  Everything is running great so far.

Thanks for the info, too.

[newsposter]

No Problems?

Benn, you are having continual problems.  Look back at your own postings.

About every 10 days you're in here with some failure or another.

And I said that **some** 7200 rpm drives are rated at 10 watts.  Not all of them.  Many are in the 20+ range.

[benn600]

You calculate a 280 watt power draw understanding that 19 7200 RPM drives are present.

Those problems were simply due to XP.  Promise even told me that.  So I used Vista Home Premium and it has worked flawlessly ever since.

[avpman]

hard drives are closer to 25-30 each.  The only drives I've ever seen that are in the 10 watt range are 7200 rpm drives and some small laptop drives.

memory is about 50 per gig, typically 20+ watts per stick irregardless of the amount of ram on board.

fans are 10-15 each.

and as I've said elsewhere, you have to take the efficiency of a psu into account too.

300 watts ac in, 75% efficiency, that gives you a nominal max of 225 watts.  Most psus are in the neighborhood of 65-75 efficient.  A 75% efficient 500 watt psu should (by your theory and measurements) be pulling well over 650 watts at full load.

If you persist in the fantasy of looking at input watts via a ups monitoring program you have to do all of the math, not just the parts that support your preconceived notions.

And the harder you're driving a psu, the less efficient it is.  As things heat up, you start to get into a failure spiral.  More heat, less output.  more output demand, more heat until you either have a graceful failure (shutdown) or a psu that starts to seriously mess up the voltage and amperage of its dc output and this is what causes weird system behavors and component failure.

Having a ups on the ac input doesn't do a damned thing for this.

Just a side note since we're taking about "energy". Heat, generated in any fashion is "energy". It's either used or it's wasted. Blowing a fan on a hot component doesn't diminish the energy usage, it just dissipates the heat (energy) into the surrounding environment. A more energy efficient power supply would be one that doesn't give off as much heat. Heat is wasted energy no matter how much air you blow on it. Another bit of trivia; current CPU chips waste about 80% of the energy they draw in the form of heat given off. There is a new material in the works  for CPU transistors that will allow CPU's to be more energy efficient by reducing the heat output. Techies might find this article interesting http://www.physorg.com/news89109741.html

[benn600]

I completely understand that the energy is converted to heat and is not lost.  However, I need an answer.  For the actual computing power--the CPU.  How exactly is the computing done without using any energy?  I guess energy can't be converted to logic, lol.

Running a computer is very similar if not identical to running a space heater, right?  You just don't get 1K or 1.5K watts of heat...you just get 200 or 300 watts.

[horse]

My server (Much smaller then yours benn600's) has two decent 500 (Sli Vertified) and 550w PSU (Zallman). One for the M/B, DVD drive and the 2 SATA Mirrored drives that hold the main OS, exchange and other program files.
The other PSU is dedicated to the drives hung of the 3ware SATA RAID and Promise IDE (for some older IDE drives). My server was running around 200W measured on the AC side last time I bothered to check, however it is not the average you need to worry about. My PSU's have multiple 12V and 5v rails that I balance the drives over. When a drive need power it gets it without any effort. Both PSU's have active power correction and are running cool to the touch. Never lost a drive (Yet :-) ) I did loose 2 drives in another HTPC which had cooling issues and I'm sure they got cooked. Can never have too much power or cooling.

Think about an audio amp, the average current to the speaker is pretty low, but the current for those bass freaquencies require a large amount. I don't play my music loud, but to get the quality my amp has a huge toroidal transformer with large capacitors for resovoirs. The puppie weighs in at 56lbs and needs that kind of power in reserve for the 1ms it needs to deliver it without clipping the low end.

I noticed in some of your other posts you complained about the speed of the RAID, I moved to the server board to get the PCI-X bus which at least gave me double PCI's bw, next step would be PCIe with more than 4 lanes (If you're running that it should be quicker if you have the drives to keep up with it)


My home server runs a Tyan server board (Older Intel 7501 chipset)
dual 2.4G Xeon's with 2GB of ECC memory
Adaptec / Intel 2 channel SATA RAID embedded (Main OS)
3ware 9508S SATA RAID with 256MB ECC Ram using PCI-X
Promise TX2 for the IDE disks
1050W of PSU (Tandemed 500W and 550W)
Housed in a CoolerMaster Stacker case with 4 slow spinning 120mm fans to keep it cool
APC UPS (Switching type) mainly there to protect against spikes and brown outs and shut the machine down cleanly if the power really goes out. Power never comes back on nicely in CA, it bounces a few times just to really upset stuff :-)

[benn600]

Wow, that's a pretty nice server.  My goal was just different going into the project.  I was after an inexpensive pathway to get as much space as I could without spending more than a fortune that I already spent.  My total cost was right around $5,000.  I can only imagine what some of the things you added would have brought my cost to--such as two very nice PSU's.  My PSU is a 3 year old Antec so it didn't cost me anything.  Was around $70 standalone when I bought it before.

My case was ~$700, the Promise RAID card was ~$700, and the extra 6 HDD's were ~$700.  I already had 10 drives.  Then I got three 320 GB drives for the OS in RAID5, around $200.  Motherboard, processor, memory were under $200 alltogether (yep, very cheap, but 2 GB memory!)

Then the $200 UPS marked down to $140, very low-end graphics because the mobo didn't have graphics.  The card I have, I think, is x8 PCI express.  I also added a slim DVD-RW drive only because it was only slightly more expensive than a slim CD.  I used all 16 hot-swappable ports plus the HDD port, floppy drive port, and large CD drive port for the 3-320 GB drives, leaving only the slim optical bay open, so I had to go with my purchase.  Otherwise, I was using a (free) CD drive I already had.  Everything is black so it looks nice.

Plus, I bought the bezel (lock and key) and sliding rails.  My college, where I work, is going to give me their rackmount, which I will put in my basement with the server.  The speed is a little confusing but I definitely feel it is a little slow at times.

At one point I was noticing 190 MB/second duplication speed (reading off array and writing to same array).  So that would be read and write speed for a combined data transfer rate of 380 MB/second.  I did notice a significant speed increase when I switched to Vista.

Do you know of any good program for testing speed?  I've tried some testers but they always yield horribly low transfer rates that are much lower than I know are capable.

My server draws around 280 watts.  I was surprised that going from my previous Prescott Pentium 4 to new server with 6 more drives that the draw was still 250 watts.  An extra 20-30 watts were added by the extra 2 320 GB drives when I made the switch to RAID 5 for the main drive.

[JONCAT]

AMPS....how many amperes can your rails handle. If your overloading it in this regard watts don't matter, besides a PSU rated 600w, isn't always going to run at that...because of efficiency AND load. Run P95, crunch the cpu at 100%,  and watch the wattage then.

DC

[benn600]

I'm not sure about the technical details of it at this point.  I have somewhat forgotten about my concern because it's been running with 19-drive simultaneous startup without a hiccup for 3 months!  Not a single problem to date!  No data loss or strange problems.  Some speed issues at one point but I'm quite certain that it was the network switches and not the server.

What is the single most common issue related to insufficient power?  If I see it I'll start worrying.  I may consider upgrading to a redundant power supply at some point but not yet.  I'm running on money-savers lane!  I saved ~$100-300 because I didn't have to buy a PSU.

[benn600]

[craft]

null

[benn600]

I'm actually going to look at Windows Home Server and possibly install it on my server if I like it.  You're probably best off buying a case with hot-swappable bays (very nice) and a hardware RAID card with 4 or 8 ports.  Then, use RAID5.  If you can afford it, go for RAID6.

RAID 5 means one drive can fail with no data loss
RAID 6 means that two drives can fail with no data loss

If a drive fails in RAID5, the likelihood of another failure is significantly greater because of the very high demand during the rebuild process (reading/writing lots to every drive).  So, RAID6 can protect against a failure during rebuilding.

I've thought of building small file servers and selling them.  It would be a good business!

[benn600]

We absolutely need to know how much space you need.  I'm assuming by "6TB?" you did not mean you want 6TB.  If so, my configuration is working great and you would have space for a few hot spares.  Then, you'd be looking at $2,500 +.

[craft]

null

[benn600]

Building your own case?  Yikes.  That would be a challenge.  Well, it obviously depends on how much space you're after.  If you've only got 3 drives, that's pretty easy and your cheapest solution would probably just be a regular case.  Server, rack-mountable cases tend to be more expensive.  I bought mine on Circotech (google it).  They had very good service.  Unfortunately, a small cable was missing when I received it but they shipped one out promptly--granted after they were gonna ship it I added two items to my order and total was ~$100.  He claimed he was giving me free shipping but I'm not sure because the two items were not listed on their site (more special, less common items).  I was getting the bezel and rails.

Technically it's 7TB but the difference of 1024 vs 1000 and other differences gives me just over 6TB.  That's what makes me want to add a few more drives to get 7TB but then I'd technically have 8TB, lol.

Tell me what you want stored, how much data expansion you want, how much backup you want (remember DVD backups + hard drives work very well), your budget, etc.  Do you want some higher end features including hot-swappable fans?  My case has those...not that I'll ever need them!  It also has hot-swappable SATA bays.  You probably don't want a redundant power supply.  Lastly, what other uses will this server have?  What OS?  Are you going to run more applications?  I personally run a web server, email server, sometimes FTP server, Media Center's UPnP & Library server, file server, security camera recording for FOUR cameras (D-Link), Juice podcast downloader, Syncback to auto backup from 7TB array to smaller array in the same case, etc.

So I have quite a few demands other than just files.  My web and email servers aren't heavily used but are definitely used consistently throughout the days.  In fact, I listed 15 items or so on eBay and all the pictures are hosted on my server.  I tend to post lots of very large pictures (800px wide, etc).  One auction has almost 2MB of images, which is a lot compared to what most people have.  I never buy the extra images from eBay...I just host them for free on my server which only costs me $30 per year for the dynamic IP redirection & domain name (I have a few more domains, though).

Wow, I'm off topic.  Just tell me more about your intended server.  It's a lot of fun building a server because you know that your efforts can benefit you for a few months (lol)...maybe YEARS.  My server has kept all my data online as requested (restarts and down-time mainly by choice) for almost FOUR months.  Yes, that's not much time but that's since I built it!

[KingSparta]

1024 vs 1000

Technically Drive Makers Do Not Use The 1024 Rule.

So 1K = 1000, One Meg Is 1,000,000 One Gig is 1,000,000,000 etc....

[benn600]

Exactly while Windows reports based on 1024, which makes your drive seem smaller and is why I only have 6.x TB instead of 7TB.

[newsposter]

and do not forget to calculate in the raid overhead...

[benn600]

What is the RAID overhead reqirements?  How does this decrease overall space on a server?

[newsposter]

this is pretty basic foundation-level knowledge stuff.

Google is your friend.