More thoughts on my next project here

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9759

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

dbone1026,

Well I just got my Chenbro 5 in 3 Hotswap HDD Cage today.. Just a part of the DYI build.. The question I have for you what would you recommend on MOB & CPU to have a system do everything yours can do, but allow to play or stream movie to two different room at the same time. I was thinking about a Intel chip... but AMD seems to better pricing.

Video would be SD.... I already have Cat6 running through the entire house.

thank you

Shawshank allows for multiple video streams to be played at once. I have confirmed two streams at once but I imagine I could push it to 3 or 4 streams. I know folks who do this with the current Media Smart Servers. The only potential issue would be if you are running CPU intensive programs (streaming is not, but something like on the fly transcoding is) which would definitely have an impact on your streaming. I upgraded my CPU to a quad core because I do have some transcoding going on at times (to mobile devices)

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Good to know your current setup supports multiple video streams.... Yeah I would like to do some on the fly transcoding and not to take away from streaming. So a quad core cpu would help out on transcoding (to mobile devices)? Why did you go with a AMD & not Intel?

Thank you for your help

I would have gone with a core i5 or core i7 BUT that would have required me replacing my motherboard (which I did not want to do). My mobo only supports AMD which is why I upgraded to a quad core AMD CPU. If you look at my holiday project writeup you will see I discuss the upgrade and the performance with transcoding. When I was using the dual core CPU I had a difficult time getting a stream to play on my wife's iPad/iPhone. Also, if I was streaming a movie to one of my HTPCs/players, transcoding to a mobile device struggled heavily. I haven't had a chance to do too much testing, but initial tests show much improved performance with the quad core (also may come in handy down the road if I decide to move some tv recording/commercial cutting processes over to Shawshank from my desktop)

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

One thing I forgot to mention (I think I did discuss somewhere in this thread). I had issues with the Chenbro 5 in 3 Cage when I first received. I ordered three of them and two were defective. I ended up having to return the two defective ones to only get two more defective ones. Finally after returning the second defective batch the following batch worked fine. The defective ones I had contained a bad sensor (there is an option to mount a fan to the back of the cage which I did not do, but the cage thought I did mount and the fan was defective so an alarm would sound). Just bad luck on my part when I received initially, but I have had zero issues since (knock on wood)

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

How's the system running now... Anything new to report?

Still plugging along. As far as streaming performance I have had zero issues streaming all my content (including high bitrate Blurays) since I shut off demigrator. I am sitting around 26TB currently. I may do a server recovery soon though. I am getting some errors with my NIC (I think some settings may have gotten screwed up somewhere) and I have noticed that my WHS console has become a little unstable with some of the add ins. If I do a recovery I will report back

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

So I went to access Shawshank and it became non responsive. Shut it down, turned it back on, everything would start to load and I would get to the WHS logo and loading screen. Then I would just get nothing but a black screen. Pulled the O/S drive out and put it into my PC, no errors on the drove. I decided to format the drive and do a server recovery. With WHS installed on a USB drive I start going through the process. The first step when it asks to add drivers I add the floppy disc with the SASLP drivers. 2 of the drives appear but then WHS pretty much locks up on me. Rebooted, and this time I decided to load the SAT2-MV8 drivers first. No issues, driver loads and all drives appear. So I then load the SASLP drivers, and same issue, a few drives appear and then WHS locks up. If I leave WHS alone I eventually get a blue screen.

So I am thinking that the SASLP card went bad. What is odd is that when i first boot up WHS in the DOS screen it shows the SASLP card spinning up all drives without issue. Given this is where the WHHS install hangs up I can't imagine it is anything else. Ideas on what else t o troubleshoot? Otherwise I will just have to buy a new card

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

I just want though an issues with one of my MV8's which caused a BSOD and would drop out drives. Since it was a new build I wondered if I may have caused the issue with an incorrect BIOS Setting so I reset the BIOS back to Optomized Settings and the server would start to boot see all the cool cards and then Crash with a BSOD. Soooo I set the BIOS to its Defaults and the server booted fine. I shut it down and reconfigured the BIOS back where I had it and rebooted the server but the issue I encountered with the drives returned so I RMA'd the card and swapped it out and no more problems.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Sounds like the card may be bad, though it would be interesting to try it in another system to see if it misbehaves there as well. Have you tried booting with the card in but no drives connected to it?

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Well, disconnected all drives from the card. I can load the driver without issue and WHS doesn't freeze

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Yeah, I think the card went bad. Is it sad that I am tempted to basically replace everything when all I need is just a replacement one card !!!

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin

Not as sad as those who bring their servers out to the drive way and run them over a few times. I got less then 2 weeks out of the MV8 which I RMA'd. I generally do not run into many issues but with this new build I am doing I have already RMA'd 3 items, the MV8, a backplane because of an LED issue and a WD 2TB Black. I do not have the option for the drive way solution because my Mazda is to low to get on top of the beast.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

If it was a battle between Shawshank and my 2003 Passat, Shawshank would win!

_________________
Cheers,
Damian

DIY WHS - 12.5TB and growing, too many gadgets to list

Did you read the MediaSmartServer blog today?
Blog - http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com
"Like a midget at a urinal, stay on your toes!" - Lieutenant Frank Drebin