I recently wrote about a tower case solution which sliced $500 off the cost. Last night we found an ASUS m/b for a Phenom II which supports ECC. This will be a cheaper faster solution. I will, however, have to buy a NIC. This NIC runs a Realtek chipset. No thanks.
- LIAN LI PC-A71F Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case $240 (from mwave)
- Silencer 610 EPS12V from PC Power and Cooling for $99
- Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
- ASUS M4A79T Deluxe m/b for $180
- AMD Phenom II X4 945 CPU $150
- 2x SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II 4 port at $60 each for $120
- Kingston ValueRAM 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM ECC $97
- Intel EXPI9400PTBLK 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Gigabit for $76
You will notice the new RAID cards don’t need special SATA cables.
Total cost is about $1040 with shipping.
This is the same cost as the previous Intel board, but the Asus motherboard and CPU combination would have more power and I/O. Thus, we have increased the power of the system without increasing the price.
I had been looking at Intel EXPI9301CT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express Gigabit NIC for $40 but preferred the above NIC because it has Wake On LAN. Or perhaps use this cheaper Intel EXPI9301CTBLK card for $31 that jbeez is using on his gateway box, which is running ZFS.
For the HDD, I’ll buy 5x SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ at $150 each: their TLER/ERC is set to 7 seconds.
Change of mind: I’ll probably buy the HITACHI Deskstar 7K2000 HDS722020ALA3302TB 7200 RPM 32MB drives. Double the space, for the same price; just not RAID-specific HDD. For the same price, I’ll have a 6TB system, assuming raidz2.
However, I may go for raidz1, which will allow for one disk failure. This would give me an 8TB system with 5HDD. Again, reliability rules, so I’ll probably go with raidz2.
That puts the total cost for a 3TB system at $1770. Or a 6TB system if I buy the Hitachi drives.
NOTE: This was previously mentioned as a 4.5TB system. I mistakenly thought the Samsung F1 was a 1.45TB drive. It is not: it is a 1TB drive.
