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The Big WHS: February 2011 Update

Patrick Kennedy — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:18:26 +0000

It has been a long time since I have posted about The Big WHS. At the last update in May 2010, the machine occupied 8U using two 4U enclosures, and was topping 60TB of raw storage capacity. Since then there have been quite a few developments that I thought I would write about. The current [...] Related posts:

SAS Expanders, Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure and Save – Iteration 2 – A Better Solution

Patrick Kennedy — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:00:08 +0000

After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary [...] Related posts:

The Big WHS: May Update 60TB Edition

Patrick Kennedy — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:08:29 +0000

The Big WHS was originally supposed to house approximately 30TB of storage when the plans were first detailed on an Excel spreadsheet BOM in December 2009. This was a big upgrade to my first DIY Windows Home Server box that had well under 20TB. About five months later, the storage capacity has crested 60TB, with [...] Related posts:

SAS Expanders, Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure and Save – Iteration 1

Patrick Kennedy — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:39:31 +0000

Oftentimes, users running file servers such as Windows 2008 Server R2, Windows Home Server, Linux variants (including Openfiler), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (including FreeNAS), and so forth will require more storage than their server can physically store. One option is to add more servers to the SAN. Another option is to add more storage to an existing server. [...] Related posts:

The Big WHS: 8 File-Serving OS’s Virtualized in one 4U Server

Patrick Kennedy — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:59:58 +0000

Now that the Big WHS is stable, and I have a bit more storage capacity than I need, I decided that Windows Home Server running virtualized in a Hyper-V virtual machine is good, but I wanted to test out some of the free WHS alternatives. A quck listing of the NAS operating systems installed on the current [...] Related posts:

The Big WHS: It Multi-tasks! (Thanks to Hyper-V Virtualization)

Patrick Kennedy — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:20:16 +0000

Things have been progressing on the Big WHS front. First off, my main PC is now is using the WHS Connector software and has back-ups scheduled on the new WHS. The old WHS is still assembled, but it is not powered on at this point, just in case something goes wrong with the current setup. [...] Related posts:

The Big WHS: A Big Mother(board) Change of Plans

Patrick Kennedy — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 17:50:23 +0000

This week the Big WHS underwent a major change and dropped the Asus motherboard in favor of a Supermicro one. Apparently the Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard does not like the HP SAS Expander at all. I could not find a card that could see the SAS Expander. This all culminated when I finally took [...] Related posts:

Intel Core i3-530 and Core i5-650 in the Windows Home Server (WHS)

Patrick Kennedy — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:21:03 +0000

When Intel announced the i3-530 and i5-6xx family, I was full bore on building the Big WHS which included an LGA-1366 i7-920 CPU. The new i3-530 and i5-650 are based on the 32nm Clarkdale core with an integrated, on package GPU. For the home server world, read low power consumption and integrated graphics. To say [...] Related posts:

The Big WHS Update: Sorting Controllers and other Issues

Patrick Kennedy — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:50:07 +0000

Just as a quick update to those who are following this build. Some adjustments have been made ove the past week. First, I finally decided that 32 ports from two Adaptec 31605′s would first off be slightly less than I had wanted. I realized that while the initial build would hold 19-20 1.5TB drives, 6x [...] Related posts:

Port Costs and the Home Server!

Patrick Kennedy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:55:56 +0000

Most people who build custom home servers will be able to articulate the cost per GB (cost/GB) of their drives. Yet this is a somewhat outdated metric. The major cost consideration that a lot of people overlook is port costs. Simply put, this is the cost to connect a hard drive to the system. For [...] Related posts: