The Cases, Hard Drives, RAID, and the Rest
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
The CaseChoosing a case for our new servers was a fairly important matter as well. There were a few considerations that we needed to take into mind when looking throughout the numerous options available to use. First, while it is true that the Tyan Thunder K7X motherboard has the ability to fit into the smaller 1U and 2U cases that are available in rackmount form, in order to provide the system with optimal cooling and allow for a internal components, I felt that going with the 4U size was necessary. Doing so allowed me to use all the of the PCI slots in the motherboards if necessary and didn’t require me to try and find a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI riser card for the Tyan motherboard.
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The case we choose was the Directron RA456 enclosure. This case has a sturdy steel construction to it and a lot of room for internal hard drives and fans – things that we would definitely need. Each case had support for front USB, which we didn’t use or need, 5 internal 3.5” bays, 2 external 3.5” bays and 3 external 5.25” bays. We did have a small problem with 2 of the internal bays being over the processors and conflicting with our heatsinks that caused us to move one of the hard drives to the external bays. It wasn’t a big problem though and the extra room in the server more than made up for that design flaw.
The Hard Drives
We had been talking a lot about our I/O subsystem in this article and how important the hard drives were in the overall performance of our servers. Our databases required fast and reliable storage, but we also need a lot of space for our databases and backups.
Seagate and their line of Cheetah SCSI hard drives were our first choice for the three new servers. Having used them in my personal systems before as well as having them run in the old servers for over 8 months without a problem, I knew they were the fastest available and were stable enough for enterprise use. But, because the SCSI drives are still very expensive when going for large storage space, we decided to include an IDE drive as well for some of the less important storage and backup options on the servers.
Using the Adaptec on-board SCSI controller featured on the Tyan Thunder K7X motherboard, using SCSI drives was simple and they were easy to install and upgrade to. Both the new ads server and the new site server (hosting the news/articles that you read) are using a single Seagate Cheetah drive running at 15,000 RPM with 36 GB storage. Because the database for both of these machines wasn’t extremely large, the majority of it would be stored in memory and thus we could go without a RAID setup for them for the time being. However, the new AMDForums server was a different matter. This machine has a database of more than 2 GB in size and is constantly being written to with the new posts of our 37,000 members. To speed things up on the forums, we need the absolute best in hard drive performance and that falls into the SCSI RAID category.
Using the inexpensive but very effective Adaptec 2000S 0-channel RAID card on the Tyan motherboard, we were able to setup a 0/1 RAID array with 4 of the Seagate Cheetah hard drives. This would give us the speed increase of a striped array as well as the reliability of a mirrored array. The drive performance with this setup was amazing and you can witness it by visiting the AMDForums now.
As I mentioned before, we also decided to include an IDE drive in each system to be used for such things as logs and site backups. For this we need a lot of space but not a lot of speed, so we could afford to use IDE drives to save some money. Once again we turned to Seagate, the worlds largest-selling hard drive brand. While their name is not very prominent in the DIY market for IDE hard drives, that is because the majority of their sales are to OEMs and white-box PC makers. The Seagate Barracuda line of 7200 RPM drives at 80 GB provided the servers with the needed speed and storage space.
The Cooling
With all this hardware, some good cooling was needed for these servers. Having dual Athlon MPs in a system will generate a lot of heat on their own, but including 15K RPM SCSI drives multiplies this 10 times. Those drives are fast, but they can get hot! For all of our cooling, we turned to the guys at Vantec. They supplied us with the CopperX heatsinks for the processors as well as a collection of the Tornado case fans to use in the appropriate case bays. The CopperX fans do a great job keeping the processors cool while the Tornado case fans keep the server airflow fast and cool (and loud!).
The Rest
The rest of the hardware including the NMB power supplies, the 52x CDROMs, the floppy drives and cable were minor parts that don’t need a lot of explaining. These were provided by Monarch Computer.
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