[PLUG] Motherboard recommendations

[Quentin Hartman]

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com> wrote:
>   * Does the formfactor really matter? Space is not an issue, but it
> may be difficult to find a place for a rack mount (Our "rack" only has
> a front mounting bracket, and no rear supports -- it just holds
> switches and a kvm)

It depends. You can get shelves or special brackets to put a machine
designed for a four-post rack into a two-post telco rack. In fact, a
lot of private (ie - not colo) datacenters do this because you can get
better rack density this way.

>   * Memory: quantity or speed? I know this is very hard to answer
> without knowing exactly how we'll be using the machine, but it's also
> very hard to know exactly how we'll be using the machine...  Roughly

Unless you care about sub 10% differences in specific benchmarks, or
have some other extreme edge case, all modern RAM is fast enough that
quantity matters more than speed.

> ram: 8 gigs
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231195
> 80  ; mobo: (micro atx?!)
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128379
> 193 ; AMD Quad-core Phenome II & fan:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.163672
> 600 ; drives (2 2TB WD SATA)
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136344
> 20  ; dvd/cd
> ; case? (micro atx?) & powersupply
> )
> $1037 ;; well within our budget.  What else would you add / change?

All this looks fine, but I'll pose a question to you. Is this server a
stop-gap, or something that you will want to grow with? If it's a stop
gap, what you listed thrown in just whatever case will be fine. When
you outgrow it, retire it and replace it. If you want this to be an
investment into something you can grow, I'd _strongly_ recommend
getting server-class parts in a rack-mountable chassis. In AMD land
that unfortunately means no Phenoms right now, which is a bummer, but
it is what it is. A multi-socket motherboard will support up to 32 or
even 64GB of RAM (as opposed to 16 on the board you linked), you have
room for more cores if you need them. It's a machine you can grow as
your needs change.

I'd also second the comment below that more, smaller disks will give
you better performance / $ than the 2GB flagships. But, if that
doesn't matter, getting by with fewer disks will reduce your power and
cooling requirements. I don't necessarily support the recommendation
for hardware RAID though. In the budget you seem to be talking about,
getting real hardware RAID (don't be fooled by fakeraid cards!) will
be a substantial increase in cost (30% increase, minimum) and is
unlikely to buy you anything you actually need. When running Linux, I
actually favor the software RAID over hardware RAID in all but a
handful of cases. A mid- to high-end database server, for example. The
performance difference in real-world applications is usually only a
couple %, and software arrays are portable and easy to manage.
Hardware arrays aren't usually.

As much as I hate to say it, if you want to get into "real" server
hardware, you might be better off in terms value to look at one of the
tier-1 vendors (Dell, HP, or even tier-2s like Pogo, Advanced
Clustering, or Penguin Computing) than you would be building your own.
The "fit and finish" on those machines is simply better, and that's
typically worth something to whomever is tasked with taking care of
them. But again, if the "creature comforts" that sort of hardware
offers are not important to you, what you linked to above looks fine.
I'd not get a micro ATX case though. It will likely limit the number
of drives you can run, which may prove to be a hassle at some point.
It's also worth while to get a quality powersupply. It's the
foundation that everything else depends on.

-QH-