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That's a C17 Globemaster on a test flight. My Globemaster is now in full-blown production mode!
About a foot from my left knee is a Silverstone CS380 case holding a fully working home server. It's running FreeNAS 11.3. Right now the only thing on it is a share called "media" that's holding 400+ movies that I've ripped into a non-DVD form, meaning that the files are small enough to get squirted through the network to a tablet to watch. Eventually, I'll create spaces for my music and photos to live there as well and all our media will be easily available and I won't have to go and find it for my wife and hand it to her on a flashdrive so she can post something on social media! I will say that it wasn't easy.
I started out thinking that I'd be doing something like this small form-factor box tucked into a corner somewhere.
Then I fell in love with the robustness of FreeNAS and really went for the idea of a ZFS storage array that had the ability to withstand 2 drives failing at once. In the middle of trying to build a 6 drive beast to do that, I went way off the rails and feeling like I'd never get the thing up and running!
I was having dreams/nightmares of rack servers with dozens of hot-swap bays.
Ultimately, I was able to settle on a comfortable middling size compromise when I found the Silverstone CS380. In reality, it's just a mid-tower that's had it front end specially adapted to hold 8 "hot-swap" drivebays. The back end of it is really just simple ATX.
The Supermicro X9SCL/SCM motherboard slid right in without a hitch and there was plenty of room for a normal tower style heatsink/fan assembly. Once I got the type of RAM that it needed solved, I was able to get 16Gb (8Gb x 2) ECC RAM out of China off of eBay. That leaves me 2 more sockets for future expansion. I have all six drives connected directly to the motherboard, but also have an IBM/LSI controller along with two empty bays for future expansion.
It took me a while to get everything loaded, up and running, but Youtube is an endless well of information these days. You just have to expend the time to find the right videos and watch them! Yup, I screwed up my first drive pool build, somehow allowing it to access the 16Gb SSD that I had put in there for possible future cache use which screwed up how it balanced out it's space allocation. In any case, I figure it out, pulled the drive, deleted the pool and rebuilt it. So now, it does indeed correctly gives me a bit over 7 Terabytes of storage out of 6, Hitachi Ultrastar 2Tb drives. Yup, that's right; I'm sacrificing around 5Tb of drive space to redundancy! But hey, that's why we build these sorts of things to start with right? Oh, and I also has something clearly reinforced to me while watching the 500Gb of movies being copied over.
The standing rule of thumb for FreeNAS is that you need 1 gig of RAM for each Terabyte of storage that you have. A little much for a file server, right? Uhhh, no, not really.... I was watching the console data as the file transfer was being made, and it was using something like 80% of the available memory out of the 16Gb that I have in the machine! If I hadn't had enough, it would have really slowed down that operation! Lesson learned...
Do I wish I had one of these cool little cube builds!?! In a word, No..... In any case, I might still build a little box mini-server for my brother-in-law anyway!
This picture of C17s at "final assembly" in Long Beach is appropriate for my "Globemaster" server build. It seems to have taken forever! It started out as a build based on the Supermicro "X7" generation motherboard. These were LGA771, Xeon boards that were contemporaries of the early "Core" processors. So yeah; it's a bit older. To make a long story short, I never did get that board up and running correctly, so I decided to jump forward.
Forward to the X9 generation. That's LGA1155 and Intel C202/204 chipset, which on the desktop side took the Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors. These are for much smaller processors as compared to the X7 that I had started with. There's only 4 RAM slots and one processor socket, but it's got what I need. My board is a very commonly available X9SCL. I chose this board, because it's cheap (about $50) and commonly available. It also can take regular i3 cpus and DDR3 RAM. But I have higher aspirations than that!
I want to use ECC memory (which is recommended for FreeNAS), so I also needed to use a Xeon processor as well. Of course, me, being me; I want this thing to be as low powered as I can. Although there are 12 Xeons that will work for this board, I want one of the 2 low powered versions. The E3-1220L (20w), or E3-1260L (45w). That's versus the 80 or 95w that the regular E3 gen processors normally run! Since the E3-1260L is almost impossible to find, I settled for the E3-1220L that I found for about $110 out of China on eBay. Although it only runs at about 2.2Ghz vs. the regular ones which range from 3.1 all the way up to 3.6Ghz, I figured that a file server would be fine with the lower speed.
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It turns out that, that part was easy. The hard part was finding the correct memory to work with the board and processor! First of all, it needed to be ECC, and that's along with the correct type, speed, etc. For servers, it's complex. Finding DDR3 that ECC wasn't very hard. Finding it that's "unbuffered" that's also in a halfway decent density was the issue! The board maxes out at 32Gb, which means 4 modules of 8Gb each. I can't really afford that at the moment, but I can do 2 modules for 16Gb. What I'm probably going to end up doing is to pick up 8Gb in 4 modules here locally. I hate to do it that way since at least 2 will end up being pitched at some point down the road when I want to upgrade. But I can get myself going at $25 vs. trying to find the ghost memory and having the machine wait for who knows how much longer!
