First Steps Toward A Dirt Cheap Terabyte Server

Looks like I'm in need of a terabyte storage server for my home media network. The primary requirement is that its got to be dirt cheap, in otherwords all components have to go under the discretional budget of under $250 ( $250 being that magic figure that you can pay cash without your spouse seeing it in the credit card billing statement).

So, I've already picked up two 250 Gigabyte hardrives each on rebate last week on two different stores (you know, one per household deal). My expenses so far are about $320 (excluding taxes). I'll need two more stores to start a promotion and I'm on my way to 1 terabyte of hard disk space for $640!

A year ago kcgeek put together this piece that estimated a whopping $5720 for a terabyte server, something I intend on avoiding! Fortunately, he revisted the same issue in late 2003 and brought down the price to $1687 and a budget version at $1392. He used Maxtor 160GB ATA133, which incidentally are around $100 for this week's bargains. Don't know yet if my next set of drives will be Maxtor ATA133s instead of the slower Western Digital ATA100s.

So let me appeal to the 'lazy web' and ask all the innovative folks out there, what's next?

Update: I've so far purchased four 250Gb Western Digital drives from CompUSA, BestBuy, Circuit City and one online from Frys. I also picked up a 160Gb Maxtor from BestBuy and I'll grab another one from Staples, just in case I go this route. I've also accumulated 2Gb of PC2700 DRAM at around $200 from CompUSA, BestBuy, Staples and Circuit City. So, just counting the WD 250 Gb and the DRAMs, I've spent $820 so far. I'm leaning on staying with WD even though they are slower, the reviews at Amazon and eopinions seem to say that the WD 250Gb has better reliability. In addition, using only 4 drives, as compared to the 8 drives mentioned in kcgeek, would require a cheaper controller, require less power and dissipate less heat.

I was thinking of going with a dual opteron system, however I realized that it only takes registered memory which cost significantly more than regular unbuffered types. So, I'm now resigned to using a Athlon 64, the big plus are these are much "cooler and quiet" than their predecessors equating to longer MTBF. The cheapest Athlon 64 appear are the 512mb cache variety, however I have a bias towards having more cache, so I'll pay $50 extra for the 1gb cache version. I'm looking now at an additional $425 for the mobo (MSI K8T Neo) and cpu. Total so far, around $1250.

Next step, the case and powersupply. Time to head over to SilentPCReview for some ideas.

I've decided to stay with the Western Digital 250Gb (WD2500JB) drives over the Maxtor 160Gb ATA133 drives. The benchmarks that I found in StorageReview have convinced me that I'm not really loosing (if any) much in performance.

Interesting a company called LaCie is selling 1 Terabyte firewire enabled device for $1,199. Now, if I was just gunning for dumb storage then that's an easy mark to beat. However, if you start thinking of storage as a pro-active and intelligent process then new very interesting ways of achieving this pop up.

Additional resources: "Building a Wireless Home Media Network Server", "Building a Budget Storage Server", "What if Disk Space where Free?", Building Reliable Newspaper Systems - The Sequel, "Of Things Quiet", ""The Software Side of Storage".