Server Hardware

Case
You’ll need to find a case with numerous 3.5″ drive bays. You’ll find them in Hawalli between KD 45 and KD 55.

At first we bought a 7.5KD case which turned out to be way too small where there was no space between the disks & the mobo. The case we got was made of metal, which isn’t something good, as good cases should be made of aluminium, but the ventilation is excellent, so it worked out.

Hard disks can heat up a lot in a very short time, especially during abuse sessions (*wink*) so it’s better to put a fan on the front panel to blow air at the disks. In the picture above, you can see some plastic wrappers; these are holding a fan (we didn’t have good screws). In the old case, the disks reached 50 degrees Celsius, while in the one above, they barely reached 38C.

Motherboards/Chipsets
Depending on availability and prices in the local Kuwaiti market, you can either buy a motherboard with the max SATA ports built-in (Gigabyte has 8 SATA ports), or get the cheapest motherboard you can find that supports multiple SATA drives (We got an MSI with 4 SATA ports). A Pentium 4 CPU will do. It’s a good idea to check for PCI slots to be able to add more SATA ports in the future using PCI-to-SATA cards.

Hard Drives
Buy a minimum of 3 SATA drives (largest capacity you can afford) for RAID storage and 1 IDE/SATA for the OS and possibly software backup.

RAM
Since we’ll be running Linux in command line interface (CLI) mode, we went for 1GB of RAM. After we had configured our box & the system was up & running with files on it being shared, memory consumption was 90MB only; It dropped to 85-80MB after we shutdown the Apache web server.

RAID
We opted for using Linux Operaing System’s capabilities of setting up RAID arrays, rather than using expensive hardware RAID controllers, but you can use hardware RAID controllers if you wanted to.

Power Supply Unit
High wattage isn’t what you want. You want a  PSU with the mot number of power cables, whether SATA or 4-pin molex. You can use molex splitters to gain 2 ports out of one, and provide power to disks (Just don’t get carried away and hook more than 2!).  PSUs with high watt rate are usually to support graphics cards, which we don’t need. You can go and hunt a CD/DVD duplicator PSU which would provide you 7-12 molex ports.

CD-ROM Drive (Temporary)

Monitor (Only during setup)

Hidden Costs
Molex-to-SATA power cable, SATA data cables, extra fans, molex power splitter cables, and a few more stuf should be put into consideration.