The "Globemaster" Home Server In Flight!

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!

"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.