[wplug] Cheap linux server - hardware suggestions

Pat Barron pat at lectroid.com
Fri Jan 11 12:03:22 EST 2013


If you're going to build from scratch, I would second the recommendation 
for ASUS motherboards.  I have an ASUS motherboard in the system I 
built, and it's been great.  I also used a Seasonic power supply, and I 
have no complaints - the tricky bit with the power supply, for me, was 
to make sure I got a power supply with enough power cables (of the right 
kinds) for all the drives I was going to put into the system, in that my 
machine has three SATA hard drives and two SATA optical drives.

On lesson I learned, though - one of my motherboard selection criteria 
was that I wanted an on-board RAID controller.  In the end, the on-board 
RAID turned out to be more of a problem than a solution for my 
application (I didn't realize that it wasn't "real" hardware RAID...), 
and I eventually abandoned the idea of even using it.  If I had to do it 
over, I would probably ignore the presence or absence of RAID support on 
the motherboard, and just get a separate RAID controller.

I would encourage you, though, if you're going to be storing a whole lot 
of video files, rendering animations, etc., do consider using some kind 
of RAID.  That way, even if you lose a hard drive, you can still sort of 
limp along until you can replace the drive (unless you happen to lose 
another one in the meantime...), and not actually lose any data.

I'm personally still a fan of the AMD processors, but it really depends 
on what you're trying to optimize, and what your application is capable 
of taking advantage of.  After looking at a lot of performance vs. price 
comparisons, I put an AMD FX-6200 into the system I built (six cores, 
3.8GHz).  It absolutely screams, I haven't been able to get it even 
close to running out of CPU, even running up to 4 additional virtual 
machines simultaneously on the physical hardware.  On the other hand, I 
don't know much about Blender, but if it's not able to take advantage of 
multiple cores, a higher end multi-core processor does you no good - if 
the application is single-threaded, doesn't matter how many cores are on 
the CPU, it's only going to use one of them - in that case, you're more 
looking for raw speed.  (I can't imagine that Blender isn't 
multithreaded, though - like I said, don't know much about it, but I 
would assume it is based on what it's used for and what kind of hardware 
it would generally get used on).

--Pat.



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