Hello all.
 
I am looking to build a very high effciency File Server for my business.  The intent for this server is to run "Remote Backup 2007" v9.4 Server.  It doesn't have to be very powerful processor wise since there's not much to process.  It is just for remote data backup for my clients.  So I am looking for energy efficent components while maintaining high reliability.
 
Here's what I've picked out so far and keep in mind I'm trying to be frugal at the same time:
 
4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 3.5IN 500GB SATA2 or Western Digital's Cavier GP 500GB SATA2 (Your input please)
1x Coolermaster Cm 690 Mid Tower Black Atx Case  
1x AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350 Dual Core Processor  
1x ASUS M2N-E ATX AM2 Nforce 570 (Because it has RAID 5 built in and I've used it for other builds and has been great)
1x Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-5400C4 2GB  
1x Seasonic S12II 430W ATX V2.2 EPS12V 20/24PIN Active PFC 80PLUS Power Supply
1x ASUS Radeon HD2400 Pro Passive Silent  
1x Generic 1.44MB Black 3.5IN Floppy Drive
1x ASUS Quietdrive DVD-E616A3 Black 16X DVD-ROM  
1x OPTI-UPS TS1700B 1700VA 900W Simulated Sine Wave Black UPS
1x Microsoft Windows Vista Business Edition 64BIT DVD OEM
 
Price wise I'm looking at roughly $1275 Canadian (w/taxes and shipping).
 
I've been looking for a motherboard that has both integrated video and RAID5 but nothing for the AMD processor.  The reason I picked the AMD processor is that from what I've read, it has a better idle consumption than other dual cores.  The processor isn't going to be pushed load wise really at all, mostly idling.  
 
So any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I am hoping to have the parts ordered within the next week or two.
 
Thank you.

Integrated Video and 4 SATA II Raid 5 capable ports.
 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131214

Yeah that doesn't look like a bad motherboard Masteryoda34.  It costs less too.  Thanks for the suggestion.

What the best hard drives to use would be and perhaps what the best overall power supply would be.  
 
I trust Seagate hard drives, especially since they have 5 year warranty.  However, the western digital's have noticably better power consumption.
 
With the power supply, I have been using the Antec NeoHE power supplies for the past year and they have been very good.  With some research I have found that the Seasonic and it's 80 Plus certification may provide the best overall efficiency.  Both companies have 3 year warranties on their units.
 
Any recommendations on these or any of the other parts I have listed?

Seasonic S12II 430 all they way. It is virtually silent, up to 88% energy efficient and higher quality than Antec PSUs.
 
While integrated RAID 5 is inexpensive, it is also less reliable than an actual RAID 5 controller card. Plus it will rely on the CPU to calculate how the data should be split amongst the drives.
 
Should you decide to upgrade to a real RAID 5 controller card in the future, then you need to be aware that it will most likely be necessary to break the current RAID 5, then rebuild it. That's 'cause the initialization protocols will be different from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Thanks for the feedback, especially on the power supply.  I entirely agree with you jaguarskx that a RAID 5 card would be better.  I just have yet to find one that is what I could say reasonably priced and still have good performance.  Unless someone knows of one.

 
We'll see what we can do for you.
 

 
Lots of storage and enough of them to make a good array. Sounds fine to me.  
 

 
Also sounds fine. You *may* eventually want a case with bigger/more HDD racks, but this case is fine for four HDDs.
 

 
It's a reasonable choice for such a system. It's not all that expensive and has a good, low idle voltage. This is important as the system will be idling for 99% of its time. You could also use an Intel Celeron 500 series CPU as these are probably the most energy-efficient CPUs that will fit into desktop motherboards. They are low-clocked, single-core Core 2s with 512 MB L2 cache. But they are saddled with Intel's less-efficient and more-expensive motherboards so the cost and energy draw of a BE-2350 + appropriate mobo is about the same as a Celeron 500 + appropriate motherboard.
 

 
Onboard RAID 5 is garbage unless performance of the disk array is REALLY not an issue. I run a 3-disk RAID 5 with 3 250 GB disks and my onboard SATA ports delivered a meager 60 MB/sec read speed (roughly that of one HDD) and a piss-poor 20 MB/sec write speed. I put in a $140 HighPoint RR2310 PCI Express 4-port SATA card to handle the RAID and performance jumped to 120-130 MB/sec reads and 60-70 MB/sec writes, which is what I'd expect from the disks in a RAID 5. Others running motherboard-based RAID have had very similar experiences on all different kinds of motherboard chipsets, with the possible exception of two-drive RAID 1 and RAID 0.
 

 
Dual-core AMD CPUs like DDR2-800 aka PC2-6400 rather than the DDR2-667 you picked. You want to run Vista 64-bit, which itself consumes nearly 2 GB of RAM. I'd suggest two 2 GB sticks of DDR2-800 to give yourself 4 GB of RAM. I've put just that into an AM2 machine before and I used G.Skill's F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ kit. The only thing is that it was $500 then and is $100 now...
 

 
Good choice.
 
 

 
Forget this. You should get a motherboard with integrated graphics as the graphical power of a discrete GPU is not needed in a server and the card just sits there and sucks power. In fact, many servers run headless with no monitor physically attached, so the extra money spent on the GPU is wasted.
 

 
You probably don't need this. You're running Vista as the OS and it does not need a floppy to install RAID drivers any more. Most motherboards also don't need a floppy to install a BIOS update anymore either.
 

 
Sounds appropriate. You can also just yank another machine's drive for the one time you'll need it to install the OS.
 

 
I don't know much about UPSes other than you probably should have one.
 

 
That will work. Linux or BSD/Solaris UNIX also would be an excellent choice as well. Linux and UNIX are the most popular server OSes out there. I just don't know if you application will run on something other than Windows. If it will, I strongly suggest using Linux or UNIX as they are much more server-oriented than Windows Vista Business and a grand cheaper than Windows Server.
 

 
Forget onboard RAID 5. Just get a motherboard with integrated graphics and a PCIe x16 slot. I suggest a nice AMD 690G-based unit such as the well-reviewed ASUS M2A-VM. Use the integrated graphics to connect to a monitor and use the PCIe x16 slot to put a RAID controller card into. I am a fan of HighPoint's RocketRAID line of controllers. They are inexpensive as they are "dumb" controllers that basically just handle the I/O traffic and let the CPU handle the RAID 5 XOR computations. A CPU is a whole heck of a lot more powerful than a little onboard IOP chip like the much more expensive "hardware" controllers have, so the cards perform quite well. You have four drives right now, so I'd suggest an 8-port unit such as the 2320 as you may very well want to grow the RAID 5 to five or more disks at a later date.

Thanks a lot for your post MU_Engineer.  I really appreciate how you've broken everything down.
 
I've made a few changes to my list of items:
1x - Highpoint Rocketraid 2302 4 Channel 2INT 2EXT SATA2 RAID Controller Card PCI-E1X 0/1/5/10/JBOD  
1x - OCZ PC2-6400 OCZ2M8004GK 4GB 2X2GB DDR2-800 CL5-5-5-15 200PIN SODIMM Dual Channel Memory Kit  
1x - ASUS M2N-VM DVI mATX AM2 GE7050-NF630A PCI-E16 PCI-E1 2PCI SATA2 Video Sound GBLAN Motherboard  
 
With these changes, I'm spending roughly a $150 more, but that's not a big difference.  With your suggestion to use Linux or Unix, I have to use Windows since the Remote Backup Server software only works with windows.  So I thought I'd use the more secure 64-bit edition and I'd use Vista since it will be more future proof (in theory).
 
I will still keep a floppy drive for legacy sakes.  Don't want to be in a "oh crap, no floppy" situation.  Plus I can get one for only $6.
 
And I think for now I will have to go with a 4-port SATA RAID controller.  I know 8-port will give more upgradability but if I have to get more drives in the future, I'll probably have to get a new case too.  Right now, this will do the job just fine.
 
So my last question is, what hard drives should I go with?  I know Seagate are quite good for reliability.  However, Western Digital has got the best power consumption at this time and they've still have a decent 3 year warranty.
 
Your thoughts?
 
 

Seasonic S12II 430

 
Antec Earthwatts 430

 
Since they ARE both made by seasonic and use the same (Well nearly)parts with the exception to the fan(Antec has a 80mm instead of a 120mm, This works better in some cases). I would not say that the Antec is worse then the seasonic. I would say they are BOTH seasonic.
 
Your server looks good....

Thanks.  I've been reading reviews on the seasonic and I haven't come across a bad one yet.  
 
My last dilema is what hard drives to go with...

Hard drives seem to fail equally(its a mechanical device and can break), So What have you had the most luck with? They both offer a 5 year warranty now anyway.....and raid 5 will keep your data safe....

EDIT______________________

I take it back, only some WDC's have a 5 year......i have had only a few drives die, one was a WDC but it had a hard life(went through 3 computers)......Maxtors on the other hand do seem to fail more often.....

Placing the hard drives in the bays with all 4 screws (to maximise heat transfer from the drives to the case metal) and ensuring sufficient air flows over them (4 of these suckers generate a huge amount of heat which is not easy to remove) should be considered.
 
Ensure the case ( the pics for the Coolermaster case don't show the inside of it) has uber airflow to keep the drives cool.
 
Consider spacing them with air gaps between them if the inside bays at the bottom will accomodate this - you might not have room tho.
 
Also ensure you fit a 120 fan in the front at the bottom to push air over them.
 
I used to cut a piece of plastic and fit it inside to shift the airflow up and into the drive array to cool it a bit more.
 
Plus tidy up all of the cables inside and tuck them out of the way to improve airflow.
 
Hopefully this will see your drives lasting a bit longer as they are not cooking ... neglected in the corner.
 
Hope this helps.

 
This card has two internal and two external SATA ports. Unless you are planning on having two internal drives and then two in external enclosures, I'd suggest a card like the 2300 or 2310 with all four SATA ports on the inside.
 

 
Vista also is in my experience more stable than XP. Perhaps it is because the Vista driver qualification process chucks some of the cruddy 3rd-party drivers that were shipped for Windows XP. Vista is more future-proof as it will be getting updates for longer than XP will. XP Professional's updates are set to stop in November 2011 IIRC.
 
I will still keep a floppy drive for legacy sakes.  Don't want to be in a "oh crap, no floppy" situation.  Plus I can get one for only $6.
 

 
Either company makes good drives. I have WDs in my desktop's 3-disk RAID as they were on sale that day. I've also used Seagates and Hitachis and have had good experiences with them as well. The only HDDs that I've had die on me and the company is still making hard drives today is Toshiba, and they were all laptop drives in Pentium 4 laptops. The P4s probably would have cooked and killed about any brand of HDD, so I don't hold it against Toshiba for that.

[quotemsg=1779036,13,61517]This card has two internal and two external SATA ports. Unless you are planning on having two internal drives and then two in external enclosures, I'd suggest a card like the 2300 or 2310 with all four SATA ports on the inside.
 
You are absolutely right.  I should have read a bit closer.  Thanks for the heads up.  The 2310 looks like the best overall card as far as features and performance (and price).
 
I think for now I am going to have to go with the Seagate 500Gb 7200.11 hard drives.  The cheapest I can find the Western Digital Caviar Gp 500Gb is rough $150 each whereas I can get the Seagate for $118 (Canadian).  That adds up when times 4.  I would love to put maybe two or three 1Tb Caviar GP hard drives in for now but that is not finacially reasonable at this time.  Heck, in 6 months the 1Tb drives will probably be the same prices as the 500Gb are now.
 
I really appreciate the suggestions and comments so far.  Any other comments or if I've missed something, feel free to let me know.
 
Thanks.

If this is for client data I dont know what kinda of warrenty your offering them but you should be getting some type of mirror setup with a dedicated card.  I wouldnt use off the shelf desktop parts but rather something like a intel server board or a tyan server board for a amd setup its a little bit more expensive but they have higher reliabilty I know because I work with this stuff all day long.  

This is a server for myself to hold client backup data that is encrypted.  I'm simply offering an offsite automatic backup solution for my clients.  The software I'm using is the "Remote Backup Server 2007 9.4" and it works very good.  Excellent compression and encrypts all data on my end.
 
But this is why I'm looking for an energy effcient server as it will be basically always online (except for weekends) for either backup or restore operations.

 
The Highpoint 2310 is a excellent and cheap RAID5 solution. I'm running one in my main machine with 3 - 320GB WD drives and a 4th - 320GB drive as a hot spare.  
 
One thing worth mentioning since the 2310 is not true hardware RAID, be sure to load and initialize the array using the web-based utility. Also, purchase a 4th drive and configure it to the array as the hot spare. This might seem obvious but I had to learn the hard way.
 
Whether you run Windoze or Linux, Highpoint has good drivers and support. I can readily recommend the Highpoint 2310!
 
Good luck!

 
So what you are saying is that I should not partition my array into two drives (C for OS and D for data) but instead have a separate drive for OS?  Or are you saying that the 2310 will automatically use the 4 drive as a spare (replacement) if one drive fails?
 
Thanks.