nas - Can I use fiber channel drives with normal server for home labs

08
2014-07
  • Moorage

    I am planning to buy this

    But I am not sure if I can attach it to my IBM server x3650 M2 to use as storage / backup of VMS. I don't know much about these fiber drives.

    Can anyone please help me on this?

    • Answers
  • Ecnerwal

    You will need at minimum a Fiber channel card for your server, and SFPs for the thing you are buying which has empty SFP slots, and some fiber (or copper if you get copper SFPs, but fiber can often be cheaper and also has much more flexible length options.) You will probably need SFPs for the card you put in the server as well, unless it happens to come with them.

    Used, these parts can be quite reasonable if 4Gb/sec fiber channel will do what you want. Lots of surplus available at that speed class. Oddly, you can often find single-mode FiberChannel SFPs cheaper than multimode, but that's just a matter of what you can find shopping at any given point in time, and making sure that the SFPs and fiber you get are all the same so that they will work together. The 10km single-mode SFPs work fine at 5 meters as well, so no need to assume that short-haul means you can't use single-mode - but don't try that with 80km units (though they won't be the cheap ones anyway.)


    • Related Question

    PCI 1000Mbps NIC for home server?
  • Lifeson

    I'm looking to buy a barebone box to use as a headless home server. I plan on loading Ubuntu Server 9.10 on it, and using it for backup, running a person webserver, and streaming music from it using Jinzora. I've built it as a VM, and am trying to pick out optimal hardware, and I'm pretty hardware-illiterate.

    I understand that I'll need to buy a 2GB stick of DDR2 RAM, and a 3.5" SATA hard drive of whatever size I feel like paying for. My question is whether I should hunt around for a 1000Mbps NIC for optimal streaming. The questions I've read around here indicate that server performance from an Atom server like this are mostly going to be determined by the hard drive disc speed and the network connection, but I haven't built a server like this before. Is the built-in 10/100 Mbps NIC on the mobo sufficient, or should I attempt to find a 1000 Mbps NIC that I can stick in the PCI slot? The 1000 Mbps cards I see on Newegg are all PCI-e, so I'm not really sure what I should do.

    Thanks for the help!


    • Related Answers
  • John T

    Depending on the max throughput you'd need at once, gigabit may not be needed yet, but it's always good to have it for the future and they aren't too expensive. Make sure all other hardware is gigabit capable as well before making the upgrade. There are a couple on newegg they're just tricky to find.

  • Troggy

    I would try and buy a motherboard that has a built on 1000 Mbps card first, then I would look at 3rd party cards.

    Also, are you running a gigabit network (switch/router) that this would be able to connect at full speed to? If you have a gigabit card, but no network that supports it, you will not be able to take full advantage of the speed. I recommend upgrading if you plan on doing lots of data transfers. When I upgraded, it was a very nice increase in network speeds and transfers.

  • Broam

    I don't think PCI gigabit cards are anything more than a way to take your money. The PCI bus is your bottleneck and gigabit cards are going to be not much more than an expensive network card with a huge buffer.

    You'll need a motherboard with PCI-E or PCI-X instead.