Hi Ravnwolf,
Welcome to the forum. Glad you are here.

Very nice setup. Thanks for sharing your component list with us. Will be a good reference for me when I get the nerve to move over to a DIY WHS server.

I noticed you blog post referred to a Raid 5 server. Did you really decide to add WHS instead, but just did not update the blog

Have any pics of the finished server? You said you were planning some additions to storage. Wondering if you are considering adding an internal 4 or 5 bay backplane, easy access enclosure, or are you thinking about adding a seperate eSATA or USB enclosure tower?

Thanks agin for posting. You must have some connection with We Got Served (Update: Excuse the reference to WGS. Apparently I got you link mixed with another. I would have sworn I saw WGS in your web address link. I was worng ). Hope you will stay around here as well. Welcome again, Ravnwolf!
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

Thanks for the welcome!

I had not updated the post. When I first wrote the post, I had not decided on which way I was going to go. Once it was built, however, I decided to toss WHS on it as an experiment and I haven't looked back. I like the ability of easily backing up some of my windows machines (especially my wife's computer since she believes technology is out to get her... lol).

As for adding additional storage, I haven't made up my mind on that yet. It will definitely be some type of external closer just to keep the heat issue minimized. I can add 1 or 2 more fans to the case but I don't really want to cram a few more drives in it. I tried adding an older 300GB external USB that I've had for a few years, but once it was added to the storage pool, we started having issues with saving files to the shares. Apparently the 300GB drive is on its way out. The case has eSata also, so I may go that route. I currently have 2.4TB of capacity left, so I'm not hurting quite yet - but my media library keeps growing and growing so that will eventually be gone. We stream media from the server to a Mac Mini as well as an Xbox 360.

I'm attaching one picture of the unit (it's the black case on the right). It's in my 48" rack that I have my switch, wireless router, VOIP modem, linux server (running VMWare server for virtual servers that we run on it) and my fiber connection for our Internet access.

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Manager, Plant TiftNet
http://www.donovanadkisson.com, http://www.tiftontalks.com

nice homeserver u got there

offtopic this thread is becoming populair:D

Thanks for getting back Ravnwolf. Sorry about my delay in replying. I've had a major project that was (and still is ) consuming lots of my time lately.

It would really be nice if you decide to add an external eSATA enclosure to your DIY. A lot of us here have had trouble using eSATA on the MediaSmart Servers (MSS) and this may be realted to the particular chip set used in the eSATA port in the MSS. It would sure be nice to see how your install went with the eSATA box with a DIY. Please let us know how it goes if you decide to go that way.

A couple of threads that may interst you (in case you have not found them yet ) regarding eSATA enclosures are listed here for your information.

The first is a thread I started about some troubles I had over several months regarding my eSATA tower (I have the AMS Venus T5). This thread talks about the thing I had to make sure were "right" to avoid issues with the attached box. Please don't let any comments I or others make discourage you from going the eSATA route. As I said, it would be nice to know your experience with the DIY and most likely the issue I had could have been the eSATA port itself and you have a DIY so may not face any issues at all. You could always go over the "right" things in my thread to help resolve isses if they do occur as a number of us have "crossed that bridge" already. Link to the first thread is here.

I went with an AMS device because I got my enclousre before the Sans Digital TowerRAID Series Official Post thread was started. If I were doing it over again, I probably would go with Sans Digital mainly becuase the have a support thread right here on the forum and Stanley is very helpful. He travels a good bit so you may not always get an "immediate" response, but he will help you when he is able to get back to the thread. It is my impression that most folks on these forums who have external inclosures have the Sans Digital enclosures and are happy with them (in general). As I said, I bought my AMS enclosure quite a while ago even before I started posting regularly on this forum and befor the Sans Digital thread was started, but another reason I got the AMS was the fifth bay and at the time the cost per bay looked good. Turns out I might not be able to use the 5th bay because of a limitation of the MSS. I will be trying it on my next HDD pruchase becaue I have 4 or the 5 bays in the external enclosure filled now. I'll let you know

You probably already know this, but you just need to make sure your eSATA port is "port multiplier" aware. The EX 47x series (first generation) MSS machines are Port Multiplier aware, but the EX 48x series (second generation) MSS is not. Of course, you have neither of these, but just check to make sure your a PM aware chip controlling your eSATA port.

Sans Digital has at least two multi-bay eSATA models (a 4-bay and 8-bay as I recall). Of course the AMS Venus T5 does work as well if you wanted to go that way but I think most here would recommend the Sans Digital models for reasons stated above.

I probalby gave you more info than you needed at this point. As you said, you have a good bit of extra HDD space available right now. But you know you can never have enough disk space

Keep on posting and come back often. This is a great forum and folks here are very knowledgable and helpful. I think you will like it here.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

Also, another nice thing about keeping all the HDs in the same case as the motherboard is that you can power everything off of one of the many high-quality, efficient, quiet, reliable ATX PSU's available on the market. Many of those external cases have noisy power supplies of unknown quality, often lacking power factor correction, etc.

Right now I've got 9 drives in an Antec P182 with a Supermicro 5-in-3 backplane. It's a nice case, but the bottom drive bay can be a PITA to deal with (you can't add or remove drives without unplugging everything and sliding the whole assembly out. Getting a real rackmounted system together in my basement is something I've always wanted to try (maybe even including rackmounted UPS, keyboard, switch, etc.), but I'm sure it would run into big $$$ pretty quickly.

I agree, I don't need the extra power consumption/line noise etc. of questionable PSUs in those external boxes.

The thing with 5-in-3 backplanes is that it seems that there is always a rub with them. There seems to be some issue of needing to modify something or as in your case one of the drives is not removable. Some of these reviews talk about these issues: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRe ... 6817121405


I was wondering what exactly is going on in your case with the bottom drive bay. Are saying that particular slot won't release its drive unless you pull the whole assembly out?

All the 4 in 3 reviews seems to be positive and they seem to not have the issues of the 5 in 3 units. However I want to have 5 in 3.

Rack mount seems nice, as you said expensive and there's something about ever having to move or carry a box with 24 drives that probably weighs 70+ lbs with all those drives in there. I know its the same or similar weight on the other cases, but the shapes are more amenable to carrying or moving. I read some reviews that some of the rackmount cases need two people to put into the rack. Also the shape of those makes them seem delicate if not fastened securely to a rack.

One thing in order to be power efficient, I really want to have something reasonable like 450 or 500w as the PSU. I imagine that 20 WDC Green Power drives would in theory consume 120-140w and the system board and CPU about 150w to 200w at most. So to run at the 80% point of efficiency I want something in the 450W range or even lower. The problem I suspect is during spin-up when the PSU may not be able to supply that kind of current. So I suppose a staggered spin-up is crucial to build a power efficient server. What do you use and do you know of any good PSUs for about 18-20 drives?

Sorry for the confusion. I was referring to the P182's standard built-in drive rack, which is at the bottom front of the case, not the Supermicro 5-in-3 bay.

My Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B works well and is very well built. The only issue I have with it is that the rear fan is very noisy and also sticks pretty far back in the case. It's easy to remove though, so I ended up doing just that. I rely on the negative pressure generated by the P182's case fans to suck enough air past the drives to cool them (since I'm mostly running WD green power drives, that's a pretty easy task). You're right though, the drives are more closely packed than they would be in a 4-in-3 rack, so if I were running hot drives I'd probably have to keep the noisy fan in there.

By the way, that Newegg picture is misleading and shows the CSE-M35T-1B flipped over on its side. It actually holds the drives vertically. What looks like the "bottom" bay in the Newegg photos is really the rightmost bay.



I'm using an Antec EarthWatts 380. My system idles somewhere around 100W (as measured from the wall outlet), so I'm nowhere near the peak efficiency of 80%+, but even if the PSU is only 70% efficient at that load, it shouldn't be more than a few watts difference. The Supermicro 5-in-3 does support staggered spinup, though with 4 WD 1TB greens and a 1TB black (my whs boot drive), startup power isn't much of an issue. For 20 drives I think you'd want to use staggered spinup. I'm not sure what's involved in getting that to work though.

Thanks Ravnwolf i think you saved me a lot of tedioius research

I notice you have no video card and there is no onboard video, how do you install the OS, put an old one in then pull it out later? I know you can remote admin later but do you have any issues booting, ie does the motherboard complain there is no video card? Or maybe you had an old card you used?

I am interested in the future expandability to eSata towers if need be, i dont see a built in esata connector on the board, but i guess those sans digital towers come with their own cards to add the functionality.

Oh, one other thing...is there any reason you went with such a small drive for the main OS? You can easily store WHS on a large drive you're also using for storage "safely" right?

Thanks for the info, I feel a lot more confident using the Supermicro now. However it turns out I am in need of a new WHS since my MSS died and my custom due to finances will not be as ambitious as I first anticipated. In order to build a quick replacement I will build something but probably target a lower price. The Antec earthwatts is a great suggestion, I think I will be using that exact PSU in my build.

I would hope that with 20 drives and each using about 12W on spinup, I could get away with the 380W PSU. It seems these new PSUs are 80% efficient at any load so I could just go ahead and buy a more powerful PSU and not worry so much about wasted power.

I didn't realize at the time the way WHS worked. If I had known, it would have been the same drive as the others. I was approaching it from the point of view when I built linux storage servers; main HD was for the OS and another drive was for the data, etc.

As for the video card, I failed to list it, but I had several old video cards running around the house, so I captured one and tossed it in there. Nothing fancy.

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Manager, Plant TiftNet
http://www.donovanadkisson.com, http://www.tiftontalks.com

Nice setups!