Plan A Computer Build: Addendum

When the Computer Club met this week, we had a little deviation. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about it. This week, at our regular meeting time, during which we've been planning a Mini-ITX gaming build, most of the students were tied up with other activities. However, the one student who did show up is currently, my most advanced having built his own machine among other experiences. Therefore, what he wanted to learn about was the "next stage".... dabbling in servers to work with Plex, transcoding, etc. Conveniently, I have such a beast just sitting around in our computer room, a cast-off from a commercial client; a Dell PowerEdge SC440. 

Granted, it's really not much of a server. Machines such as these occupied the low-end of the market back in 2006, which is why it was surplus and had been sitting in a corner of our workroom for the last year and a half! However, it turned out to be perfect for a 16 year-old looking for something to learn on. What is it? Well.... it's from the Core/Core 2 Duo generation built around an LGA-775 and Intel's 3000 chipset. That give's it the ability to run relatively modern operating systems, yet is old enough to have a wealth of cheap hardware available.

If you'll look at the SC440 motherboard, what do we see? For one, it's a full-on server board.... but cut down on features to some degree. No SCSI or SAS controller. One CPU socket. But critically, it does have the ability to take Xeon processors, and ECC RAM. There are also 3 PCIe (x8, x4, x1) and 2 32-bit PCI expansion slots. This gives the machine great latitude to accessing a WIDE variety of cards to do just about anything the owner might want for cheap. It's main weakness?

If you look closely at this image, you'll see that there are just 2 dedicated bays for 3.5" hard disk drives. However, there are 2, 5.25" optical drive bays which can be made use of, plus a 3.5" "floppy" bay, which could be used as well. Although, there are only 4 SATA headers on the MB, it seems unlikely that someone would need more with this box!

I must say though, that for a baby sys-admin looking to learn; I couldn't think of a more ideal machine. Although, it's hard to tell from pictures, this thing is solid steel! He's not going to break it! It can take serious hardware. Software for the most part is free, ranging from the ubiquitous Ubuntu, to FreeNAS to more obscure distros. Upgrade parts are cheap! And best of all..... it's free!

"Globemaster" Server

Much like the gestation period of an elephant, or the development of the actual C17 "Globemaster", the new server build is underway!

In case you're wondering why the home server got a new name...... the size differences makes that pretty obvious. On the floor (on it's side) is the "Spectre" progression of the original C-130 "Hercules" server. It was literally maxed out! All 6 drives spaces had some sort of drive in it. All 6 SATA port on the MB was occupied. I even had to use the IDE (!!!) port for the optical drive! The rather compact Silverstone case was literally stuffed to the brim. It was time.

As I've discuss in earlier posts, I was able to acquire an incomplete Fractal Design Define XL R2 off of Craigs List for $30 a few months ago. In reality it wasn't all that incomplete, just missing the 3 fans, and some screws: items that I have ready replacements, so a non-issue. You can clearly see that sitting next to a regular ATX-sized case like the Define R4, the XL is a beast. 

So much so that it's EATX (Extended ATX) size gave me the option of using full-blown server parts designed to go into "rack-mount" cases. .....which by the way are very cheap to buy on the used market since the demand for them is so limited. I picked up a SuperMicro X7DBE dual processor board for $50 (after shipping). 

It cost me another $30 or so to get the I/O shield and giant heatsinks AND another $10 for the 2 Xeon 5148 processors. Yes, I did say $10! Yup; old server parts are cheap. 

 $30 more for 16Gb (4 x 4Gb) sticks of DDR2 Kingston ECC/FB RAM. 

Why all this trouble? You guys already know that I've convinced myself to go with FreeNAS (especially now that Windows Home Server is dead), but I've also decided to go "whole-hog" and move to ZFS or Zetabyte File System. And after studying up on the subject, I've decided that although I don't need ZFS2 (2 disk failure protection), I'd like to have the highest level of efficiency with ZFS1 (obviously, 1 disk failure protection) which is .8333% space utilization by using 6 drives. That'll give me roughly 10Tb of storage space using 6, 2Tb drives. That's a lot of drives, right?

Oh No, there's more! Since I'd like to use Plex on this machine to serve up the media, I'm going to want to have a caching SSD for that since Plex runs best when transcoding with one of those. Lucky I've already got one, but that's 7 drives!?! I've only got 6 SATA headers onboard!

 

SuperMicro to the rescue.... once again, with a SAT2-MV8, 8-Port SATA controller for another $17.50! Woe is me! It'll give me the ability to add more drives or move to ZFS2 someday if I feel the need.

Hey, at least I don't need to buy another NIC for this thing since it has 2 of those already ..... plus a serial and a parallel port, because everyone needs some of those. 

Unfortunately, I've run into some road-blocks to finishing this monster! The case is so big, I need extensions for my power supply cables! I also need an adapter to run to an extra 12v header on the MB. Since it has dual Xeons, it not only requires an 8-pin aux plug, but another 4-pin as well! On top of that, there's a little problem of screws! Don't get me wrong; I've got lots of those, but the case comes with drive trays with rubber mounting rings, I need extra-long screws. And since I have 6 of those things......

But these are relatively minor issues to the "Globemaster" taking off! Not a bad upgrade for less than $200.

 

It Can All Be Stored..... But Then What?

In today's round of email ads, came something called the Seagate Backup Plus 4Tb.... that's, as opposed to the "Slim" which is 2Tb. It's being sold for $150 from Newegg, which of course means that, that's the de facto online price now. I'm always looking at storage because we all know, no one has enough storage and it's something which is always nibbling at the edges of my consciousness. Especially right now while I'm in the process of rebuilding my own file server. Anyway: so here's this huge (capacity-wise), "portable" (form-factor-wise) drive for a pretty amazing price. So I started digging around a little. 

 

This whole shindig started about a year ago with the Backup Plus Fast 4Tb drive. It sold for about $210 and was even thicker. It turns out that the "Fast" was fast  because it had not 1, but 2 Momentus M9t 2Tb drives in it set up in a RAID "0" (striped) setup, making it's read/writes the fastest out there among bus-powered drives. Of course, stacking 2, 9.5mm drives on top of each other makes for a FAT drive.... plus the extra hardware made for an expensive one as well.

So, this year, Seagate brings out the Momentus M018 drive that's 15mm thick, but is 4Tb all in one case! Yes, they crammed 5, 800Gb platters into one case! I'm not a Seagate fan, but all I can say is..... WOW!!! Am I going to run out and buy one of these things? Uhhh, no..... but it is very interesting. I'm still in the middle of acquiring more 2Tb Hitachi Deskstar so I can get to a 5-drive ZFS array on the FreeNAS file server. I know it's kind of quaint in these days of huge 4 and 6Tb desktop drives, but I'm conservative and paranoid! Now, if I can get my hands on one of the Backup Plus Fast drives at a good price, I might strongly consider doing that, so I can pull the drives to go in my Drobo Mini, bumping it's 5Tb (2, 1.5Tb, and 2, 1Tb) capacity to 7Tb.... then putting a couple of SSDs into that case to make for one very fast external drive! But what does one do with all that storage?

 

Media of course! I've found that backing up just doesn't use up much space. However; media file storage and serving does! While I was getting out the 200 DVD "Mega-Changer" and putting that beast back into the A/V cabinet, I came to the conclusion that I really wanted something easier. That thing was fine "back in the day" and has more than served it's purpose keeping the kids from handling the physical media, but we all know the day of physical media is over. As it sits, I have over 300 movies ripped already AND routinely carry them ALL around on a portable drive/access point from which they can be consumed via pretty much any digital device. Of course, I don't just have the crunched down MP4 files for iPad use, but also the original decripted files as well. Yeah, that takes up a LOT of storage space.

I don't think anyone would argue that the up-to-date delivery method of the computer file is way more efficient and convenient. The issue is the time it takes to rip all the movies and then to store all those file! This is going to take a whole change in mentality for me.

Up until this point, my servers have always been Friday to Sunday machines..... that is a file server that I turn on over the weekend, so that our laptops can do their backup and play the occasional playlist on a quiet Saturday morning. But our needs for data are different now. We want them to server our media files 24/7. We want to get that picture to go on the Facebook page on Monday night. We want to play our iTunes playlist throughout the house on Tuesday evening. We want to pull up that the old Star Wars Ep. 1 (God help us!) on Thursday night. Well.... you get the idea. What's the purpose of ripping all our CDs and DVDs if we only carry them with us on vacation?

So, the concept is that the rebuilt "Spectre" server will be a high up-time machine. Maybe not 24/7, but at least maybe 6pm to 1am/most days of the week computer that's there to feed all those tablets and TVs scattered all over the house.