so I talk about my Windows Home Server an awful lot but I don't think I've ever
actually shown it to you guys so here it is in its current configuration it's
running Windows Home Server V1 and I actually just recently made some changes
to it so I went from an an LGA 775
configuration to a Zeon board and a low
power xon 1155 processor I've got some
old school Anon memory in there remember Kima yeah they're out of business so
I've got 2 gigs of RAM um I actually recently changed the power supply as
well I used to have an 850 wat power supply in here I've gone to a 150 wat
power supply but that's not actually because I needed the extra wattage but
rather because I needed a power supply that had the ability or the uh before
sight to separate and put the peripheral
connectors on two separate rails so that way I'm able to plug in my up to 24
drives in the front to two separate rails on the power supply the other one
had all of the peripheral connectors running off of a single rail which
overloaded it as soon as the drive started to spin up even when I turned on
staggered spin up which means that the drives some of them Spin and then the
other one Spin and the other one spin so they don't all hit your power supply at the same time so that was why I went
with a different power supply I'm using a Norco case that has a u sff uh
8082 or what whatever this connector is called I can't remember so up to 4 four
SATA or SAS channels per connector although I'm only running SATA drives
cuz I am running Windows Home Server right I also recently changed my SSD so
I had my Corsair uh what was it I can't even remember I posted this on Twitter
cuz I thought it was pretty lulls but U my Corsair S Series so this was back
with the uh when they were using the Samsung controllers I posted this on my
Twitter as like a tombstone outside so
this is the first SSD that I've actually had legitimately die on me um
when I had it deployed and I think the reason for that is just Windows Home
Server really trashes your boot Drive Windows Home Server V1 is what I'm
running because it uses it not only as the OS but also as a storage drive as
part of the drive pool which balances itself around all the time so it just
really gets hit uh pretty hard so I went with an Intel drive just because you
know legendary reliability and all of that 510 series just cuz it's a little
bit older so I got a good deal um in
terms of the raid card I'm running again this is a bit of an older raid card it's
not SATA 3 or anything like that but it's an Orica 1680 this is a 24 Port
raid card um I think it's got like 256 Megs of memory on it I haven't really
upgraded it is that 512 512 Megs I
haven't really upgraded it because it hasn't been necessary cuz I'm not
actually running in raid yet but I will in the future when I upgrade to Windows
Home Server V2 or 2011 or whatever it's
called I'm going to put a proper rate array because right now I have uh well I
have what Windows Home Server V1 was basically designed for and that is the
most ghetto possible arrangement of drives ever because V1 is all about
taking random assortments of drives and configuring them in the drive drive pool
so what the drive pool does is it redundantly stores all of your data on
at least two drives any at any given time and it rebalances it constantly to
make sure that it stays on at least two drives at any given time so the performance isn't great however I can
usually get 70 to 100 megabytes per second read and write from the whole
server at any given time but it's really not good enough anymore because I'm
editing video directly off the server these days and so that is what's
prompted um my next upgrade so here check this out guys so I've got uh any
sort of random variety of drives so there's a seate 7200.10 320 gig drive
here let's go through and look at them all there's another one of those so
let's slide that back in here's uh a 250
gig 7200.10 uh here is an empty one here's
an empty one so we got three drives so far this whole sort of space should be
empty here uh three drives three drives four drives so there's a wd1 TB black
five drives another wd1 TB black empty
six drives a wd1 TB black seven drives a
wd 1 TB black eight drives a Cate 7200
point 11 500 gig nine drives a 7200.10
500 gig 10 drives a wd1 TB black 11
drives a wd1 TB green 12 drives a wd1 TB
black 13 drives a Hitachi 1 tbte 14
drives a Hitachi 1 TB 15 drives a wd 2
TB black 16 drives a wd 640 gig black
and 17 drives aache one tbte so what I
want to do is I want to build Windows Home Server 2 doesn't include the drive
extender so I can no longer use my random mish mash of drives here in order
to get my you know8 or 9 terabytes or whatever it works out to a storage over
a span of like 16 drives I have to build
a proper rate array so what I'm going to do is I am going to get a new boot drive
so you have to have at least I think it's a 160 gig boot drive for Windows
Home Server 2 so I can't even use my 120 gig Intel SSD I'll have to get something
bigger I still want to go with an SSD for the boot Drive I've still had more
hard drives fail over the last few years than ssds I've had one SSD fail and I've
had anywhere from about 8 to 10 hard drives fail in that given time um and
it's not that I don't deploy enough ssds I mean my personal rig has eight ssds in
it for the boot drive so it's not really that I don't think uh so I'm still going
to go with an SSD for the boot drive and then what I'm going to do is I'm going
to build myself a raid six array with some new seate 3 terb um the consumer
level WD drives aren't that great for raid these days so I'll find enough
empty ones build a raid array on the card and then in the Windows Home Server
V1 operating system I will then transfer
all the data off the drive pooled drives to the raid array and a raid array has a
few advantages the performance will be dramatically better and I'll tell you how I'm going to leverage that because a
single gigabit per second connection isn't going to do it um performance will
be better also it'll be more real time in terms of the data reliability so the
drive pool takes in the data then it kind of waits for you to be idle and
then it shuffles it around whereas raid will actually dynamically in real time
be shuffling it to all the right places and raid six can lose up to two drives
before you lose any data as long as you uh you know throw a new one in there and
rebuild the raid uh before you know an additional two drives fail like raid
five I don't think is reliable enough because if one drive fails and then
another one fails while you're rebuilding it then you've lost your data
but raid six you can lose up to two so that's why I want to go with raid six
um other advantages I mean disadvantages are that you can't just dynamically
throw drives in it and just kind of increase your storage you have to
actually plan it and build it properly but I don't need that much storage space
anyway so it's not really the end of the world okay it's just Twitter going
crazy
um yeah you have to have like all matching drives and stuff like that it's
kind of a pain you have to just generally manage it better however the raid card should help me because at
least with a high-end raid card you can uh you can change the raid level on the
fly if you want you can add drives to the raid on the fly if you want you can
remove drives from the raid on the fly if you want so that uh that'll help a
lot so that's the migration plan here and then I'm also going to be changing
my uh mother board because I need more than one PCIe slot see there's a single
PCIe 16x slot on this board right now that's where I've got the raid card
plugged into but I'm going to be adding a quad Port Ethernet card next so I've
already added one to my personal desktop you can see right here I've got an Intel
server Nick it's got four ports on it there that plus the Intel Nick built
into my motherboard is going to give me up to assuming I'm using cat 6 cables
and assuming I have a compatible switch which is why this is sitting here is going to give me up to 5 gabit per
second to anything else that is similarly connected using uh teaming or
whatever it's called whatever so they all work together and you basically
combine the theoretical maximum throughput um of all the ports you're
using together so I'm going to take a
new z77 board that just has sort of all
of the uh all the PCI E slots that I need and then I'm going to still use the
low voltage Zeon assuming it'll run in it I think it should be fine so I'm
going to put this in there use the Intel Ethernet here throw another one of those
I'll probably put it in this one so it runs directly off the PCIe controller on
the CPU rather than down through the South Bridge um and then I'll run the
raid card off this one and that'll give me the expansion that I need to do my 5
gbit per second connection now the requirement for that though is you have
to have a switch that's ready you have to have a manageable switch um so I'm
going to be using this guy is like a couple hundred bucks and then there's
even like a $25 Mir so this is a 24 Port
gigabit Smart Switch and uh so what is
it what is it called it's the pro safe
gs724t 300 Nas so I'm really excited to
try this out so that means between my computer here and the Windows Home
Server which is on the other side of that wall I will have a 5 GB per second
connection and then the rest of the house will just be gigabit and that will
give me plus the raid six so the additional performance I'm going to get
from not using the ghetto Drive pool should give me just screaming
performance between those two PCS and then gigabit to everywhere else so I'm
very excited so basically I'm going to try and find a cheaper power supply that
I can put in here cuz it's a total waste of this th000 watt I I need a new boot
Drive I need to get Windows Home Server V2 going I need to upgrade the
motherboard I need to add the four port Nick and then I need to get some hard
driv so that is my project over the next little while it's a bit more of a sort
of it's a less sexy project than upgrading my personal PC but I just
haven't had the time for a variety of reasons lately and uh this seems like
more of a priority in terms of uh increasing my productivity so that's
what I'm working on thank you for checking out this update and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips
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