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
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