Ballistics Report

Ballistics Report

So after all that, this is what we ended up with:

The system assembled

Evercase 5000LX case – 88%
This is my new favorite case. It provides good cooling, great expansion, and doesn’t look like every other case on the market, plus it doesn’t cost too much as compared to the big Aluminum cases. It looks professional and a little intimidating because of its size, but doesn’t try too hard to look gimmicky. No one would make any comments about your case looking dorky with one these on your desk.

Cost: $80

PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 ATX power supply – 85%
A no holds barred power supply for your system. It means never having to second guess this component choice, but you do pay for it. Throughout all our testing, I couldn’t get the +12v rail to budge from +12.04v to +12.10v. If it were about $50 cheaper it would be in every one of my systems. You can’t beat the built in line conditioning and just the overall output.

Cost: $190

Pentium 4 3.0GHz Retail box
Not much to say, a workhorse Intel CPU…A better deal following the recent price drops from Intel.

Cost: $300

Tyan Trinity i875 motherboard – 88%
Clearly intended for the demanding corporate customer, Tyan puts all the design into the practical features. Performance wise, most i875 boards are the same at stock speeds. Extra points for the dual gigabit interfaces and the 6 PCI slots. Price is competitive with other high-end i875 boards, but the extra gigabit NIC was the main factor that led us to choose this board.

Cost: $200

1GB Corsair XMS PRO low latency ram – 90%
When you need reliable and fast RAM, Corsair XMS is the recommended choice. I am still split on the practicality of the PRO series with its status LEDs, although I now see their value in diagnosing hardware problems, or seeing if your software is actually using all your ram. I would like to see a line of 2-2-2 DDR 3200 modules from Corsair though.

Cost: $340

Seagate 120GB Barracuda 7200.7 SATA – 78%
A good hard drive but nothing to brag about, or at least nobody will care if you brag about it. It is a little noisy during operation.

Cost: $110

Maxtor Maxline II Plus 250GB PATA x 4 – 86%
A hard drive with potential, given its SCSI-like MTBF ratings and design for 24/7 applications. Having a hard drive fail is no fun, so if Maxtor has really built a more reliable drive any additional cost is well worth it. It gets extra points for presumed reliability. It is also faster than our SATA 120GB Barracuda.

Cost: $1,000

Pioneer DVR-106 DVD±R/RW – 80%
There isn’t much that can differential the current generation of combo DVD burners. It does what it is supposed to do.

Cost: $150

Matrix Orbital MX2 – 90%
At first I though it was as gimmicky as a aquarium side panel for your case, but the information that the Matrix Orbital can provide can be quite useful, not only for keeping tabs on your system’s health status but on the latest stock quotes or surf reports. Extra points for innovation and wow factor, that is until everyone starts putting them into their computer. Anytime you want to

Cost: $100

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 – 78%
The slowest 3D card in the GeForce FX line, but enough for our purposes. You don’t always need to have the fastest video card.

Cost: $70

Samsung 1.44MB floppy drive – 70%
Probably the most expensive storage device in this system, when computed on a storage capacity per dollar. It will probably get used as often as an ice scraper in San Francisco, but we had that empty drive bay…

Cost: $10

ATA-133 controller – 70%
Hard drive speed is still limited by the hard drive, not so much by the interface. It was a cheap way to add more IDE ports

Cost: $30

Logitech wireless Ergonomic keyboard and MX 700 mouse – 90%
My personal input device of choice.

APC BX1500 UPS – 80%
Hopefully we won’t ever need to use it, but that it will work when the time comes. A UPS is highly recommended, although most UPS can do their job well. One thing that does distinguish the APC is that it looks cool enough to sit on your desk instead of under it. Another advantage of APC is the readily available replacement batteries.

Cost: $200


Netgear GS108 8 port gigabit switch – 80%
Strong offering with limited competition in the budget gigabit switch market. For smaller workgroups, the network traffic isn’t high enough to really differentiate between the more expensive switches.

Cost: $200


Total $3,140

These majority of the above parts were bought at retail from Ewiz, NewEgg, and Dell.

Looking at other network attached servers from either Dell or Apple brings a cost of $4360 for a 2.6ghz/400fsb P4 Dell Powervault for a one terabyte server and $5024 for a 1.33GHz G4 X-serve with 720GB. These “budget” servers are also IDE based, but they do not list what drives they use, and there is a question about the cost of additional storage upgrades, the configurations above were the maximum allowed for the initial purchase. In addition, these prices don’t include a UPS or gigabit switch. We think that for a small workgroup, our system can match the performance of these entry-level servers while also adding workstation functionality.

Those prices on network attached storage devices were one of the primary reasons why we had to build our own server that would meet our current needs and be prepared for our future needs. Our main goal in this system design was to ensure the ability to increase our storage capabilities as necessary and to maximize system reliability. Like we said, with most of the off the shelf servers, there aren’t open drive bays or the drives are in RAID configuration, limiting the ability of the hard drives to be used in other setups. While there are clear advantages to those approaches, our desire to be able to add another 4 drives at anytime and then to have the full drives “retired” to external enclosures influenced our decision-making. The components that we chose for our build were all chosen for a specific reason and because they work well with the other parts of the system. For each category, there are probably better parts that we could have gone with, but as with any project you need to prioritize your needs.

In summary, we talked about the key considerations in building a storage server, reliability, performance, and expandability. With our build, we have attempted to optimize all these values, while still keeping a reasonable budget. Don’t be afraid to build your own “monster” workstation or server. Often you can save much more money by doing this yourself since the profit margins in this segment are much higher than with entry level computers. So go spec out your own system and build it.

Any guesses on how fast it takes us to fill up a terabyte?