K62 550 for a DIY NAS?

D

Dr. Baltar

Hi,

I purchased 4x 250 GB deskstars (sataII) , hoping to put them in RAID 5
and I had a few questions:


I have an old K62 550 with a decent Inwin ATX case. I'm contemplating
purchasing the 4 port PCI SATA II controller from Promise and sticking
it in the old machine. The Power Supply is 250 Watts.

Basically 3 users on my home network will access it,
for mp3's , streaming .avi's / DVD's to my Xbox (typicall home usage
these days). No video editing or anything wildly disk intensive is
anticipated other than perhaps BitTorrent.

My question is, will that old K62 550 (198 MB ram) suffice with a
barebones Linux distro (freenas?) to serve those kinds of files?

I can't afford a decent RAID card and from what I understand the cheapo
cards are simply software RAID in disguise. Should I put that $80
bucks for a controller into a newer system (w/ onboard SATA) / better
PSU?

much appreciated
 
Y

Yousuf Khan

Your old K6-2 should be just fine for a NAS box. You might also want to
get yourself a Gigabit Ethernet card with a Gigabit switch too. And yes,
most of those "hardware" RAID cards are just software RAID in disguise.
And they are proprietary RAID, you change your RAID card from one brand
to another, and your drives will no longer work until you reformat them
for the new RAID card. You'll lose all of your valuable data in the
meantime. So you might as well use a true software RAID, which is an
operating system-based one. That way, you can be sure that the RAID will
operate no matter what the hardware is underneath, just so long as you
remain with Linux and the same software RAID product.

Yousuf Khan

Dr. Baltar said:
Hi,
Click to expand...
I purchased 4x 250 GB deskstars (sataII) , hoping to put them in RAID 5
and I had a few questions:

I have an old K62 550 with a decent Inwin ATX case. I'm contemplating
purchasing the 4 port PCI SATA II controller from Promise and sticking
it in the old machine. The Power Supply is 250 Watts.
Click to expand...
Basically 3 users on my home network will access it,
for mp3's , streaming .avi's / DVD's to my Xbox (typicall home usage
these days). No video editing or anything wildly disk intensive is
anticipated other than perhaps BitTorrent.
Click to expand...
My question is, will that old K62 550 (198 MB ram) suffice with a
barebones Linux distro (freenas?) to serve those kinds of files?
Click to expand...
 
G

Groucho

Dr. Baltar said:
Hi,

I purchased 4x 250 GB deskstars (sataII) , hoping to put them in RAID 5
and I had a few questions:


I have an old K62 550 with a decent Inwin ATX case. I'm contemplating
purchasing the 4 port PCI SATA II controller from Promise and sticking
it in the old machine. The Power Supply is 250 Watts.

Basically 3 users on my home network will access it,
for mp3's , streaming .avi's / DVD's to my Xbox (typicall home usage
these days). No video editing or anything wildly disk intensive is
anticipated other than perhaps BitTorrent.

My question is, will that old K62 550 (198 MB ram) suffice with a
barebones Linux distro (freenas?) to serve those kinds of files?

I can't afford a decent RAID card and from what I understand the cheapo
cards are simply software RAID in disguise. Should I put that $80
bucks for a controller into a newer system (w/ onboard SATA) / better
PSU?

much appreciated
Click to expand...

I have recently run Freenas successfully with a K6-2 400 and less ram (128)
on an old Baby AT socket 7 motherboard. Did so though with an old LSI Logic
i4 Megaraid card which has its own onboard processor, ie hardware raid. A
similar setup was used in this guide
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/27840/77/

I would have some doubts about the K6-2 550 being able to cope with software
raid 5, especially with (gigabit) network as well and not be bogged down,
unresponsive at times?. But others in the know should advise any possible
lack of grunt in that scenario.

Checkout the driver situation too before you buy or use anything.

One downside of using newer motherboard, CPU, etc though is increased power
consumption and heat and then possibly requiring additional cooling etc the
newer you go. Whereas sticking with the older stuff costs less per year to
keep running 24/7

An old 2nd hand hardware based raid card and big IDE drives is cheaper to
create such a system.
 
A

Arno Wagner

Previously Dr. Baltar said:
Hi,
Click to expand...
I purchased 4x 250 GB deskstars (sataII) , hoping to put them in RAID 5
and I had a few questions:

I have an old K62 550 with a decent Inwin ATX case. I'm contemplating
purchasing the 4 port PCI SATA II controller from Promise and sticking
it in the old machine.
Click to expand...

Should work fine. I have two of these working in a server.
The Power Supply is 250 Watts.
Click to expand...

That might be a bit close. Considering that the k6-2 is not a
power-hog like current CPUs, it should still be enough, IMO.
Basically 3 users on my home network will access it,
for mp3's , streaming .avi's / DVD's to my Xbox (typicall home usage
these days). No video editing or anything wildly disk intensive is
anticipated other than perhaps BitTorrent.
Click to expand...
My question is, will that old K62 550 (198 MB ram) suffice with a
barebones Linux distro (freenas?) to serve those kinds of files?
Click to expand...

Unless you use Gigabit Ethernet, the network should be the bottleneck
anyways. CPU power and RAM is plenty for the application with
fast ethernet (100Mb/s)
I can't afford a decent RAID card and from what I understand the cheapo
cards are simply software RAID in disguise.
Click to expand...

It is. And the ''decent'' RAID cards often turn out not to be so
decent after all.
Should I put that $80
bucks for a controller into a newer system (w/ onboard SATA) / better
PSU?
Click to expand...

I don't think so. For $80 you will not be getting good quality.
If you run into problems, you can still replace parts.

Arno
 
A

Arno Wagner

Previously Yousuf Khan said:
Your old K6-2 should be just fine for a NAS box. You might also want to
get yourself a Gigabit Ethernet card with a Gigabit switch too. And yes,
most of those "hardware" RAID cards are just software RAID in disguise.
And they are proprietary RAID, you change your RAID card from one brand
to another, and your drives will no longer work until you reformat them
for the new RAID card. You'll lose all of your valuable data in the
meantime. So you might as well use a true software RAID, which is an
operating system-based one. That way, you can be sure that the RAID will
operate no matter what the hardware is underneath, just so long as you
remain with Linux and the same software RAID product.
Click to expand...

Just a note: There is no ''software RAID product'' under Linux. It is
all kernel-based and compatible between kernel versions. At least
that is my experience.

Arno
 
B

bbbl67

Just a note: There is no ''software RAID product'' under Linux. It is
all kernel-based and compatible between kernel versions. At least
that is my experience.
Click to expand...

Kernel-based is still software-based.

Yousuf Khan
 
A

Arno Wagner

Kernel-based is still software-based.
Click to expand...

My point was that it is not a ''product'' in the sense that there are
several alternatives or that you install it in addition. Of course you
are correct about it still being software.

Arno
 
W

Will Dormann

Groucho said:
I would have some doubts about the K6-2 550 being able to cope with software
raid 5, especially with (gigabit) network as well and not be bogged down,
unresponsive at times?. But others in the know should advise any possible
lack of grunt in that scenario.
Click to expand...

My recently retired NAS was a K6-III 450 with Intel Gigabit ethernet and
4-drive PATA RAID5. The K6-2 550 is probably on par with my chip,
performance-wise.

You are correct in that the system will be a bit underpowered for
Gigabit speeds. Under heavy network load (e.g. moving a multi-gigabyte
MythTV recording), the NAS CPU would be pegged with about 2/3 CPU time
for smbd and 1/3 for the MD/pdflush stuff. The system worked perfectly
well. It was never unresponsive. I just don't think I got nearly the
throughput that I should have. Just slightly faster than 100Mbit
speeds, if I remember correctly.

Its replacement is a mini two-drive SATA RAID1 system with a fanless C7
Esther CPU. The system is quieter, uses about 1/2 the watts of the old
system, and is significantly faster, both CPU-wise and network
throughput wise. Though having set up the new system, I realized that
I didn't properly set up jumbo ethernet frames with the old box. That
would have probably helped a lot with throughput.


-WD
 
G

Groucho

Will Dormann said:
My recently retired NAS was a K6-III 450 with Intel Gigabit ethernet and
4-drive PATA RAID5. The K6-2 550 is probably on par with my chip,
performance-wise.
Click to expand...

I don't know whether they would truly be on par. The K6-III 450 was quite a
special and rare CPU in comparison to the K6-2. I can remember a time when
individuals hanging onto S7 motherboards and wanting just that little bit
more grunt would have just about sold one of their nuts for one. ;-)

Your new setup sounds interesting and 'expensive' in comparison though.
 
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