[./bA] The Mammoth 2.0

[bANONYMOUS]

I had a build here before called the Mammoth, built out of an old Dell T7500 as a workstation for video editing, that thing was amazing but recently I've replaced it, and almost a year later, I have an itch for older server hardware, so here goes another Mammoth build, this time it's going to be a storage server for all of my raw footage.

I got this thing pre-assembled, well used, dirty as all hell, and cheap!

Case:
Chenbro SR10568 with a free broken and missing front panel door
Add-on 4 bay hotswap adapter

Motherboard:
Asus DSBF-D12/SAS

Processor:
Intel Xeon E5335

Cooler:
Stock Intel LGA771

Memory:
4x 2GB DDR2-667MHz 

Storage:
2x Seagate 73GB SAS in Raid 0
2x Seagate 146GB SAS in Raid 0

Graphics:
Gigabyte GTX460

Power Supply:
Antec 450w 80+ Bronze

Operating System:
Ubuntu Server 8.04

This is the beast here


My plan for this is to clean it up a touch, add a second processor, possibly an upgrade to something higher, add more RAM because 8GB is pretty low even for a Facebook machine in this day and age, let alone a media server that's going to be streaming footage. As for storage, I'm hoping to convert the thing to SATA to keep costs down. I'll be running the storage setup in Raid 5 this time so my footage remains safe instead of the Raid 0 setup it has now.
I have an old MSI GTX770 kicking around, I might put that in it tomorrow after I've gotten it all set up. We have a license at work for Windows Server 2016 Data Center Edition, so I can put this on that license and see where I can go from there, it came with Ubuntu Server 8.04 on it so by the looks of that, it was built in 2008, set up, and never touched or opened again, it's FILLED with dust, like, chunks of dust, just trying to remove the hotswap sleds was a task with how much dust was just layered on and in everything. The picture posted was after I gave it a quick wipe down already, it used to be brown with dust lol.

I was looking into processor upgrades and I noticed that on the motherboard supported hardware page it says X5470 is the highest supported processor, but in that same field of LGA771 processors is the X5492, does anyone know if that one will work, or will it REALLY not work in this board? The processors are super cheap so it might be worth a shot to just buy them to find out, but if someone knows for a fact they won't recognize in that motherboard it would save me some time and money.

I'm also going to max it out with the supported 48GB of RAM because why not, parts for these things are so cheap I might as well go for max specs.

Oh, and there's a huge price jump from 8tb drives to 10tb so I would be trying to find either 5 8TB HDD in Raid 5 and a smaller capacity SSD boot drive or 6 8tb drives and just run the OS off of the Raid 5 setup. Not sure yet, all depends what I can find on a bulk discount, ideally I'm going with 5 HDD and 1 SSD, but if I get a bulk price drop at 6 HDD.. I might as well get 6.. I know the SSD isn't going to matter much in terms of network performance for storing files, I just want to have a snappy system to work with when it needs maintenance or updates. Just a personal preference.

Anyway, that's my new project over the next coming weeks so I'll start taking more pictures tomorrow once I get it all set up.

EDIT:
I did more reading into the hotswap add-on from Chenbro, turns out they have 5 different ones, two 4 3.5" bay SAS, two 4 3.5" bay SATA/SAS, and one 6 2.5" SAS add-on. So tomorrow I'm going to check the model number on it and if it ends in 78 or 85 we're golden to use the hotswap for SATA drives which means I could run 4 8TB SATA HDD in Raid 5 at 6gbps with the one that ends in 78, or 12gbps with the one that ends in 85, and two 64GB or 128GB SSD's in Raid 1 for the boot drive going straight to the motherboard.

So many possibilities, I love giving old hardware a new use for home applications, start looking into a PLEX server off of this bad boy too, going to see if it can stream 4k videos and it might end up being a glorified NAS, possibly cloud accessible? maybe?

[bANONYMOUS]

Been working on this project off and on over the last few days so I haven't had much time to get a lot done, I ordered a 48GB RAM kit which should be next week, I still have to order the 8TB SATA drives, I decided I'm going to go with 4 in RAID 5 so I don't have to alter the chassis.

This is the whopping 2GB RAM modules that was in it when I got this beast, total of 8GB


The overly expensive for what it is motherboard


Stock internals from how I got it


I found the factory 4 bay 3.5" cage that replaced the SAS hotswap cage. (This is why I'm only getting 4 8TB drives instead of 6)


The CPU temps were really good, somewhere around 35-40 degrees with this stock cooler, the only down fall is there's zero cross wind for the RAM so it was just cooking at 60-70 degrees


Did some more digging and found these LGA771 bad boys


I put both coolers in even though there's currently only one CPU, and I know it's going to be blowing the heat from the CPU onto the RAM but any airflow is airflow so it should at least help with the RAM temps, especially after the 48GB kit arrives.


More digging and I found this guy


It's a 3x5.25" bay 120mm Antec fan mount


So I popped these out since they'll never be used in a storage server anyway


Looks a whole lot nicer now after being cleaned up


A lot of internal clutter removed with all of the cables for those two drives and ditched the GTX 460 since I'll be running this headless anyway, why add more heat beside the RAM when it's not even going to be used.


Here's how it is currently sitting, waiting for the 48GB of RAM, better processors, and some larger capacity drives, I'm going to play around with FreeNAS and see if that's the route I want to go rather than Windows Server 2016, I might just end up using this for OwnCloud

[bANONYMOUS]

Turns out when Asus said it only supports the Xeon X5470's max, it wasn't because they just didn't include the X5492's in that list, it was because those are 150w CPU's and the board only handles 120w of the X5470..

So here are all of my blown capacitors as a result of trial and error lol

Two here


Three here


Another one here


and the last two here


So, I'm going to order the new capacitors, change those, make sure this board still works, and if it does, I'll be ordering the X5470's that Asus said is the max limitation of the board, guess this was all very well warned, I didn't understand why at first but now it all makes sense knowing that these are largely different wattage processors.

I'll keep updating this as I make process, I'm currently sick and not at work today to start pulling capacitors and ordering replacements if we don't have any in stock.

[bANONYMOUS]

Not much of an update today, we ended up having the capacitors I needed and I started replacing the blown ones on the DSBF-D12


All three 6.3v 1500uF capacitors were changed.


I only managed to get one of the 6.3v 820uF capacitors changed today, ran out of time before the shop closed for the night and tomorrow is a holiday, so I'll see if I can get special access to the shop tomorrow, but if not, I'll be finishing this up on Saturday and we'll see if this get's it back up and running.


The 48GB RAM kit should be in any day now and the processors should hopefully be in next week if everything goes well with shipping.

I am a little on the fence now about what storage route I want to go with, I was fairly content with a 32TB storage server, (24TB in RAID 5) but now with that Antec 5.25" fan mount I found with some broken cases, I'm not sure if I want to go that route with the three extra 5.25" bays I can use with adapter brackets.

I'm kind of thinking maybe a small SSD boot drive for freeNAS and then running six 6TB drives in RAID 5 giving me around 30TB of storage space, but also the drives being $40 less each, that's a savings of $160, which means one of those 6TB drives would be completely free within the budget of four 8TB drives.

The 8TB drives I was looking at are $180 each, and 6TB are $120 each, so given that the four 6TB drives would end up being $160 less than four 8tb, the 5th 6TB drive being $120, it would come out of my $160 budget of the 8TB drives meaning I get a 5th 6tb drive for "free" and $40 towards the 6th drive, so, to sum this up, I can get four 8TB drives, or six 6TB drives for $80 more and have basically 6TB more storage space. I just gotta figure out what kind of RAID setup I can manage with that and this motherboard, it has two RAID connectors on it and I have the additional cables for a total of 8 SATA connectors in RAID, but I don't know if the board will use both ports in one RAID config or if it's limited to 4 drives per RAID.
 

Once I get this up and running again this weekend, I'll look into this to see if this is possible to run six drives off two RAID ports in one RAID 5 array and then have the boot drive on it's own separate SATA connection or if the planets happen to align, possibly run the SSD off of the additional section channel RAID ports seeing as how there's 4 cables on that and I'll only be using 2.

That's pretty much where I'm at with this for now, just for testing before I dump a bunch of money on drives, I put together a four drive RAID array with 500GB Western Digital Black drives to see what I can do with those, perhaps I'll see if I can use the two different raid ports to put all of those in RAID 0 or something like that just for testing to see what this motherboard is capable of.

[bANONYMOUS]

It's been a few days, time to get back at it.
I ended up replacing the rest of the capacitors on the motherboard but still haven't tested it to make sure it's still working. Since then, the 48GB RAM kit came in



While I was picking that kit up, the CPU's I ordered also came in so I grabbed those while I was there.


The issue that stands now is that the 450w Antec PSU I have in there now isn't going to cut it, seeing as how the current single 80w 2.00GHz Quad-Core Xeon setup with 4x2GB RAM is a 288w system with the 4 SAS 10k RPM drives, suggested 400w PSU minimum. Now, with the dual 120w 3.33GHz Quad-Core Xeon setup and 12x4GB RAM, that puts this at a 597w system which would suggest a minimum 700w PSU. So, naturally, I picked up a Corsair TX750 to toss in this beast tomorrow with all the other goodies.


Now, if it actually still works after that over wattage cpu disaster, I'll start setting up FreeNAS and dedicate this thing as an OwnCloud Server and I can cancel my Google Drive subscription, this server is already going to start paying for itself, $10 a month a time.
Not to mention the fact that I'll have access to SIGNIFICANTLY more storage for personal and company use than I would with Google Drive.. $10 a month for 1TB.

On a side note, I still haven't figured out a boot drive yet, does anyone know if there is any performance loss running FreeNAS off of a USB stick vs a very small capacity SSD?
I was thinking of getting a 32/64GB SSD as the boot drive but I can get a USB stick of similar capacity for less than half the cost. Will booting off of a USB drive on a 24/7 server cause stress on the USB drive, overheating, damage, failure? I'm leaning towards just spending more on a small capacity SSD just to save the headache down the road if the USB drive fails and I need to start over, I know that the largest benefit of the SSD boot over USB boot being that I could run two SSD's in RAID 1 so I can never fully lose my boot drive. Can you run USB Drives in RAID 1 as a boot drive for FreeNAS? Is this a thing? So many questions about USB boot drives, I've never used a USB boot drive for anything other than an OS installer, my green hat is on, this USB boot drive stuff is all new to me.

[bANONYMOUS]

Removed the 450w Antec PSU, CPU coolers, and 4x2GB RAM


The Xeon X5470 CPUs installed


The Hynix IBM branded 12x4GB RAM kit


Something about this just makes me feel so content


This is where things are getting interesting now that I'm ready for the coolers to go back on.


Those tower style CPU coolers I found were from an old HP server, but it turns out I was able to fix that server and the old full copper cooler that came off of this server doesn't fit the HP, the legs are too long and the cooler doesn't make contact with the CPU on the HP (build log on that soon), so I had to take those tower style coolers back for the HP and revert the mammoth to the original cooler that came on it when I got it, and I bought a brand new one that matches the original. Just gotta clean off this factory thermal compound so I can get some better stuff on there.


I got the Corsair TX750 in there for testing just to make sure this thing still works after all of the capacitor fiasco and everything is running flawless.


I ended up caving and I picked up a Corsair Graphite Series 760T


I can't wait to start transferring everything over into this beast tomorrow


I have roughly 13.25" to play with for the motherboard


and the motherboard is 12.75" wide so it's just going to fit as long as all of the standoffs work out because this case is only rated for EATX and this is an SSI EEB form factor so I believe 5 of the standoffs will be in a different location from EATX but it.. it should.. work.. maybe..


I was looking into the SAS controller for this motherboard and it will not run SATA drives off of it so I only have 6 SATA ports to play with, which means I'll be going with 5 HDD and 1 SSD unless booting off of a USB drive if safe enough not to fail and I can run 6 HDD and 1 USB boot drive for FreeNAS.

For the time being I'm going to be setting this up with 5 500GB Western Digital Black Enterprise drives and one 256GB Samsung 850 Series SSD as that's all I have on hand, which should allow me to get the cloud up and running, start testing, finding flaws, fixing issues, working from there, and once the server is bullet proof I can just back it up and swap the HDD for the 8TB drives once I order them and a smaller capacity 32/64GB SSD so I can take my 256GB SSD back as I use that drive for testing laptops with hard drive failure so my laptop repairs are going to have some down time as I'll only have one of my two 256GB Test Drive SSDs.

[bANONYMOUS]

I know this isn't the big reveal but I really wanted to save that for it fully up and running, and so far I'm on day three now trying to get FreeNAS to even boot, I've tried 5 different USB sticks, USB 2.0/3.0, I even tried burning FreeNAS to a blank CD which you wouldn't believe me if so told you how hard it was to find one of those around here. However, still no avail.

 

I can boot off of the FreeNAS 11.1-U4 installer USB just fine, same with the CD, no issues, I follow along the installer and select BIOS because this motherboard doesn't support UEFI, and every single time it hangs on reboot, install goes fine, nothing goes wrong, no errors, all peachy, reboot and remove the install media and it hangs at post, can't select boot device, can't enter BIOS, nothing, completely dead, if I remove the USB stick that has the OS install on it, server responds fine, this is 100% USB related and out of 5 different USB drives varying from 4GB USB 2.0 to 32GB 3.0 and everything inbetween.

 

I've also tried Rufus to make the USB stick using both ISO and DD write methods, same issue hanging at post, I've tried Win32DiskImager and that didn't work, burning the ISO to an actual CD with Windows 10 built in ISO burner, every result boots up flawless, the CD version was painfully slow, but right after install, hangs at post, this is so very confusing, I've been searching forums for the last three days and everyone has been saying try different USB drives, try install fromCD and tons of people are having luck with these solutions.

 

What I can't find though is the optimal BIOS settings for FreeNAS, is something stopping it from booting? Are there BIOS features FreeNAS doesn't like? That's the only thing I can currently think of at the moment, I'm just waiting for UNetBootin to finish writing another FreeNAS installer so I can try that with all 5 USB sticks again and see if one of those prevail for me.

 

If not I'm kind of out of ideas, I've never used FreeNAS before and from all the rave I've heard about it being so great, it's become one of the tedious things just to get it running, let alone actually using it.

 

UPDATE:

UNetBootin was the worst of all, I can't even get the install USB to boot, getting MBR Error 1, FreeNAS has turned out to be a nightmare lol

 

UPDATE 2:

I tried making a FreeNAS installer using another desktop and a laptop, I've now made 40 USB installs out of the 5 USB drives I have on hand, every single one hangs on post, this has to be a BIOS issue, the Asus DSBF-D12 is fully updated so it has to be something to do with settings.

 

Just for testing I used our Windows Server 2016 USB and installed it to one of the USB drives I was trying to boot from and it boots straight into Windows Server without any issues off of USB as the boot drive. So this is 100% FreeNAS/Hardware/BIOS compatibility issues and so far I haven't found any fix on other forums.

 

Anyone have any ideas? Out of all the janky things I did throughout this build, I did not foresee FreeNAS being my biggest issue to overcome.

 

UPDATE 3:

Well, turns out this is a known and reported issue with the Asus DSBF-D12.

https://redmine.ixsystems.com/issues/7631

The case has been closed without resolution so I guess FreeNAS just doesn't care to solve the issue, their claim was they can't reproduce this issue even though there's tons of other threads from people having the identical issue. So... Unraid? Is there another free alternative to FreeNAS that's reputable for running OwnCloud and a virtual Windows 10 desktop install?

[bANONYMOUS]

Okay, I finally got it all taken care of and it's up and running the way I intended as a cloud server, so here's the final update on the build for a long time. I don't have anything planned for this for awhile now.

Installed the motherboard and it actually fit significantly better than I was expecting.


Picked up three Corsair AF140's




750w Corsair TX750



The six 500GB Western Digital Enterprise drives for the time being.



Started cable managing


Nicely tucked away behind the back panel


Door back on and that's as good as it gets



Panels all back on and buttoned up


And finally, this is where The Mammoth lives, beside my workstation desk.


The only future updates will be a vast storage upgrade, swapping all the fans over to matching ones, and possibly a GPU if I can figure out how to get this thing running a Windows 10 VM.

But, none of this is relevant for the build, it's completed for the time being, hope you enjoyed the hole in my wallet from a simple old $50 beaten up server out of a basement to what it is now.

[Mnpctech]

transformation turned out great, love that board! 

[bANONYMOUS]

As if MN PC Tech just commented on my build.. Literally the reason I got into building custom computers *star shock moment*

..back to business, I'll be making a final update on this build thread in a few weeks once I get everything together, but I've bought a lot of parts for upgrades, so I'm actually going to end up with all of the original parts from this build that I'm going to put back together in the old Chenbro case after the new paint job is done in a few days. Nothing fancy, it's just getting a matte black chassis, exterior is staying satin black but it's just getting cleaned up.