Globemaster Server..... Under Development....

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.

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!

 

"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.