jmannik

Actually people who "Know a fair deal about what it is that they do" tend to be the most difficult users to deal with, they are the ones who tend to fiddle with things most often and then cause issues for us when we are there to try and fix it. Granted not all people who know what they are doing are like this but most are.

Got a mini ITX system for my main system.
Bought a BitFenix Prodigy case for it.
Not a bad system or case but I just didnt like it.
Just replaced the case with a Silverstone TJ08-E case and im about to replace the motherboard cpu and video card for a matx motherboard and i7 processor.
 
In the past:
- Gave away or sold all of my previous cases (Antec P182, Antec Super Lanboy, Silverstone TJ06)
- Bricked a motherboard with a bad bios flash (P166mmx and Athlon XP boards)
- Threw out or lost all my old consoles.

Im finally back home now so I took a few pics of my server to add to the album above.

Small updates on the project.
First of all three POE switches (with 4POE ports on each switch) are being replaced with a single 10/100 24-Port POE switch. There are plans to add more cameras at current location, and even more at the new location. I figured it is a good idea to invest in 24 port switch right away. Server cabinet was assembled, 48 port patch panel arrived, and some networking equipment was ordered. Now here is something a bit ridiculous. Occasionally there is a problem with some devices on the network, some devices (one or two) will simply lose all network connectivity until restart. After restart, another device(s) will do the same. I couldn't figure out why, but then realized that DHCP server on the router is leasing only 50 IP addresses. Surely, all 50 IP addresses are being leased, so I am waiting for the end of the workday to make that change to avoid router restarts during work-time.
 
Ninja-edit (not really):
After increasing the amount of DHCP leases (from 50 to 100), the issues has seem gone away. I decided to take it a step further and setup a guest wifi network that is on separate subnet with no access to other subnets (AP Isolation and iptables rules). Of-course internet access is allowed. We'll see how this playsout

At my job, in our production servers, our clustered SQL setup is 2 virtualized machines each with 128GB of RAM with fiber channel storage on a  NetApp SAN. 

That is yet another category of frustration lol, the long standing debate of "how much access should we give the contractor?" which in the case of managers tends to fall on the "not enough to do the job they are contracted to do" side until its fixed

Yeah I could definitely see that. My experiences are predominately based on providing instructions on things I need because I don't have permissions (due to being a contractor).

It's day to day life for IT, the trick is to train them to not be dicks when they don't have unreasonable demands met

It's day to day life for IT, the trick is to train them to not be dicks when they don't have unreasonable demands met

It's day to day life for IT, the trick is to train them to not be dicks when they don't have unreasonable demands met

You can download the firmware for just about any HP device from their website. If you can find the firmware you need, I'll happily share the upgrade .iso if you need it

Hardware
CASE: Silverstone DS380
PSU: Silverstone ST45SF-G
MB: Supermicro A1SRi-2758F
CPU: Intel Atom C2758
HS: Stock Supermicro heatsink
RAM: 16GB DDR3 SODIMM 1333
RAID CARD 1: HP Smart Array P410 512MB With BBU
SSD: Kingmax SMP35 240GB
HDD 1: 5x 2TB Western Digital Green


Software and Configuration:
The server is running ESXi 5.5 and currently hosts 3 virtual machines with more to be added once the RAM is upgraded.
Usage:
I use the server for storage of audio recordings from gigs (24 individual channels and a stereo channel, all in raw WAV audio) and also to store TV Shows and Movies for watching on the media center pcs, the storage server is running on Windows Server 2012 R2. Two other virtual machines run linux, One runs Turnkey MineOS, the other Runs Ubuntu server to run the Mumble server.
Backup:
The server is backed up via an LTO 2 Tape drive on a workstation set up for backup running VEEAM
Additional info:
This server was built specifically for low power usage while still being powerful enough

Photo's:
To be Added once I return home and can take pictures (currently away for work).

One of my main gaming pcs has the following specs:
486 dx4/100
16mb ram
1.2gb hard drive
2mb s3 virge
Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11
You are not living in the past compared to me

Will a RAID 5 array, run with a relatively inexpensive card like the one I've suggested be very taxing on the CPU? It depends on how the RAID controller works, some of the cheaper ones still use the CPU to do the parity calculations, having said that the raid card you are looking at appears to not be one of those RAID cards (most usual culprit of the cpu parity calculations are the Highpoint RocketRAID cards) What sort of read/write performance can I expect? As wpirobotbuilder says its difficult to say, with a decent raid card you can expect at least the speed of a single disk on writes and higher performance on reads but on cheaper cards this is not always the case (Motherboard performance is horrible for raid 5 even with modern CPU's) Is the notion of running a RAID 5 array such as the one I propose, in a personal reason rig stupid for a reason I've overlooked? No Is there a much better RAID card for the money (I'm prepared to spend up to £250)? I am unsure on the pricing in your country, but I would actually recommend looking for one that has battery backed write cache as you are likely to find better performance and more reliability with that (or flash backed write cache which is basically the same thing just new tech)  
I am new to the forums but my background is that I work for a National Managed IT provider in Australia, working with RAID arrays in servers is part of my day to day job.
At home I currently have an ESXi server running a HP Smart Array P410 with 512mb Battery Backed Write Cache, it has 5 2TB WD Greens in it for mass storage and the performance is around the 250-350MB/S read/write.
Hope that gives you a little more info and im happy to try answer any questions you have.
Also when you first build your array you won't get full performance out of it until its finished initialising the array, so don't be disheartened if performance is much lower than expected at first.