3. minimum specs for a sia file server?

minimum specs for a sia file server?

  • E

    I have plenty of spare drives and parts, but I wanted to know what benchmarks I should be using to ensure that what I put together meets the requirements. Additionally, I'd like to know what kind of bandwidth requirements there are, because generally the read and write speed of the hard drives are going to be a larger bottleneck than file transfer speeds. Normally a file hosting company splits the files into several places so that the slower speed of hard drives are offset, and while I know something similar is supposed to happen here, I still don't quite know what speeds I should be going for.

    So things like minimum RAM and RAM speed, minimum processing, and graphics cards. I'd probably even want to run a Linux distro with as little as possible to not waste resources, so if anyone can suggest a good one I'd appreciate it. Oh, and I'd likely use an SSD as the host machine OS drive, and would want to make sure I get one with enough for however big the Blockchain is expected to balloon to, so knowing what size would be sufficient for that would be helpful. and is it OK for each drive to be separate, so that if one failed it could be replaced? Or will I need to put the drives into a RAID configuration?

    Ideally, I'd like to put together a 100 TB file server to test the waters before going big with this, and would plan to install an ISP load manager so that I'd go through more than one ISP to increase speed and up time. I'd set my Bitcoin miners at the highest priority (they have low bandwidth requirements anyway) and the file server as the next highest network priority. I also have fiber optic options in my area, but I'd rather not drop the money on that unless I think I could actually recover the investment.

    0
  • S

    Well, one thing's for certain, you don't need a graphics card for your file servers. If I were in your shoes, I'd take a look at how NAS's are spec'd, and go from there. At least regarding RAM and CPU.

    It's totally fine to have many separate HDD's, but a RAID configuration could be useful simply for redundancy, so that if (or when) a disk fails, you wont have to pay any collateral, since the RAID has the data on a redundant disk. Then you'll of course have to replace the faulty disk, but given the generous allowance of maintenance time for servers, that shouldn't be a problem.

    IMO, using an SSD for the OS disk is overkill, since you won't be booting the machine(s) often, and you won't actually be starting and stopping a lot of programs all the time.

    Regarding Linux distro, I myself, would go with Debian, simply because it is very stable.

    0
  • E

    @shirian Thanks for the feedback. The main reason I'd use an SSD (or even an M.2 drive) as the OS/boot drive is that the last few cases I got all seemed to have a special space for those separately and they are not that expensive all things considered. Although, I guess an old laptop hdd would be sufficient if it won't need to read or write anything there.

    Good to hear I won't need a dedicated graphics card. What about processing power and RAM?

    I've operated NAS devices before, but they all seemed to have their own custom firmware so that if and when they failed it was a real pain to get data off them. Even worse for the RAID devices since it treated the group of them as one partition so that if one failed just replacing that one drive wasn't enough to recover data - no, it would then reformat all the drives causing a permanent loss of data - so I got away from using pre-built NAS devices as I started to think of them as far too risky.

    I don't suppose there would be any good RAID software you can suggest for making sure that one set of drives mirrors the other so that if either fails and is then replaced the other will pick up the slack and repair the missing data?

    Alternatively, I don't suppose Sia has any built in redundancy options of it's own. It would be great if I could set a second server up to be a mirror of the first, where both are treated as backups of the other. That way if I ever need to shut a machine down, or if any drive fails on either, I maintain up time. If that was an option I'd probably put a machine in one of two different locations just in case of power and/or internet disruptions at either location.

    ... although I read threads about people having lost coins and contracts for trying to sign in with more than one machine, so it sounds like Siacoin is ill equipped to handle larger operations. If that's true though, I don't really see how I could make use of a backup system without complete loss of data and contracts.

    0
  • S

    I'd recommend having a go at talking in https://discordapp.com/channels/341359001797132308/341362900117487636 (the hosting channel on discord). There's a lot of competent people there that you can discuss these things with. Regarding redundancy, the Sia protocol does store the renters' data redundantly, with 3 separate hosts, but the collateral is forfeit for a hoster whose data storage fails for some reason. I myself am a noob regarding RAID, so I cannot give specific advice on it.

    My guess is, though, regarding CPU and RAM, that you will get away pretty good with a low-end CPU, e.g. AMD Athlon or Intel i3, and 4 GB DDR3 RAM. Especially if you're running GNU/Linux on it vs Windows.

    0
Log in to reply