ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

Since there are some requests here are the servers side by-side. The New WHS is on burn-in duty while the old WHS has had 9.5TB removed thus far. I moved the cases to somewhere that is more comfortable for me to work from in anticipation of the “final” build this week. Also placing them next to each other made it really easy to segment the two servers on a dedicated switch for doing the file transfer.

Old WHS Being dismantled on the left, new WHS doing burn-in on right, IBM power supply in middle.

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Just as an update. I installed the second Adaptec 31605 today, filling all 16 ports with 8x WD Greens, 6x Hitachi 2TB, and 2x Hitachi 1TB drives. There is an additional 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 being used as an OS drive. That’s 27.5TiB raw capacity.

Here’s a view of all the drives currently in The Big WHS. Note, I may have killed yet another WD Green. A single SMART error so I’m making quadruple sure that something isn’t wrong.

17 Drives, 27.5TiB Raw installed for testing

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Continuing to test the new WHS box, I was treated to yet another new Western Digital Green failure this week. Ridiculous!

This was the second (of 8 new) WD greens to fail in its first week.

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At around 1:30AM I woke up to what I believed was the fire alarm. After about 30 seconds outside in the cold, I realized that it was not a fire alarm, but rather an Adaptec controller alarm. The first hard drive has failed.

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After work today I got the server up and running doing a build/ verify Raid 6 array on the 8x new Western Digital Green 1.5TB drives. Since the current WHS is still in use, I used some spare hardware in the place of the legacy hardware including a 850w Coolermaster PSU, EVGA 8800 GTS 512MB, and an Adaptec 5805.

Something I should have known to do, but forgot to check, is that VMWare ESXi does not work with the Realtek onboard NICs of the Asus P6T7 Supercomputer, and apparently there is a further chipset conflict. Since I was between going Hyper-V and ESXi as a hypervisor, VMWare’s incompatibility made the decision easy.

Tomorrow after work (which sadly has been consuming 12+ hours a day lately) I will probably pick up Windows Server 2008 R2 as a Hyper-V platform. I like the idea of running WHS from the free Hyper-V server, however, since the goal of this box would be to run VM’s for other servers anyway, I’ll probably just go the Microsoft route.

First off, this is not a typical WHS build, and it was not meant to be. For the majority of users, a HP MediaSmart (by far the WHS to get if you do not DIY the build) is the way to go. For my purposes, I have seen a consistent, but increasing 500-600GB/mo of extra disk usage. Just for the record, unlike the opinion of certain Seagate executives, it is not for material of questionable moral value. Alas, I needed a solution that would allow me to have one box that could be upgraded and used for up to 24 months. As mentioned in Part 1, this project is an upgrade project and therefore I had some parts, and had a good idea of what I was doing before embarking on the project.

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About 10 months ago I decided to enter the world of the Windows Home Server. My storage arrays had outstripped my Cosmos S’s capacity, and running multiple controllers for all of the SAS drives as well as SATA storage became too much. My decision to build a WHS v. buy one was made due to sub-$100 Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 drives (at the time very inexpensive) so I bought another eight drives just to fill up an 8 port raid controller.

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The current WHS is <2.5TB from being full, which means it will be full in 3-4 months. I just ordered more drives, a Norco RPC-4020 (20 drive bays), and an Asus P6T7 WS Supercomputer motherboard for the next build. Stay tuned!