WHS is Alive and Well!!!

Well, after over a week of building, transferring of data and some unexpected troubleshooting, I am finally “done”.  The WHS server is up and running and it is ever so nice to have everything in one place.  BTW, I say “done” because nothing in my world is ever DONE.  I will change or upgrade this thing for no reason at all in less than a year even if I tell myself I will not.  It is just me.

So.  The most important part.  What did I use to build it.  Here is the list of parts:

• Case              - Thermaltake with 6 internal 3.5” and 4 5.25” bays
• Power Supply - FSP BlueStorm 500 watt
• Motherboard  - ABit NF7-S 2.0
• CPU                - Athlon XP 1700+
• RAM                - 1 GB (2 x 512MB) PC3200 Samsung
• Boot Drive      - 80 GB Seagate PATA

Data Drives:

• Seagate 500 GB SATA2
• Seagate 500 GB SATA2
• Hitachi 160 GB PATA
• Maxtor 250 GB PATA
• Maxtor 250 GB PATA (USB External Enclosure)
• Hitachi 320 GB PATA

The Results - I now have is a nice server that has a very capable powersupply and a grand total of 1.88 TB of storage capacity.

Too much CRAP!!!

Well, during the build, the truly biggest issue was that I had a TON of data scattered all over the place.  In total, I have over 1.5 TB of data crammed on this thing.  So, what it involved was a lot of either copying across the network or pulling of a drive from a system immediately and adding it to the server and doing a direct copy to the storage pool.  After that drive was emptied, I would then add it to the storage pool.  So altogether, I got to do that 7 times.  I also got to do some cloning as I was also stealing some of the large drives I used from other systems in the house.  I think, all told, I must have spent the first 5 days just copying data around.

I got Greedy…

Well, I was not happy with just 7 drives and 1.88 TB, so I dug out an old Promise SX6000 RAID controller and started adding drives in individual JBOD configs.  I had 3 extra smaller drives attached and was now over the magic 2.0 TB mark!!!

Then Murphy stepped in…

The SX6000 is or I should say was a good card in its time and the one I have served me well.  It had, however, decided to give up on me with intermittent issues that caused WHS to totally freak out.  It did not crash the server but it did cause disk access to the shares to totally lock up.  After some hoping and finger crossing mixed in with my troubleshooting, I had to concede that the card was no longer dependable.  Well, that caused me to have to then remove several drives from the storage pool as well as one of the 250 GB drives.  That 250 ended up in the external USB enclosure.

All of that fun and games cost me 2 hours of sleep last night and about 3 hours of thinking I had it beat the night before.  If I feel the need to add more storage, I am NOT going to cheap out.

In the end, I am still well within my target goals and the system has been totally error free for almost 24 hours now.  The organization of all of the media content is much easier to browse in SageTV now and I no longer have to load balance my files between 7 drives myself.  I am a happy boy.