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Unread 05-31-2007, 09:05 AM   #6
Brians256
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Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Klamath Falls, OR
Posts: 1,439
Default Re: picked up a free computer

I got a computer like that too. It was a dual P3 server with SCSI RAID, dual power supplies for redundancies, hot-swap hard drive cases, etc... You could do what I did.

It was loud as a vacuum cleaner. So, I threw the innards out and put in modern stuff. I have an ASRock (cheap) 939 mobo with 1GB of RAM, an S3 PCI (yes, PCI) VGA card, and then I started to get excited and spend money. I put a 3Ware 9590SE-8ML SATA RAID card in there (4-lane PCI-Express), added 4 750GB SATA drives to it (I later added two more), 3 500GB PATA drives, and then got it booting from a disposable 120GB drive. Oh, and I used an old 400W sparkle PSU instead of the redundant PSUs that were in there, because they were only 300W. Running Windows Server 2003, it's not bad as a place to hold all my DVDs (bought and ripped to avoid fingerprints, scratches and peanut butter globs from teh kids). 5TB FTW!

I'd rather run FreeBSD or Linux, but never got around to it, and, well ... it works now. Changing it just requires me to, erm , do stuff instead of watching those movies or playing with the kids.

NOTES

1) OCE (Online Capacity Expansion) simply rocks. Slow as molasses, but incredibly useful. I've done it twice to go from about 2TB to 3.5TB on my RAID controller.

2) Auto-carving is also wonderful. Having the RAID controller present a huge 3.5TB RAID-5 array as 2TB chunks was nice. In retrospect, I'm half inclined to goto GPT partitions to have the whole array as a single drive. But, that'd make it hard to migrate to FreeBSD/Linux sometime later. The jury is still out.

3) RAID-5 makes me feel better.

4) Cooling 11 drives (including DVD) is requires quite a bit of airflow, and so the server is definitely not quiet.

5) A 400W power supply is actually inadequate to boot this server! For a cold boot, I have to depower my half of my RAID array drives, let the others spin up, and then let the other half spin up. Otherwise, I trip the overcurrent protection in my power supply. At least I know it now works.

6) Having that many drives is actually a pain to cable for power. I had to use splitters, and that makes me uncomfortable.

7) Having that many drives is normally hard to cable for I/O but SATA makes it easier. I also needed 1m cables, not your normal 0.5m cables, since the drives are in the other half of the server case. The breakout cables used by 3ware are particularly nice in that they click into the 3ware card with a single connector serving 4 SATA drives. A breakout cable thus goes from one 3ware connector to 4 SATA drives.

8) The iStar drive enclosures are good. I have two: one from the local Fry's and another from newegg to save me a 1h drive (30 min each way) and the horrible temptation to buy more stuff once I walk into the Fry's door. iStar enclosures at NewEgg These enclosures hold 4 SATA drives in the place of 3 drive bays and allow hot swapping. I only use the hot-swapping ability (now) to turn power off on half of my drives during the boot process. Yes, I need a bigger power supply.
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