A Storage server - your recommendations
 

hello,

i am thinking of either building or buying a storage server, basically i would like to know your recommendations for what kit to buy, where best to get it and whats the pros and cons of it
my requirements for this server are as follows:

* needs to be always on
* if possible at least 150GB of space
* some form of RAID ( ? ) ( as a fail safe if one of the disks do go down ) - i'd like your opinions on this

optional stuff

* Some sort of encrypted area, for storing sensitive data

* expandability ( hot swappable drives ? )

with all that in consideration, i have one final request, is it possible to make the box power down and be as silent as possible ? by silent i mean, the hard disks powering down when not in use, and if possible a silent power supply like a laptop one?

please post your comments on this and any recommendations for hardware you have.


thanks
antken

You can either get serial ATA or SCSI controllers that can do RAID 5. If you decide to get a serial ATA controller, I suggest you get Western Digital hard drives. Their Raptor hard drive (SATA) has near SCSI performance and it has SCSI like reliablity. Seagate SATA hard drives has problems in LINUX, so you may want to stay away from them.

You don't want the hard drives to power down because this makes hard drives fail sooner. Its best to leave them on.

You can easily make a silent computer/server. Use water cooling for the processor(s), northbridge chip, and hard drives. There are many power supplies that are quiet although they cost over 100 US dollars.