Retrograde File Server

Not long ago, I talked about my "amok time" when I went a little bit storage drive crazy. As part of that, I bought several Hitachi drives, one of which was a 2Tb Deskstar that filled out the connections of the HighPoint RocketCache 3240X8. This RAID controller has the capability to handle up to 4 SATA drives that can be any combination of SSDs and HDDs. Of course, at least one of them must be an SSD of up to 64Gb in order to take advantage of the caching aspects of the RAID set up. If you've been following along over the course of the last year or so, you're probably aware of it being a part of the Spectre upgrade from my original Hercules file server.

 

The whole shebang was built into a Silverstone Precision Series PS-07, Micro-ATX case that literally was just the right height to fit into the space I had for it. It went together great, and that case, as expected was big enough for all the drives, quiet and unobtrusive..... everything you want in a file server. Over time though, I've become increasingly unhappy with the HighPoint controller. It started off poorly with the included disk that had the wrong software, exacerbated by really, really bad documentation that made me reminescent about 70's Japanese model instructions! The thing that has bugged me this whole time was that it's RAID setup made one of the 2, 2Tb drives disappear entirely (no, it's not set up as mirrored). The capper was when I initialized the 3rd, 2Tb drive, the controller made that disappear as well! While, I'm a 100% certain that it probably can be rectified by some settings in the user UNfriendly software, I've decided that it's just not worth the continued hassle. 

Right in the middle of all this hoo-ha, I had decided to pull the living room HTPC and sell off it's guts for an upgrade. Although the Gigabyte GA-EP45 motherboard isn't worth much, the 8Gb of Mushkin RAM sitting in it could fetch upwards of $100+! As my sell-off/upgrade/purchase routines tend to be intricate and linked; it occurred to me that as an HTPC in today's world, it completely didn't need the power of a "Core" machine. I had retrograded my bedroom HTPC from a Westmere i3 to a Celeron of that generation with no ill results at all. It occurred to me that the "Brazos"-chipped Asus E35M1-M Pro board was completely wasting the graphical end of it's APU concept living out it's life as a file server in a cabinet! The features that originally drew me to it as a server board such as fanless processor, lack of need for a graphics card, and USB 3.0 were just as, if not more valuable in an HTPC. On top of which, a change to a different board would allow me the opportunity to resolve a few issues that has to do with personal quirks.

One of them being that I've always used an IBM RT-3200 compact TrackPoint keyboard as my server interface. Yes, I'm aware that most people imply use the web interface, but you might be aware that I'm not like other people! In fact, one of the four monitors in my desk setup has it's VGA input connected to the server to I can interact with it directly. I've tried KVMs and don't like them. Hey; at least this way, I don't have to have a separate mouse, which by the way is the reason I've always struggled with the Asus E35 MB. It only has one PS/2 port and no adapter I've ever tried (4) has allowed me to ability to connect both of those functions on my RT-3200. 

After quite a bit of head-scratching and research, I settled on an Intel DQ965GF. Why this board? Well.... you already know about the 2 PS/2 ports. So here are some other items that I really liked: Intel Gigabit NIC (can we say way faster than Realtek), 4 RAM sockets, integrated graphic (natch), 8 (vs. 4 or 6) SATA ports, 2 PCI slots, 2 PCIe slots, 6 USB ports on the back panel (plus 2 more headers on the MB), and socket 775 for which I got both dual core CPU and a quiet HSF in hand. There are some other random items that might come into play at some point such as Firewire, and a parallel port as well, but who knows right? This board ended up costing me $17! I bought a $12.99 PCI-e card to give me 2 USB 3.0 ports on the back panel, plus an internal header that will give me front-panel USB 3.0 for the first time. For some inexplicable reason the Asus board only had that on the back panel! Anything else? 

I'm considering an alternative to using Windows Home Server 2011. Not sure yet. That may be a down the road thing, after I've fully tested it out on the test server that's at school. 

At the very least, I'll finally be able to see all 6Tb of storage from the 3 Hitachi 2Tb drives! I'm also going to plug up the old Antec SATA "hotswap" drive bay in the other 5.25" location. This thing will allow me to move data in bulk directly from the Blackbird workstation to the file server. It has two "hotswap" drive bays one of which has a Hitachi 1.5Tb drive in it for exactly that purpose. This will allow me to move files at SATA bus speed which is WAY faster than even Gigabit Ethernet! So yeah..... I'm doing one of those moving forward by taking a step back things. The Stay tuned and see how this turns out.

Old School ThinkPad

I go through so many computers, that sometimes a machine will fall through the cracks. Although, I'll occasionally need to clean out "the crumbs", I'll also find that jewel as well. In this case, it was the titanium lidded Z61m that I had worked diligently on to bring back from "discarded project" of another ThinkPadder to become a "do-everything" mobile workstation. Unfortunately, it never fully came to fruition due to a locked BIOS. Now, I've dealt with other machines with the BIOS locked before, and in general it's not an issue, however this particular machine wasn't recognizing the wifi card. I tried a number of cards with the same results. It came down to that it was either a defect on the board with was highly unlikely, or that it was shut off in the BIOS somewhere. This is not a very good state of affairs for a mobile workstation! After a while it fell by the wayside, especially since around that time I fell under a proverbial avalanche of ThinkPads! On top of that, many of those machines were more updated (T61), or more powerful (T60p). So, it sat forlornly in the "boneyard" under the workbench. It even suffered the ignominity of giving up it's updated parts (T7200 CPU, 4Gb RAM, 80Gb SSD) to other "front-burner" projects. 

When things were looking it's worse, a plot-twist appeared. As part of my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project, I was reexamining my stock of IDE/PATA laptop drives and decided to clear them out while their value was high. I listed them on the ThinkPad forum, from which an acquaintance offered a trade for one of the 160Gb drives. Among the things he had to offer was a derelict, but working Z61m! A couple of nights ago, the working base of his Z61m got mated to my screen and other top parts. The parts box coughed up 4Gb of RAM that came out of my old X300, and a 160Gb Intel X18 SSD. 

Then this morning, after a BIOS "whitelist" hack, it got an Atheros 5418 "N" wireless card! This was the capper! The very reason that it originally ended up under the bench. Now, it can be a fully MOBILE workstation! Yeah, I gave up a nicer ATI Mobility Radeon GPU on the other board, but the reality is that, it's not something I'll really miss given what I'll be using this machine to do. What'll this machine be expected to do?

In a word..... "gruntwork", that's what. My primary portable computer is the uber-sleek ThinkPad X1, however, it's a sports car of laptops. You can haul tree branches in a Porsche, but you won't find it very enjoyable. The old red pickup (Z61m) of laptops, on the other hand, may not be very sleek, or up-to-date, but it can do pretty much anything...... not fast, or stylishly, but it'll do it without complaint.