Upgraded my server

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Jul 14, 2009
Messages
11,196
Location
NY Capital District
It's been a long 3 days. I just finally finished upgrading my server. So what I had previously, was a simple setup. 3 x2TB Western Digital AV-GP drives, a Hitachi 750GB 2.5", and a Samsung 500GB HDD, in a JBOD. Or simply, a spanned volume, using windows. This had pros, and cons. The pros were, it was dead simple to set up. The downside, is that if a single drive fell out, I lose EVERYTHING, which is currently sitting at about 5TB or so. Yeah.

This server runs just Windows 7, and I use mapped network drives, I also run my plex server, a mumble server, and occasionally a minecraft server, on it. It also runs my IRC bot. I knew I couldn't leave those drives like that, because it was only a matter of time until one died, and I lose everything. I originally was going to do RAID 5, adding two more 2TB drives. My friend convinced me otherwise, for several reasons. According to him, my situation which is mostly a write once read occasionally situation, would best be served with a snapshot based software RAID for pooling and parity. I bit the bullet, and just finished. It involved a lot of transferring data around (for reference, it takes about 8-10 hours to fully write to a 3TB drive). Since I was taking the server down, and doing work, I went ahead and replaced the 5 year old 80PLUS Antec power supply with a brand new Seasonic SSR-360GP, which is a 80PLUS Gold certified unit, which should basically last forever because it actually uses good capacitors (Hitachi, Nippon Chemi-con, and Rubycon, as opposed to the mediocre at best Su'scon caps used in the Antec unit I had).

I also upgraded the Celeron G1610 (Ivy) with a Core i3-2100. Yes, yes I know I went from Ivy to Sandy bridge, but the i3 was given to me for free by a friend who didn't need it, and it's a good bit faster overall, especially since it has hyperthreading, and the Celeron didn't.

original specs
Intel Celeron G1610 (Dual Core, 2.6Ghz Ivy Bridge)
8GB Crucial DDR3-1333
1x ADATA 64GB SSD (boot, application)
1x Hitachi Deskstar 320GB (9 years old, for IRC logs and server data for minecraft/mumble/etc)
1x Samsung Eco Green 500GB HDD
1x Hitachi HGST 5K750 2.5"/750GB HDD
2x WD AV-GP 2TB HDD (EURS)
1x WD Green 2 (EARX)
Antec Neo Eco 400C PSU



The two hitachi drives, and the Samsung were removed, and I added two Toshiba 3TB/7200RPM drives. Toshiba 3.5" are essentially Hitachis, since they purchased Hitachis 3.5" manufacturing when HGST was purchased by Western Digital. I set up flexraid using drive pooling, with four DRUs (2+2+2+3), so using 4 data drives, I used the 5th, the other new Toshiba 3TB for the parity drive. This gives me about 8.2TB of usable space, with backup, and I have it scheduled to update the snapshot every night at 4AM, and validate every monday, weds, and friday. It's also set up to send me a text message if any update or validation fail, as well as if any potentially problematic SMART data changes (bad sectors, for example)

Flexraid also handles the network shares, and it works very well. I'm quite impressed with how smoothly things went together. I was still able to map the network drive on the other computers. I'm very happy. This is in addition to the new Power supply as well.

Also, since I recently moved into my grandfathers house, I have been forced to set up a bit of a new network inside the house. The ISP is now Time Warner 50/5, with an RT-N66R as the router, which also handles DDNS and VPN duty through built-in functions. I ran cat5e from the modem upstairs down to the "ham shack" which is where my server currently sits. I have a Netgear PROSAFE 5port gigabit switch, which goes to the server, and two others run through the basement, one goes upstairs where one TV and a roku is, and one goes to another D-Link 5 port gigabit switch, which splits to my main box and my PS3. The other roku is connected via 5Ghz N, and I have my laptop, phone and tablet, as well as my grandfathers phone and tablet, set to connect to the 5Ghz network first. It all works very well now, I'm quite pleased with how it all went, though it was quite a bit of work to get it all set up and working.


Here are some pics and screenshots

_MG_9789_zps485d856b.jpg


_MG_9791_zps5f4f849c.jpg


_MG_9794_zps951e03c0.jpg


_MG_9797_zps614c0486.jpg


_MG_9798_zps9177a350.jpg



_MG_9803_zpsd07490d1.jpg


flex_zps490eb211.jpg


Untitled_zps68f5ef7c.jpg


Capture_zps75fc0b84.png
 
YURISEKS? dude lmao
(S: drive too, I see what you did there)

Nice setup though, pretty hardcore with the RAID array and and all that storage. What kind of array are you on now, still JBOD?
 
Originally Posted By: jrustles
YURISEKS? dude lmao
(S: drive too, I see what you did there)

Nice setup though, pretty hardcore with the RAID array and and all that storage. What kind of array are you on now, still JBOD?


Sort of. Flexraid handles drive pooling as well as parity, so it's still "one volume", but I won't lose everything if one drive dies.
 
Nice setup!!

BTW, is that a Kenwood TS-530S I see under the phone? I have a TS-520S and a TS-830S in my collection.

73,
chemman
 
Nice server machine.

I'm looking into getting one of those small Intel NUC boxes with i5 CPU, primarily for the small form factor and low power consumption. I'll just use a USB3 external drive for mass storage. It won't be RAID or anything, but none of the data on it is going to be very critical.

My current server has an old Intel Pentium E5300 CPU and sometimes it struggles to transcode stuff in Plex fast enough.
 
Originally Posted By: chemman
Nice setup!!

BTW, is that a Kenwood TS-530S I see under the phone? I have a TS-520S and a TS-830S in my collection.

73,
chemman
Originally Posted By: aquariuscsm
Hey Nick,is that a shortwave radio underneath the Duracell box?


It's very possible. My grandfather is an old Ham operator, and still has most of his equipment. I plan on getting my ham license at some point, but I'll have to put up a new antenna, as he did take those down, unfortunately.
 
Interesting setup.
What Toshiba drives are those? Ive been purchasing Toshiba drives as well because I dislike WD and I dispise Seagate and those are the only other two choices essentially. I currently have a pair of the MG03ACA 3TB drives in RAID 1 on my Adaptec 6805 with plans to buy more of the same series.
 
Everything's working so well now. I had to remove the array, because I needed to fix some drive permissions. I had built the array, tried to go into a couple folders, and it told me they were inaccessible. I thought maybe the files were corrupted, so I deleted the array and tried recovering them from my external drive I had used to transfer the files back to the server. But then I found them normally. Thought it was just a fluke, rebuilt the array. Still couldn't access them. Fortunately I was able to post over on the flexraid forums, and they suggested I check permissions for the other drives. Sure enough, that was the problem. Rebuilt, and it's now working as intended. daily scheduled updates, and 3 days a week a full validation.
 
As a continuation of this, I upgraded from Windows 7 Home to Windows Server 2012 R2, and set up my own domain. All computers in the house had windows reinstalled with 7 Pro or 8.1Pro to join the domain. This includes a network share that auto-mounts when you log on via group policy, and RDP sessions. This coupled with setting up a VPN through my router (with a new domain name and email hosting) allows me to access my stuff from anywhere.
 
Originally Posted By: Nick R
As a continuation of this, I upgraded from Windows 7 Home to Windows Server 2012 R2, and set up my own domain. All computers in the house had windows reinstalled with 7 Pro or 8.1Pro to join the domain. This includes a network share that auto-mounts when you log on via group policy, and RDP sessions. This coupled with setting up a VPN through my router (with a new domain name and email hosting) allows me to access my stuff from anywhere.

Ive been think about doing this. I have a Dell Poweredge server sitting here doing nothing that would be well suited to that role, but the cost of a Windows Server license is what is stopping me.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top