Server Rebuild Time!

[AshleyAshes]

My current 'Server' as it stands.  However it does more than act as a server so I'll go over it's history quickly.

 

 

It was an XBMC HTPC, powered by an Athlon 64 3200+ with (AGP) Radeon HD 4650 with a 2TB HDD for media.  I got fed up and replaed it with an AMD APU, A8-3870K with Gigabyte A75 board.  It eventually got an old Radeon HD 6850 added to it.  It got another drive and then it got more drives.  It currently uses DriveBender to pool 8 drives for a combined storage pool of 22.5TB of data with no redundancy except for select folders that contain something other than media.  In September the Gigabyte board failed and that lead to switching to an Asus B85M-G with i5 4590 in it.  It also now has a Radeon HD 6950 in it instead.  Well, the thing is this lacks expansion options for controllers and it's doing a LOT of jobs.  Like, it's running Kodi for my bedroom, it's running DriveBender, it runs Steam Big Picture Mode for the bedroom, SickBeard, CouchPotato, SABNZBD, Transmission, MySQL, and even Cinema 4D Team Render Client.  So I'm going to split this into TWO machines.  A dedicated server with PCIE slots to spare and a cute pink and black HTPC for the bedroom using the mATX board.  The first step is to rebuild this thing as a dedicated server!  However the hardware will temporarily still run dual purpose while I'll build the dedicated all pink and black bedroom Kodi/Steam machine.  So on with the specs!

 

Case: Corsair 750D with extra HDD cages installed. ($185 CAD, plus $1CAD USD in cages, air flow panel and solid panel to replace the windowed panel.  Actually got this two months ago but let's factor it in as a cost)

Motherboard: Gigabyte P67A-UD3-B3 (Free!  Bought it five years ago for a college workstation, this mobo has been decommissioned and in a box for two years now.)

CPU: Intel i5 2300 2.8ghz ($80 USD, basically the cheapest compatible CPU I could source without going dual core.)

RAM: 2x4GB Corsair SMS08GX3M2A13339C 1333mhz SO-DIMM DDR3 memory.  (Free!  In a drawer since a laptop was upgraded to 16GB.)

Graphics: PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 1GB (Free!  Also left over from the college workstation.)

PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 650w P2 ($99 CAD)

Extra SATA Controller: SYBA SI-PEX40064 ($34.99 CAD.  I'll just add more of these as needed)

RAM Adaptor: SO-DIMM to DIMM DDR3 adaptors  ($9.54 USD)

 

 

Corsair would ONLY ship via UPS for $48 USD even if I ordered ONE $9.99 HDD cage, so the shipping and exchange are why those extra parts pricing sucks.  Since shipping stayed the same no matter how much I got, I went all out.  No, NO retailer in Canada carried Corsair after market accessories.  Yes, the Radeon 6850 is overkill, but the P67 chipset lacks graphics, I need graphics, and the 6850 is sitting on a shelf right now.  I'll install it on the bottom 4x/16x PCI-E slot so as to leave all other PCI-E slots free for SATA controllers and avoid dealing with riser cables. Look at the bright side, my server will play Portal 2 decently!  More realistically, the 6850 could add useful hardware video transcoding if needed.  And yes, I'll be using SO-DIMM memory in adaptors.  Yes you can do that.  Yes DDR3 DIMMS have 240 pins where as SODIMMs have only 204 pins, did you know that like a THIRD of DDR3's pins don't DO anything?  Go look at a pinout diagram, they're marked 'No Connection' and do literally nothing.  Why pay $50 for RAM when I have perfectly good laptop RAM that can go to use for $10 USD in adaptors?  Anyway, this build will begin next weekend, just waiting on the i5 2300 to arrive.

 

As for software, yes, I don't like my total lack of a redundancy.  I'll be looking into adding 2x8TB drives and then using FlexRAID snapshot based parity.  This machine only is mostly just a hoard of media files so even a nightly parity snapshot is enough redundancy for my needs.  If I lose 24hrs of new data that has not had parity generated, I'll just redownload it.

 

This server has evolved a lot and until two months ago it was in a crappy 'Senty' brand case that it barely fit in.  I still fondly remember when I put that APU board in it.  It seemed pretty awesome at the time.

 

[dalekphalm]

Nice upgrade... very creative with the parts on-hand (Don't think I've ever seen anyone use SODIMM adapters before lol). My Server desperately needs an upgrade too. One of these days...

[DHelios]

10 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

It currently uses DriveBender to pool 8 drives for a combined storage pool of 22.5TB of data with no redundancy except for select folders that contain something other than media.

Does DriveBender allow you to set redundancy on a per-folder basis and then manage its storage in such a way that those folders will be stored on two separate physical disks?

 

I've been looking at upgrading my home server, but one of the things holding me back is that Drive Extender is limited to the first generation of Windows Home Server. DriveBender might be just what I'm looking for to get away from WHS and its 2.2TB-per-drive limit...

[dalekphalm]

Just now, DHelios said:

Does DriveBender allow you to set redundancy on a per-folder basis and then manage its storage in such a way that those folders will be stored on two separate physical disks?

 

I've been looking at upgrading my home server, but one of the things holding me back is that Drive Extender is limited to the first generation of Windows Home Server. DriveBender might be just what I'm looking for to get away from WHS and its 2.2TB-per-drive limit...

I use FlexRAID for my home server, and I find it does everything I liked about WHS v1, and more. I use it to mix-match HDD sizes (I've got a collection of HDD's made up into virtual 3TB HDD data units, with a single Parity Drive - a couple native 3TB drives thrown in the mix too).

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, DHelios said:

Does DriveBender allow you to set redundancy on a per-folder basis and then manage its storage in such a way that those folders will be stored on two separate physical disks?

 

I've been looking at upgrading my home server, but one of the things holding me back is that Drive Extender is limited to the first generation of Windows Home Server. DriveBender might be just what I'm looking for to get away from WHS and its 2.2TB-per-drive limit...

DriveBender DOES allow for that kind of parity however only one folder is set for that, it stores college and film project files.  All the other media is expendable enough that I don't want to waste double the hard drive space for all my episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.  But this is why I'll be moving from DriveBender to FlexRAID to add parity in the future however.  But right now I'm staving off spending money on two of those Seagate 8TB Archive drives.

 

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

Nice upgrade... very creative with the parts on-hand (Don't think I've ever seen anyone use SODIMM adapters before lol). My Server desperately needs an upgrade too. One of these days...

I'll be making a thread about that as well once the adaptors arrive.  I posted about the adaptors in a thread and was told that they were snake oil.  However I did some research and they should totally work, they're just obscure.  This is ALSO why you can have motherboards that use desktop CPUs but SODIMM RAM (Typically ITX boards) or desktop boards with mobile CPUs that take full DIMM RAM. (Like those desktop boards with Intel Atoms or AMD E-350's in them).  So there's no reason it SHOULDN'T work, it's just that people don't normally try, but it seems like a great way to recycle 8GB of DDR SODIMM ram.  I mean, that's not a useless amount of RAM after all.

[AshleyAshes]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I use FlexRAID for my home server, and I find it does everything I liked about WHS v1, and more. I use it to mix-match HDD sizes (I've got a collection of HDD's made up into virtual 3TB HDD data units, with a single Parity Drive - a couple native 3TB drives thrown in the mix too).

My plan is to buy two 8TB drives, use one for more storage and the other for parity, and then migrate in my other drives from Drive Bender, which I'm sure will be an enormous pain in the butt.   I'm just waiting until I'm out of storage first.

[DHelios]

5 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

DriveBender DOES allow for that kind of parity however only one folder is set for that, it stores college and film project files.  All the other media is expendable enough that I don't want to waste double the hard drive space for all my episodes of The Real Ghostbusters and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

I know the feeling. WHS Drive Extender supplies redundancy for my documents, photo's and music collection (I've spent a lot of time sorting, tagging, and so forth, not looking to do that again). Downloads, video files, temporary stuff... not so much.

 

Looks like I'll be doing some homework into both DriveBender and FlexRAID. Thanks @dalekphalm for the tip!

[AshleyAshes]

Just now, DHelios said:

Looks like I'll be doing some homework into both DriveBender and FlexRAID. Thanks @dalekphalm for the tip!

DriveBender is free at least.  I paid for it but it eventually became donationware.  That said, I think this means that major development has stopped.  Asside from redundancy, I'm really just doing it to make one massive 22.5TB 'E:\' drive so that I don't have to juggle what data is on what drives.

[dalekphalm]

10 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

My plan is to buy two 8TB drives, use one for more storage and the other for parity, and then migrate in my other drives from Drive Bender, which I'm sure will be an enormous pain in the butt.   I'm just waiting until I'm out of storage first.

You could, in theory, mix and match all your drives with those 2x 8TB drives. A single 8TB parity drive can be used with other smaller HDD's, as long as those individual drives don't become larger than 8TB (Even in this case, it'll still work, as long as you don't store more than 8TB of Data on those smaller drives).

 

My original setup had my drives split up into Data Risk Units (DRU's) and Parity Protection Units (PPU's):

DRU 1:

1x 2TB HDD

2x 500GB HDD

 

DRU 2:

3TB HDD

 

DRU 3:

3TB HDD

 

PPU 1:

3TB HDD

 

My 500GB HDD's have since crapped out, so I replaced them with a single 2TB HDD, meaning DRU1 actually has 4TB of storage. But it's fine, as long as I don't put more than 3TB of Data on any given DRU.

1 minute ago, DHelios said:

I know the feeling. WHS Drive Extender supplies redundancy for my documents, photo's and music collection (I've spent a lot of time sorting, tagging, and so forth, not looking to do that again). Downloads, video files, temporary stuff... not so much.

 

Looks like I'll be doing some homework into both DriveBender and FlexRAID. Thanks @dalekphalm for the tip!

No problem. FlexRAID was easy to setup, and the web UI is very easy to navigate. There's quite a bit of flexibility (Heh... hence, the flexRAID) in how you can configure everything. And Parity based RAID will save you lots of HDD space, since you only lose as much HDD space as you decide, with the number of parity disks you run.

[AshleyAshes]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

You could, in theory, mix and match all your drives with those 2x 8TB drives. A single 8TB parity drive can be used with other smaller HDD's, as long as those individual drives don't become larger than 8TB (Even in this case, it'll still work, as long as you don't store more than 8TB of Data on those smaller drives).

This is my plan.  What I don't know if I can do is if I can actually migrate the existing drives directly into FlexRAID.  So my current assumption is that I can build a FlexRAID array out of 2x8TB to have 8TB of storage then 'copy' say, 2x4TB worth of drives into that, then add my now empty 4TB drives into the FlexRAID to make it 16TB, then copy OTHER drives, then add them once empty to the array, and basically do that along as an asinine game of leapfrog.  But as an alternative, an I just add drives with existing data on them to FlexRAID and have it integrate that data into it's array?

[dalekphalm]

12 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

This is my plan.  What I don't know if I can do is if I can actually migrate the existing drives directly into FlexRAID.  So my current assumption is that I can build a FlexRAID array out of 2x8TB to have 8TB of storage then 'copy' say, 2x4TB worth of drives into that, then add my now empty 4TB drives into the FlexRAID to make it 16TB, then copy OTHER drives, then add them once empty to the array, and basically do that along as an asinine game of leapfrog.  But as an alternative, an I just add drives with existing data on them to FlexRAID and have it integrate that data into it's array?

Yes, what you propose should work. FlexRAID allows basically unlimited expansion. You just need to do a scrub after adding a drive (or multiple drives) to ensure the parity info gets updated. The parity is usually automatically scheduled per whatever your settings are, so you can always just let the automatic schedule kick in.

 

Just create a DRU (DRU1) out of one 8TB HDD, then a PPU (PPU1) out of the 2nd 8TB HDD. Then copy 8TB worth of Data from 2x of your 4TB HDD's to DRU1, and then add them to the array as, collectively DRU2 (So DRU2 would contain 2x 4TB HDD's). If you have additonal 4TB HDD's, you can repeat this process.

 

Alternatively, FlexRAID allows you to live migrate HDD's without erasing the content I believe. I haven't tested this, mind you, but you might be able to simply add in your 2x 4TB HDD's as DRU2 without migrating any of the data. Now, to be on the safe side, I would copy the data to the 8TB drive anyway, just to ensure it's in 2 places at once, until you have one set of data in the pool. Once you've got the data on the 8TB drive, you can format the 2x 4TB ones and then import them into the pool as DRU2 as fresh drives.

 

Make sense? FlexRAID also has a pretty good WIKI that I've used on occasion.

[Woodypc]

Hey, What did you end up doing. I have a similar setup but have DrivePool, which cost but not much and then for redundancy I use Snapraid(totally free). It is just as good or better then flexraid and cheaper.

[AshleyAshes]

6 hours ago, Woodypc said:

Hey, What did you end up doing. I have a similar setup but have DrivePool, which cost but not much and then for redundancy I use Snapraid(totally free). It is just as good or better then flexraid and cheaper.

I haven't done anything yet, the i5 2300 hasn't even arrived in the mail yet (Should be today).

 

But my intention is to stick with Drive Bender until I consume all current storage, then make the expensive migration to FlexRAID.

[AshleyAshes]

 The i5 2300 arrived in the mail today, I brought it home and it and the 5 year old Gigabyte motherboard fired up on the first try.  Yes, that's a BIOS, this mobo shipped just as UEFIs were starting to get popular, but it only has a BIOS. (There's a Beta UEFI for it that was abandoned after the first version and it was so buggy, the CPU fan didn't even run at the right speed)

[AshleyAshes]

PCIE card just over SATA ports... This could be a challenge.

[79wjd]

11 hours ago, AshleyAshes said:

PCIE card just over SATA ports... This could be a challenge.

 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GSQ3KT8/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?tag=linustechtips-20&ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00GSQ3KT8&linkCode=as2&linkId=EQ65QKNSOWBWHQJN

[AshleyAshes]

4 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GSQ3KT8/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?tag=linustechtips-20&ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00GSQ3KT8&linkCode=as2&linkId=EQ65QKNSOWBWHQJN

It turns out I have TWO right angle SATA cables that fit.  All my others are right angled in the OTHER direction and some are too tall despite being right angle anyway.  I'll post photos in a bit, right now I'm benchmarking and undervolting it to get the best power performance out of it.

[AshleyAshes]

So we worked our way around that.

 

[AshleyAshes]

 

So it's built and going, still pulling double duty as a server and an HTPC for now but that's only until I build the new HTPC.  I undervolted it, the PLL is at 1.52v which is the lowest setting it can hit and the dynamic vcore is at -0.2v which gives you about .8v idle and 1v at full power.  These are some huge power savings over the stock settings and it results in some pretty low temperatures.  With a stock Intel air cooler it peaks at 60'C at the absolute highest while running Prime 95's most heat inducing process.

 

With one PCI-E SATA controller in it, there's still three more slots free so there's lots of room to just keep cramming hard drives into it and to hang them off low cost controllers.

 

One thing I'm unhappy with is the huge GPU in it.  I may source something much smaller like an HD 6350 or HD 7350 to replace it.  The HD 6850 is just big, needs a PCI-E power pin, and even idle it's eating up power I otherwise shouldn't need to use.  I imagine that in the summer I'll eBay up something used to swap for it.

 

Oh, and since I did just basically build what would pass for a mid range gaming PC five years ago into a server, the 3D Mark Standard Sky Diver score was 7414.

[Juggernawt]

I'm running a AMD5450 in my server. It's passively cooled, tiny and ultra-cheap.

[AshleyAshes]

15 hours ago, Juggernawt said:

I'm running a AMD5450 in my server. It's passively cooled, tiny and ultra-cheap.

Yeah.  I'm in no rush right now and I do still NEED the HD 6850 in it since it's still also an HTPC until I build my replacement HTPC but I feel like something like that card would be better.  It'd consume less power, produce less heat, and take up less space.  It's a server afterall, the only reason I even want to put a GPU in it is because the P67 chipset lacks IGP support.  I mean, I'd totally just go Intel IGP if it was an option.

[AshleyAshes]

As a minor update, this morning I eBayed a Radeon HD 6350 GPU, the lowest wattage GPU from AMD, at bout 17w.  It should reduce the power and heat a bit in the machine and take up less space.  Once it arrives I'll shelve it till this server stops being an HTPC and swap it in.

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

As a minor update, this morning I eBayed a Radeon HD 6350 GPU, the lowest wattage GPU from AMD, at bout 17w.  It should reduce the power and heat a bit in the machine and take up less space.  Once it arrives I'll shelve it till this server stops being an HTPC and swap it in.

Nice. How much did you get the card for, if you don't mind me asking? Jesus just thinking about the power consumption compared to my 7950... At least I don't have a 290x or a gtx 480

[AshleyAshes]

1 minute ago, dalekphalm said:

Nice. How much did you get the card for, if you don't mind me asking? Jesus just thinking about the power consumption compared to my 7950... At least I don't have a 290x or a gtx 480

$11.19 USD + $12.00 USD shipping.  Actually came to $35.78 CAN after exchange.

 

http://vod.ebay.ca/vod/FetchOrderDetails?qu=1&itemid=141574909181&transid=1249573863004&viewpaymentstatus=

 

But at 17w vs the 75w of the Radeon HD 6850 I'm sure it'll shave some watts off the machines idle consumption.

[AshleyAshes]

And the Radeon HD 6350 was dead!  The fan spun but that was it, no mobo would detect it and no OS would detect it.  Also the fan was loud (Not HUGE loud, like 'quiet annoying buzzing loud' and it was DSM-59 connector only so it'd need an adaptor for video anyway and that would have cost another $30.  Not a smart move and I'll hopefully see some kind of refund.  I'm now getting a Radeon HD 5450 which is the exact same Cedar chip, but it's 1GB of RAM (Cause it needs 1GB for some reason?), passively cooled, VGA, HDMI and DVI, which makes it much more suitable for my needs.  Really, I should have went this way to start with.