Finished my 10TB Windows Home Server

[thebeephaha]

I call it WHS Galactica

26 Drives + WHS = 10,820GB before raid and formatting, Somewhere around ~9.55TB after.

4x750 (Storage Pool) (Hitachi)
7x500 (Storage Pool) (2 Samsung F1, 5 Seagate 7200.9 & 7200.10)
2x400 (Storage Pool) (Seagate 7200.10 & ES)
9x320 (Storage Pool) (Seagate 7200.10)
4x160 in RAID10 (OS) (WD Scorpio 5400RPM 2.5")

* Lian Li PC-75 Full Tower
* PCP&C Silencer 750w
* Intel Entry Server Motherboard SE7221BK1-E w/ Dual Intel Pro1000MT NICs
* Pentium 4 540 3.2GHz HT w/ Thermaltake something heatsink
* 3GB (2x1GB + 2x512MB) DDR2 RAM
* SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 (8 port SATA controller)
* Adaptec AAR 21610SA (16 port SATA controller)
* Eight 80mm fans, two 120mm fans all under-volted
* Matshita Slim CD-RW/DVD via Vantec USB to IDE
* Samsung Floppy for all those controller card drivers!!!


^ Where it all began, picked this up for $100, comparison next to my Stacker




^ Here she is today, many months later and many $$$ later.






^ Ghetto modded brackets to fit two extra drives. (Excuse the disconnected drive, waiting on a IDE to SATA thing from Newegg)


^ More ghetto modding to add 6 more drives on top of the PSU.


^ Cardkeeper saves the day, the card was bending pretty bad prior.




^ Got a old Compaq server slimline mount, shoved a newer drive in it, connected it with a Vantec USB to IDE cable and then used the extra space to shove one last hard drive above it. I need to make a bezel for it though. It's ugly.



I use this for backups and media storage, mainly movies and TV shows.

Oh and a nice fun fact. It weighs over 65LB.

If I were to guess total cost, since I got a lot free or at huge discounts from work, I'd say under $1500.

[RevengE]

Nice man How much did all that run you?

[thebeephaha]

About $1500, but most of it has been adding up over the last year or so. Kind of a long term project.

Right now I have like 6TB left so I should be set for a while. Provided something doesn't explode.

[exodusprime1337]

that is awsome.. i've got a simalar setup for a file server, although very simple. i took 3 raid cards threw them in an old a8n32 board with a 4800x2 and a crappy ass vid card and just started stacking 1tb seagate drives, i put in 8 so far and got room for 4 more including onboard.

sad thing is, i use freenas lol... it's prolly the simplest shit when it comes to running a home server.

[MRCL]

Dude, huge! Props for the ghetto modding, looks pretty professional at first glimpse.

[FordGT90Concept]

I think that PSU is liable to explode (at least turn off and never come back on). 24 HDDs to spin up is an awful lot of load. :X

[DanTheBanjoman]

Why bother with all the ancient disks? Aren't you better off using less and larger disks? ie sell the smaller ones, replace with larger ones.

Apart from that, not bad at all. I'm still busy creating my storage cabinet, the servers case is too small to put so much crap in. Looking for a cheap way to connect the cabinet externally without having a zillion cables. will probably end up making my own cabling.

[Homeless]

that is very impressive cable management

[Marineborn]

wow thats a sexy job, very nice.

[h3llb3nd4]

Really love your cable management and drive layout

[thebeephaha]

Originally Posted by DanTheBanjoman

Why bother with all the ancient disks? Aren't you better off using less and larger disks? ie sell the smaller ones, replace with larger ones.

Apart from that, not bad at all. I'm still busy creating my storage cabinet, the servers case is too small to put so much crap in. Looking for a cheap way to connect the cabinet externally without having a zillion cables. will probably end up making my own cabling.

I'd had most of the smaller ones from my previous server and I just reused them. I figure as I need more space I can slowly just replace them one by one with larger units.

I made some custom cables for power and that helped me a lot with getting 26 drives connected.

[thebeephaha]

Originally Posted by FordGT90Concept

I think that PSU is liable to explode (at least turn off and never come back on). 24 HDDs to spin up is an awful lot of load. :X

My UPS and my Kill-a-watt show about 700ish peak load for about 2 seconds at power on but just normal running is under 350w. That PSU is rated at 800 or 850 something peak and 750w sustained at like 40c or 50c so I actually have some grow room.

[spearman914]

10TB = nice. Keep it up!!!

[lemonadesoda]

You've done a great (and tidy) job building your fileserver! However I agree with Dan that a smarter move would be to buy a set of 1TB or 1.5TB new drives. Much greater storage density. Much faster. (Esp. for backing up). And much lower power consumption. And quieter. And cooler.

Excepting Seagates recent mess with their drives, newer drives tend to be more reliable too.

Even though you CAN and DID do what you did... I would suggest selling those drives off and replacing with new/hi-capacity ones. RAID arrays will be much easier to manage too.

Remember... for ultimate safety... it's good to have identical drives in a RAID array... AND to have a spare identical to rebuild the RAID in situation of failure. Unless you are JBODing.

I find it funny you have such an "advanced" system with pretty set of RAID controllers and then run Windows Home Server! LOL. Do you trust it?

HEY, wait a minute. Got a question. What is the final number of drives the OS sees?

[Tau]

To bad you cant monitor smart on athe drives on the controller.... I would be interested in seeing your temps with that kind of setup.

And damn now i really want to play with WHS....

Nice setup though, looks smooth, and that 750 silencer is loads for that setup.

what do you actually do to warrant needing that much storage space?

[Jakl]

Wow man, great Home Server you got! I should round up all my old HDD's around and build one aswell lol... I got my NAS to hold all my data, and my whole network shares it aswell, but I should setup a server...

How often you have to manage the server? or does it not even need to be looked after?

Love your server name aswell, "WHS Galactica" Im thinking I should name mine Cylon Mainframe lolz

[iStink]

That's beautiful man. Congrats. I wish I had something like this for all my porn-- er I mean, STUFF.

[Polarman]

That's a lot of TV shows.

[Jakl]

Originally Posted by Polarman

That's a lot of TV shows.

Especially if you save BR Movies... takes tons of space... thats what's hogging up on my HDD space

[thebeephaha]

Originally Posted by lemonadesoda

You've done a great (and tidy) job building your fileserver! However I agree with Dan that a smarter move would be to buy a set of 1TB or 1.5TB new drives. Much greater storage density. Much faster. (Esp. for backing up). And much lower power consumption. And quieter. And cooler.

Excepting Seagates recent mess with their drives, newer drives tend to be more reliable too.

Even though you CAN and DID do what you did... I would suggest selling those drives off and replacing with new/hi-capacity ones. RAID arrays will be much easier to manage too.

Remember... for ultimate safety... it's good to have identical drives in a RAID array... AND to have a spare identical to rebuild the RAID in situation of failure. Unless you are JBODing.

I find it funny you have such an "advanced" system with pretty set of RAID controllers and then run Windows Home Server! LOL. Do you trust it?

HEY, wait a minute. Got a question. What is the final number of drives the OS sees?

The only RAID I run is on the boot drive which is a RAID10. The rest are JBOD. How WHS works is any important data I can tell it to run "duplication" which is a pseudo software RAID1, it backs up the important files on two separate drives. The rest like TV and things like that which I can always get again are just JBOD so if a drive fails I lose those things but the important things are in another place.

I am fine with the insane amount of drives, it really doesn't run that hot, hottest drive is around 40c and that is one above the CD drive that doesn't get any airflow.

I have two external eSATA ports connected to the onboard SATA and I have two more free onboard SATA ports left as well. But... there is no more room in the case so 26 it is.

As I deem it neccessary I can always yank the small drives out and put bigger ones in their place.

WHS has been good to me, I trust it, but it took some getting there and a lot of experimentation. You just gotta read up on it to know what and how to do it, especially with so many drives and controller cards. I still have an issue where sometimes I get a BSOD when I try to reboot or shutdown, its a problem with my 16 port Adaptec card having bad Server 2003 driver support but I have never had an issue with data corruption and I have been running this for almost 6 months.

The final number of drives the OS sees is 23, 22 JBOD drives and the 23rd is the RAID10 array.

Originally Posted by Tau

To bad you cant monitor smart on athe drives on the controller.... I would be interested in seeing your temps with that kind of setup.

And damn now i really want to play with WHS....

Nice setup though, looks smooth, and that 750 silencer is loads for that setup.

WHS is fun to play with, it makes it extremely easy to manage lots of mismatched storage.

As far as SMART, the controllers in their management software can check that, but not the temps. But as I said earlier the hottest drive is around 40c with 25c ambient room temps. (there are a lot of fans in that case)

Originally Posted by kyle2020

what do you actually do to warrant needing that much storage space?

As you can see from one of my pics, I have about 6TB free, I mainly built it to last a long time.

I also setup the remote web access for the server and gave my friends individualized user accounts and storage folders.

Originally Posted by DjJakl

Wow man, great Home Server you got! I should round up all my old HDD's around and build one aswell lol... I got my NAS to hold all my data, and my whole network shares it aswell, but I should setup a server...

How often you have to manage the server? or does it not even need to be looked after?

Love your server name aswell, "WHS Galactica" Im thinking I should name mine Cylon Mainframe lolz

The server pretty much sits there and does its thing, I check in on the vitals about twice a week for updates or things like that.

Yea I named it Galactica mainly because A) I love BSG and B) its big and silver and packs a punch like BSG does.

Originally Posted by DjJakl

Especially if you save BR Movies... takes tons of space... thats what's hogging up on my HDD space

BR and HDDVD movies take up anywhere from 7.5-15GB each in my experience. Those add up fast.

[lemonadesoda]

The final number of drives the OS sees is 23, 22 JBOD drives and the 23rd is the RAID10 array.

You can only have 26 drives! (Drive letters) And A and B are floppy. And saving ONE for CD and at least ONE for USB stick, means 26-2-2=22. You are OVERBUDGET.

WATCHA... if one drive in JBOD goes down you could loose the whole thing. There are reports of the TOC getting "stuck" and recovery needs to be done via raw data recovery. In theory, if JBOD is not running in "linear" or "concatenate" mode, they you should be ok, but not for everyone. There are war stories. And your BSOD aint promising.

Test this. Pull one drive out of your JBOD array and see if all is cool.

[thebeephaha]

Well its not real JBOD raid, its all software managed its fake raid. I can pull one at any time and put it back and WHS would be like "psh whatever I'm good". I can also read any of the drives from another computer just fine too.

Also WHS does not use drive letters. It sees D as all the drives in the storage pool

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WHS

Read about the drive extender, that is how the JBOD and duplication work.

[DaveK]

Here I am struggling with 160GB and here you have 10TB haha, sweet setup man!

[Castiel]

Very nice setup!