Most people who build custom home servers will be able to articulate the cost per GB (cost/GB) of their drives. Yet this is a somewhat outdated metric. The major cost consideration that a lot of people overlook is port costs. Simply put, this is the cost to connect a hard drive to the system. For normal computer users this...
Since there are some requests here are the servers side by-side. The New WHS is on burn-in duty while the old WHS has had 9.5TB removed thus far. I moved the cases to somewhere that is more comfortable for me to work from in anticipation of the "final" build this week. Also placing them next to each other made...
Just as an update. I installed the second Adaptec 31605 today, filling all 16 ports with 8x WD Greens, 6x Hitachi 2TB, and 2x Hitachi 1TB drives. There is an additional 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 being used as an OS drive. That's 27.5TiB raw capacity.
Here's a view of all the drives currently in The Big WHS. Note, I may have...
Continuing to test the new WHS box, I was treated to yet another new Western Digital Green failure this week. Ridiculous!
Of the 15 Seagate 7200.11's that I purchased November 2008 to February 2009, two also failed. One I ascribed to Newegg's poor packaging at the time. The second was a clear firmware failure.
The remaining six 1.5TB WD Greens are...
At around 1:30AM I woke up to what I believed was the fire alarm. After about 30 seconds outside in the cold, I realized that it was not a fire alarm, but rather an Adaptec controller alarm. The first hard drive has failed.
In my haste to assemble the new hardware for burn-in last evening I did not install the Adaptec...
After work today I got the server up and running doing a build/ verify Raid 6 array on the 8x new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives. Since the current WHS is still in use, I used some spare hardware in the place of the legacy hardware including a 850w Coolermaster PSU, EVGA 8800 GTS 512MB, and an Adaptec 5805.
Something...
First off, this is not a typical WHS build, and it was not meant to be. For the majority of users, a HP MediaSmart (by far the WHS to get if you do not DIY the build) is the way to go. For my purposes, I have seen a consistent, but increasing 500-600GB/mo of extra disk usage. Just for the...
About 10 months ago I decided to enter the world of the Windows Home Server. My storage arrays had outstripped my Cosmos S's capacity, and running multiple controllers for all of the SAS drives as well as SATA storage became too much. My decision to build a WHS v. buy one was made due to sub-$100 Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 drives...
Introduction
For Small Business Servers and home servers, one thing becomes apparent, the need to use raid with large data sets. Raid 1 and software mirroring technologies like Windows Drive Extender are too cost ineffective for large storage arrays. For example, if one has 1 TB of storage need and uses one of these mirroring redundancy option, they need 1TB...
The current WHS is <2.5TB from being full, which means it will be full in 3-4 months. I just ordered more drives, a Norco RPC-4020 (20 drive bays), and an Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard for the next build. Stay tuned!