Question about a specific server's capabilities

[Maxamoto]

Hello all, I have a question about the Dell PowerEdge 840 tower server, specifically, what size SATA drive will they recognize. The product's technical specifications state a maximum total of 4TB across 4 1TB drives, but this just doesn't seem right, given SATAs ability to generally recognize Very Large Drives. So I guess my question would be, would this server be a waste of money if I intend to stuff 4 3TB drives into it? I have ways around the OS drive, like installing a SSD, adding a SATA -> PATA converter and sticking the thing in an adapter tray as the master drive on the IDE cable. If my gamble is right, this setup would be a stellar NAS server for a very affordable price, considering a PowerEdge 840 can be had for under $200 and will scale to 8GB of RAM. Thoughts, anyone?

 

[Letni]

Generally your limit is going to be with PC-bios. PC-bios generally limits drives to 2 TB in size (corresponding to the MBR partition limit of a single drive). In order to exceed these limits with an onboard controller, you generally will need an EFI or uEFI bios... This is the same with MBR disks as they are limited to 2 TB and in order to exceed that, they need formatted GTP.

 

[Maxamoto]

Generally your limit is going to be with PC-bios. PC-bios generally limits drives to 2 TB in size (corresponding to the MBR partition limit of a single drive). In order to exceed these limits with an onboard controller, you generally will need an EFI or uEFI bios... This is the same with MBR disks as they are limited to 2 TB and in order to exceed that, they need formatted GTP.

I've been out of the PC building scene since the Xbox made gaming so easy... With that said, I think I understand you. GTP is in, ZFS is doable, 3TB is in for data drives as long as there is no MBR. I'm assuming the OS drive doesn't matter in this case because it will be pretty small, like 64GB, in other words, the cheapest one I can afford. Does anyone see a problem with this hardware configuration before I buy this stuff?

 

[jgreco]

You might want to consider this:

That model, depending on spec, is typically going to consume between 225 watts and 350 watts. If you are running the thing 24/7, at an electric cost of $0.13/kWh, that's around 2500kWh or $325 in electricity for the first year of operation. That assumes only 225 watts; the figure increases to a staggering $400/year if you're burning closer to 350 watts.

Buying a cheap old-tech crudbox for use as a server is always tempting, but may not actually work out to be a great idea when you look at the TCO economics. And you have to worry about stuff like whether the BIOS will freak at large drives, etc?

If you intend for this thing to be lit up for years, you might want to consider making a purpose-built rig. Even the modern Xeon systems idle at low power. We've been using E3-1230 based boxes here with carefully selected components, and the base system idles around 45 watts idle, maybe 90 watts running full tilt. Now if you're going to add drives to that, you do need to add maybe 10 watts per drive, so a fileserver might be eating 85 watts 24/7, but that's substantially less than 225-plus-40-for-drives. And a Xeon box is generally going to be overkill for FreeNAS. Lots of these guys around here are doing things like the E35M1 based platforms, or for a completely prebuilt box, HP's awesome little Proliant Microserver N40L.

p.s. You should be booting from flash, not from an OS drive. If you use an actual drive, you're using a valuable SATA slot and extra watts.

My suggestion? Spend a little extra now. The N40L is frequently on sale for less than $300, is fairly light on power consumption (at least compared to the beast you're looking at), is BRAND SPANKING NEW, and in six months when you've recouped your additional cash outlay, you can start buying yourself a case of beer every month with what you're saving in electricity.

 

[Maxamoto]

An extra case of beer a month is always a good thing :) As far as electricity consumption goes, it would be irresponsible of me to mention that I am living on an Army base, and don't pay for electricity. Some would not care about the consumption but I try to be a good global neighbor. The N40L is definitely is worth looking into for that reason alone although I am not a big fan of HP, having worked there before I joined the Army. I always thought it was suspicious that they used IBM computers in their datacenter, and not...HP. For what it's worth, I spoke with our in-house Dell tech, and he says pretty much the same thing as Letni, that as long as there is no MBR on the drive things should be a go for 3TB drives in the PowerEdge 840. Any BIOS limitation could easily be bypassed by adding a PCI SATA controller card. I'm only putting that out there so anyone else who had the same questions could consider it answered. Thanks for the info!

 

[paleoN]

An extra case of beer a month is always a good thing :) As far as electricity consumption goes, it would be irresponsible of me to mention that I am living on an Army base, and don't pay for electricity. Some would not care about the consumption but I try to be a good global neighbor.

Global neighbor? How about thinking of the American taxpayer. :) Though it's not like the Army wouldn't find a way to spend those savings.

Have you calculated your space requirements yet? Do you know what your zpool configuration will be? If your new to ZFS check out this [thread=7775]thread[/thread].

 

[Maxamoto]

Global neighbor? How about thinking of the American taxpayer. :)

Thought I did that when I enlisted :) But you are right, the Army would just take the savings and burn them elsewhere.

I am new to ZFS, so the link and information is much appreciated. My long-term goal here is to get the Army to take some of this OSS seriously. If you knew how much the taxpayers paid for Microsoft / Cisco licensing, you would probably fall over dead. I've built pfSense firewalls for less than $300 that put any Cisco device (minus the big iron) to shame. Considering how many Windows machines are in the government, it's no wonder China more than likely knows more about our own networks than we do...