DE = Drive Extender

MSS = MediaSmart Server

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....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

Well the beast took it's first steps, Actually powered up.
PSU cable works perfectly turning on and off by mobo control.

If your wondering why it's sitting on the floor, I'm afraid if I put it on anything with wheels it would start taxiing around the house.

With 16 fans in there The Beast does ROAR!.
Hopefully I can tame its bark a bit.

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Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

DE is Drive Extender which is the WHS software that manages the storage pool. MSS is MediaSmart Server which is the HP product that inspired this forum. HP MSS.

Grats...thanks for the replies

This new 4220 case, has no 3.5" openings on the right hand side.
I was going to cut openings for three fan controllers but have decided not to mess up the face.
I have instead opted for manual fan controls and will use drive temp monitoring to set each fan individually useing.
this arrangment.
I will mount five of these in the back upper slots giving me ten manual adjustments.
I found them online for $5.95ea.

Also after much thought I will be using a basic 2.5" hard drive as my os drive.
WD Scorpio Blue 500GB, nothing fancy.
When powering on the sata controllers slow the bootup process to the point having a super fast startup drive just doesn't matter. And from resume from sleep mode it won't matter either.
Granted SSD is very cool, A velociraptor a decent compromise, but I just can't justify the cost to benifit ratio.
So cheap is good.
If I want this is easily changed later.

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Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

This build is unreal. I know when i read about you attempting to do it, i kinda thought it was a crazy idea but wow. Great job so far on the Build and the fabricating that you have done. I can not wait to see more pictures as this must be the first build of its kind. I am sure thought that those fans are letting you know they are on for sure. I just have 1 Norco and they howl throughout the house ( Have fanboard from Cavediver coming in thank god ) but with all those fans going at once. Wow.

Once again great build !

Thanks, but other than the stacking idea it all came from Andromeda, Shawshank, SuperWHS, etc...
without this forum it would be just another EX49X box.

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Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

Ya i hear ya on that. I read about Andromeda and after reading about it with the mass amounts of storage i was sold ! I am not familiar with Shawshank and SuperWHS. I have read many many things on AVS forums and new to this forum as i found it on a link for Andromeda. The Norco cases are great and very happy i switched. I had a Silverstone CW03 and it was nice with the touchscreen but being limited to hold 6 Hard Drives, the wow of the touchscreen did not matter at that point. Cavediver will agree with me on this but Blu Ray is just much more enjoyable than DVD format. The Surround Sound and Picture Quality can not be touched and i think that is a big reason why the Norco has been such a hit. It was one of the biggest selling points for me to sell my old case and get a Norco for myself. I get jealous looking at Cavediver's screenshots of 20+ drives going. I just started out and have 4-1.5TB drives and 1 new WD Green 2TB drive. Using a 2.5 for the OS.

To be able to store that many Drives in a case with that price point is great. I will say though if someone like Cavediver did not fabricate a Fan Board to quiet the storm down, it would be hard to keep this case. Those 80mm Fans to howl. Cant wait to get my new Fan Board in with my new 1600rpm Fans.

I think your build is great though. True i will agree with you that others on the forum such as Cavediver and also others have inspired us all to want to create these data monsters, but your build is very unique though. You say it is just mating to half's but still hats off and can not wait to see more pictures and see you fill this massive creation !

Ok, an evaluation copy of WHS is installed just so I can play with drives and MCE2005 integration.
Followed the instructions found on greenbutton, and indeed mediacenter does launch.
However when I attempt to play anything through it I get a raging BSOD!...
This was a distant desire on my part and I will probably postpone it till vail gets here.
It's just too cludgy for my server. Which must be rock solid stable.

The Areca controllers have a slow bootup process very much like a raid controllers.
I'm convinced the basic drive was a good idea, an ssd would not have resulted in much of a performance enhancment. Now if the controllers did not have a 1.0 minute startup cycle an instant on SSD would have been awsome, as it is the little drive has plenty of time to spin up and so is just a few seconds slower than an SSD. IF this were my workstation with much higher i/o performance needs a SSD would be choice #1.
I also have the same issue as others in that there is an absence of drive temp readings.
I did a little research and this is a common issue due to the manfacturer of the controller using Raid bios, raid cards do not allow direct communication to the drive hence no SMART data, then when they buil their JBOD/SATA/SAS non raid cards they reuse the bios.
The Areca website is a bit sparse on info too.
Given their performance I won't grumble too much about the missing temps, I will stick a few probes in there later.
Data transfer is outstanding. on my test bench with a 100mb network I was hiting 95%-100% utilization sustained.
It moved a 1.5GB file group in about a minute, a little curious what this will do on my GB network.
No sign of the realtek network issues others reported so far.

The funny thing is the WHS console still takes a long time to open, the only add-in is disk manager.
So much for the idea a realy fast system would help the console.

Will re-format and start from scratch tomorrow, now that I have all the drivers figured out.
So far not one hardware issue. YEAH!! will try to do a stress test tomorrow as well.

_________________
Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

I'm enjoying watching this come together, thanks for sharing your progress.

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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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Your welcome thanks for the inspirational site.

Here's what the wireframe looks like.
Heres a little thing that puts a smile on my face. (count the cores)
I know. It's only got four, but it shows up as eight! TeHeTehe.....
And the temps are good.

_________________
Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

Nice. Any new pictures of your fabrication ? Any pictures of the front of the case after mating the two together ?

How do you like those Areca controllers ? I have a Norco and was looking into those cards as they have 4 SAS outputs and a output on the back to use with a expansion card to add another Norco.

Funny that you would ask.
I am looking at a 25U rack today a friend wants to donate to the cause, I have been holding off face pics till I get it mounted.This looked good, 25U approx 4ft enclosed sides & top open front and back Black to Match the beast should be racked here this coming weekend.
But it came out looking pretty much as I had hoped.

As far as the Areca cards, I'm Very pleased with them.
Boot times are slow, which is normal for large capacity cards so my expectations were already there for that.
I also just recieved an email from their support saying that SMART info will be supported soon with the release of a new driver.
This will eliminate my last qualm about these cards, as their performance has been amazing for this cost effective solution.

Burn in has been uneventfull, I will start a 72hr stress test this afternoon and see if I can't pound the thing a little.
Running Prime95 1st 24hrs No problems Ambient temp 70, @100% load all cores CPU temp 51c-59c with idle temps in the low 30's not bad for a 135W CPU main case fans disconnected to simulate poor airflow and to reduce noise during burnin.

_________________
Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram

Great to hear. Nice of your friend to give you a 15U rack. The Beast will sit nice on it for sure. I look forward to seeing your pictures once you get it mounted in the rack.

Glad to hear you like the Areca cards. I am using a Supermicro Card now but want to upgrade my Norco with a different MB and Processor. Wanted to go with the Areca cards with the new build. I will just take the current components in my Norco now and move them to a bedroom build. 4 SAS outputs and when the output for expansion cards for a 2nd and 3rd Norco case, and the price is great for what it has to offer. Now that you have tested and like the results of them, i think i will use them for sure.

How many drives do you have for your Massive build ? Every other week Newegg is having a sale for WD Green 2TB drives for $ 149.99 with free shipping. Once again this is a great build.

The initial install will have the drives from my EX470.
4 x 2TB, + 4 X 1.5TB for the storage pool, plus 3 x 1TB non-storage pool drives for backups/file xport.

so 14TB in the pool and 3 non pool = 17TB total.
The plan is to add 1-2 2TB drives a month, hopefully Vail will be an OS recovery process preserving the data, if not I wil buy a few new drives for vail and manually move the data over.

The 3 non pool drives are in an rosewill RSV5 esata box, I backup important files to and haul it to my brothers house and dump it on the original server I built based on a DL380 G3. (not WHS but SBS) currently around 12TB.

That server will be getting a facelift soon, and pics will be posted here.
If comcast didnt have the 250GB cap I would use our vpn to move the files, but we average a couple TB a month.

_________________
Current DIY server DL380 G6 2xquad core 2.8ghz 32GB rdimm ram 512mb 2xHP 410 raid with 2x sas expanders (2 X norco RPC-4220) 48 slots stacked with room to grow.
30TB (Movie/File/Music)Win 2012 essentials 64bit Storage spaces
Ex490 E6400 4gb ram