Benny Biscuit

Here are the specs! First column which says Server. My Set-Up.pdf

Thanks so much!! If you have any additional suggestions, here are the specs for everything in the house! But mainly it's the server that we are looking for recommendations for! My Set-Up.pdf

The old board was a Gigabyte Z390UD. Honestly it worked great for our needs. But is there anything else you might recommend that would work just as well? We are replacing it with a MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon.

Thank you for that option. Husband says that motherboard just has way more than what we need. But is looking into it!

I will get the old motherboard information as soon as I'm off work! Thank you so much for your input so far! This project has been a huge one for the last five years and the techie guy in the house is too proud to browse these forums for advice. Very do it yourself type, after all he went to college for all of this!

Oops my bad! This is why I welcome all questions regarding the server. I didn't build nor do I maintain it. Please try to be less sarcastic with your reply. I literally contain zero knowledge of our server build, or the three gaming computers within our house. I could probably barely tell you specs. I really just want to be as helpful as possible with the maintenance and finding other solutions for just the sheer size of this thing. Our Server is strictly media, all the movies, TV shows etc. We utilize Plex for all the streaming. And half of the storage is technically redundant in case of a hard drive failure. And I've broached the backup solutions before on this forum. Backing up this much media in a separate place just isn't feasible. We have the download and upload to handle it but somewhere else not so much. The problem with the motherboard was the specific need of those slots and not being able to find one to meet our needs. The one we had, was no longer available and or possibly discontinued. We need to plug in two SAS cards as well as a video card. And I need a motherboard that can support doing all of this at full speed. I can't have three slots where two of them are wired to the processor and when you use them both at the same time it splits their bandwidth in half. I guess my main question regarding our server is how do you go "up" from here, without spending a fortune. I mean we can always swap out drives for larger ones but the case itself holds no more hard drives.

Ok so this is my second time posting in the Linus Forum but I'm looking for feasible solutions for my 128TB home server. I also need to admit I'm not the mastermind behind this project but I need to seek out alternative solutions. I want to be of some help regarding our home server. So here's what we've got: We currently have 18 hard drives inside of the server and one outside. It's already inside of a case which only technically holds 15. But with some extra work we were able to get more than 15 in there. The processor we have is an i7 8700 and the current motherboard was a very specific kind which is currently unavailable and or no longer made. It had a very specific setup which I needed to make the server work. It had one PCI Express 16 at X16 and two PCI Express 16 at X4. The motherboard was fried due to accidental damage and now I'm having a hard time finding a replacement. The drives are hooked up to the motherboard by two SAS cards. Honestly the next steps up to make sure this huge server works properly, could start costing thousands of dollars as well as increasing power needed to make it work. These are options which aren't an ideal solution. Again as I'm not the mastermind behind this project, you may have a ton of additional questions, which I can do my best to answer. I also must tell everyone that I'm NOT tech savvy when it comes to the building of the PC's in our house. I have my gaming PC and I know how to use it, but the server is a whole different ball game for me. But just trying to bounce ideas off of anyone else who may have built something like this or is in the process of building something like this. Thanks for any and all help! Here are some pictures, although I don't believe they are of much help. The whole thing takes up the entire top of a dresser (just for size comparison.) Thought it would be a good idea to add everything that is in the server. It's a PDF file and has all of our systems. But it's mainly the server we are looking for recommendations for! My Set-Up.pdf

Thanks so much for the help! Like I said it seems like it was more of a hassle to me, being unaware how all of this worked. I was just expecting some magical solution that would be efficient and not seem like such a headache! This stuff all comes naturally to him; as he's been in the biz for over a decade, but sometimes I can get a little lost while he explains these complicated processes to me. As for the movies, yes the recently purchased ones are easy to retrieve over and over again. When we moved in together I started the painful process of converting 500 some DVD's and those wouldn't be so easy to retrieve; as they no longer exist in my home. But thank you for all the help, it has been VERY insightful and gives me a better understanding of why he chooses to do things the way he does!

Thanks so much for ALL of this information! I don't really sweat the small stuff (pictures and personal documents) as it is backed up in numerous places; both in our home and on several off-site (Google, Drop-Box etc.) Definitely not pirating but everything I own is digital, and it is all that heavy stuff that he keeps an identical copy of that I'm worried about being contained within the same server/place. It is really more of annoyance when I add something, that I can't just put it into the folder where it goes as he needs to back it up to whichever drive it's supposed to be on. That's why I was wondering about programs to check for those changes and I am aware they do exist but he's pretty picky about how he wants it done.

Oh ok! I guess I didn't really understand what a fire box was there for a second! This has all been VERY helpful and definitely gives me a better understanding of how all of these things in my home work! He does try to explain these processes to me, but sometimes I DO get a little lost.

It also wouldn't be so much the cost of matching those drives. He would just build another server and remove those backup hard drives out of this server and put them into another. So there are 9 drives total: 3 drives have all the media, 3 more have an EXACT copy of all that media (they are cloned.) There is then a 2TB drive which is for our cameras and doesn't need backed up. There is a 3TB drive that is a backup for various items around the house (emulated programs for gaming consoles.) The 9th drive, I believe is the boot drive. But the 6 drives with the media need to be matched up, every time we add something to the 3 that Plex regularly accesses.

Thank you so much for your input! I was just having a very hard time understanding all of this. I just felt that it should be simpler. All of our media is contained within one place (the server,) as it frees up space on the laptops and is unnecessary to have any of this media on either of the Gaming PC's. So all of my media is with his on our home server I just felt that there HAD to be an easier way to duplicate all of this media onto this other internal drives without going through all of this trouble. But it seems as though it is the safest way to do so without encountering errors and accidental deletion of files. As for this fire box which you mentioned, what about air flow and how that will affect it? The server is cooled with fans; 4 of them.

The other day he formatted all the backup drives and then literally copy and pasted files from one drive to the other. Normally what he does when new media is added is to put one copy on the drive it goes on and one copy on the backup drive. However, what about just scanning for changes? I think he has used various native programs. See the thing is; when I add new files or new music, it sits in a folder called 'Ready to Go' until he is ready to make the needed copy and put those onto both drives. This means that until he has time, my stuff is just sitting there and isn't really accessible until it is moved to where it needs to be. So I take care of renaming things for plex and getting it ready to be moved and then it just sits there; waiting to be moved to each location. And a few days ago, as I was adding music, I wasn't thinking about it and just moved the music into my music and realized "oh crap, he needs to back that up." and then of course I couldn't remember exactly what I had added or removed. So I was wondering what the simplest process was. That way all of these new files aren't just sitting there, waiting to be moved and I could move them into the necessary folders and on the necessary drives, and he would be able to find the changes and back those drives up; without me having to write down everything I moved.

Ok that seems like an option to look into for that and thank you!! But what about backing up all of this media internally? Best way to do it? It just seems so complicated, the way he is doing it?

Ok so I'm new to the forum but have been watching Linus videos for several years now. My boyfriend is the techy guy in our home. He has built all of our gaming computers as well as our server. When it comes to backing up our server I get so confused by the things he tells me. And he seems to be having a difficult time picking the best back-up solution that meets his needs. Our server is used for media ONLY. All of our movies, TV shows, music, etc. We run the server and then use it with Plex to access all of this media. But only use IS media. We have separate PC's/laptops for gaming and anything else. First of all we don't have an external backup, which I think is stupid because if the house Burns down, everything is gone. Everything is backed up internally. There are 9 hard drives totaling 47 terabytes. For every piece of media on the hard drive, there is an exact duplicate copy of it on a separate hard drive. Our media totals about 22 terabytes of space and there is 22 more terabytes of ALL of that media, backed up onto separate drives. So it's redundant storage within the same computer but on different drives. So every time we add something new, whether it be a new show, a new television episode, or new music we need an exact copy of whatever it was, backed up onto the appropriate drive. To me, the best solution is to build another server and back it up in a separate location. Because I don't think it should all be backed up internally. However, this is currently the way he has it setup. I've looked into so many solutions but can't quite find what works best. There are hard drive duplicators, which are external, there are programs like native windows programs, or RAID or the various others. We don't want something that will run constantly. But we do need a good solution to duplicate the media onto appropriate drives so they when he clicks on the drives, they match up byte for byte. So there are 9 drives total: 3 drives have all the media, 3 more have an EXACT copy of all that media (they are cloned.) There is then a 2TB drive which is for our cameras and doesn't need backed up. There is a 3TB drive that is a backup for various items around the house (gaming console hard drives.) The 9th drive, I believe is the boot drive. But the 6 drives with the media need to be matched up, every time we add something to the 3 that Plex regularly accesses Can someone PLEASE explain this to me, because I feel like there is a MUCH better solution which is faster, doesn't require removing the drives to duplicate them, and doesn't require sacrificing a butt load of time once a week or once a month to copy and make the changes. He keeps saying it's not that simple but to me, it seems like there SHOULD be a simple solution?