Personal Project Windows Home Server Showcase & Upgrade Plans Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,235 words · ~11 min read
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so I talk about my Windows Home Server an awful lot but I don't think I've ever
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actually shown it to you guys so here it is in its current configuration it's
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running Windows Home Server V1 and I actually just recently made some changes
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to it so I went from an an LGA 775
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configuration to a Zeon board and a low
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power xon 1155 processor I've got some
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old school Anon memory in there remember Kima yeah they're out of business so
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I've got 2 gigs of RAM um I actually recently changed the power supply as
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well I used to have an 850 wat power supply in here I've gone to a 150 wat
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power supply but that's not actually because I needed the extra wattage but
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rather because I needed a power supply that had the ability or the uh before
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sight to separate and put the peripheral
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connectors on two separate rails so that way I'm able to plug in my up to 24
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drives in the front to two separate rails on the power supply the other one
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had all of the peripheral connectors running off of a single rail which
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overloaded it as soon as the drive started to spin up even when I turned on
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staggered spin up which means that the drives some of them Spin and then the
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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
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with a different power supply I'm using a Norco case that has a u sff uh
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8082 or what whatever this connector is called I can't remember so up to 4 four
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SATA or SAS channels per connector although I'm only running SATA drives
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cuz I am running Windows Home Server right I also recently changed my SSD so
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I had my Corsair uh what was it I can't even remember I posted this on Twitter
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cuz I thought it was pretty lulls but U my Corsair S Series so this was back
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with the uh when they were using the Samsung controllers I posted this on my
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Twitter as like a tombstone outside so
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this is the first SSD that I've actually had legitimately die on me um
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when I had it deployed and I think the reason for that is just Windows Home
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Server really trashes your boot Drive Windows Home Server V1 is what I'm
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running because it uses it not only as the OS but also as a storage drive as
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part of the drive pool which balances itself around all the time so it just
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really gets hit uh pretty hard so I went with an Intel drive just because you
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know legendary reliability and all of that 510 series just cuz it's a little
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bit older so I got a good deal um in
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terms of the raid card I'm running again this is a bit of an older raid card it's
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not SATA 3 or anything like that but it's an Orica 1680 this is a 24 Port
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raid card um I think it's got like 256 Megs of memory on it I haven't really
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upgraded it is that 512 512 Megs I
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haven't really upgraded it because it hasn't been necessary cuz I'm not
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actually running in raid yet but I will in the future when I upgrade to Windows
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Home Server V2 or 2011 or whatever it's
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called I'm going to put a proper rate array because right now I have uh well I
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have what Windows Home Server V1 was basically designed for and that is the
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most ghetto possible arrangement of drives ever because V1 is all about
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taking random assortments of drives and configuring them in the drive drive pool
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so what the drive pool does is it redundantly stores all of your data on
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at least two drives any at any given time and it rebalances it constantly to
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make sure that it stays on at least two drives at any given time so the performance isn't great however I can
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usually get 70 to 100 megabytes per second read and write from the whole
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server at any given time but it's really not good enough anymore because I'm
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editing video directly off the server these days and so that is what's
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prompted um my next upgrade so here check this out guys so I've got uh any
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sort of random variety of drives so there's a seate 7200.10 320 gig drive
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here let's go through and look at them all there's another one of those so
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let's slide that back in here's uh a 250
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gig 7200.10 uh here is an empty one here's
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an empty one so we got three drives so far this whole sort of space should be
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empty here uh three drives three drives four drives so there's a wd1 TB black
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five drives another wd1 TB black empty
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six drives a wd1 TB black seven drives a
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wd 1 TB black eight drives a Cate 7200
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point 11 500 gig nine drives a 7200.10
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500 gig 10 drives a wd1 TB black 11
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drives a wd1 TB green 12 drives a wd1 TB
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black 13 drives a Hitachi 1 tbte 14
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drives a Hitachi 1 TB 15 drives a wd 2
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TB black 16 drives a wd 640 gig black
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and 17 drives aache one tbte so what I
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want to do is I want to build Windows Home Server 2 doesn't include the drive
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extender so I can no longer use my random mish mash of drives here in order
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to get my you know8 or 9 terabytes or whatever it works out to a storage over
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a span of like 16 drives I have to build
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a proper rate array so what I'm going to do is I am going to get a new boot drive
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so you have to have at least I think it's a 160 gig boot drive for Windows
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Home Server 2 so I can't even use my 120 gig Intel SSD I'll have to get something
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bigger I still want to go with an SSD for the boot Drive I've still had more
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hard drives fail over the last few years than ssds I've had one SSD fail and I've
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had anywhere from about 8 to 10 hard drives fail in that given time um and
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it's not that I don't deploy enough ssds I mean my personal rig has eight ssds in
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it for the boot drive so it's not really that I don't think uh so I'm still going
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to go with an SSD for the boot drive and then what I'm going to do is I'm going
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to build myself a raid six array with some new seate 3 terb um the consumer
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level WD drives aren't that great for raid these days so I'll find enough
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empty ones build a raid array on the card and then in the Windows Home Server
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V1 operating system I will then transfer
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all the data off the drive pooled drives to the raid array and a raid array has a
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few advantages the performance will be dramatically better and I'll tell you how I'm going to leverage that because a
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single gigabit per second connection isn't going to do it um performance will
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be better also it'll be more real time in terms of the data reliability so the
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drive pool takes in the data then it kind of waits for you to be idle and
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then it shuffles it around whereas raid will actually dynamically in real time
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be shuffling it to all the right places and raid six can lose up to two drives
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before you lose any data as long as you uh you know throw a new one in there and
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rebuild the raid uh before you know an additional two drives fail like raid
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five I don't think is reliable enough because if one drive fails and then
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another one fails while you're rebuilding it then you've lost your data
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but raid six you can lose up to two so that's why I want to go with raid six
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um other advantages I mean disadvantages are that you can't just dynamically
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throw drives in it and just kind of increase your storage you have to
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actually plan it and build it properly but I don't need that much storage space
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anyway so it's not really the end of the world okay it's just Twitter going
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crazy
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um yeah you have to have like all matching drives and stuff like that it's
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kind of a pain you have to just generally manage it better however the raid card should help me because at
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least with a high-end raid card you can uh you can change the raid level on the
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fly if you want you can add drives to the raid on the fly if you want you can
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remove drives from the raid on the fly if you want so that uh that'll help a
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lot so that's the migration plan here and then I'm also going to be changing
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my uh mother board because I need more than one PCIe slot see there's a single
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PCIe 16x slot on this board right now that's where I've got the raid card
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plugged into but I'm going to be adding a quad Port Ethernet card next so I've
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already added one to my personal desktop you can see right here I've got an Intel
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server Nick it's got four ports on it there that plus the Intel Nick built
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into my motherboard is going to give me up to assuming I'm using cat 6 cables
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and assuming I have a compatible switch which is why this is sitting here is going to give me up to 5 gabit per
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second to anything else that is similarly connected using uh teaming or
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whatever it's called whatever so they all work together and you basically
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combine the theoretical maximum throughput um of all the ports you're
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using together so I'm going to take a
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new z77 board that just has sort of all
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of the uh all the PCI E slots that I need and then I'm going to still use the
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low voltage Zeon assuming it'll run in it I think it should be fine so I'm
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going to put this in there use the Intel Ethernet here throw another one of those
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I'll probably put it in this one so it runs directly off the PCIe controller on
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the CPU rather than down through the South Bridge um and then I'll run the
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raid card off this one and that'll give me the expansion that I need to do my 5
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gbit per second connection now the requirement for that though is you have
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to have a switch that's ready you have to have a manageable switch um so I'm
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going to be using this guy is like a couple hundred bucks and then there's
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even like a $25 Mir so this is a 24 Port
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gigabit Smart Switch and uh so what is
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it what is it called it's the pro safe
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gs724t 300 Nas so I'm really excited to
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try this out so that means between my computer here and the Windows Home
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Server which is on the other side of that wall I will have a 5 GB per second
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connection and then the rest of the house will just be gigabit and that will
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give me plus the raid six so the additional performance I'm going to get
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from not using the ghetto Drive pool should give me just screaming
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performance between those two PCS and then gigabit to everywhere else so I'm
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very excited so basically I'm going to try and find a cheaper power supply that
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I can put in here cuz it's a total waste of this th000 watt I I need a new boot
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Drive I need to get Windows Home Server V2 going I need to upgrade the
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motherboard I need to add the four port Nick and then I need to get some hard
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driv so that is my project over the next little while it's a bit more of a sort
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of it's a less sexy project than upgrading my personal PC but I just
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haven't had the time for a variety of reasons lately and uh this seems like
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more of a priority in terms of uh increasing my productivity so that's
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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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