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I have been using Adaptec products for over a decade, and have generally been a fan (with a few exceptions over the years). My first Windows Home Server was based upon an Adaptec 31605 RAID controller.  Today, PMC-Sierra acquired Adaptec’s channel storage business, including their RAID business for $34m USD in cash.

This is probably a sign of things to come in the storage space. I am also guessing some larger players (Dell and HP) will be interested in picking up a few smaller storage vendors in the coming year.

Hopefully PMC-Sierra will have the resources to make some cool controllers in the future. I hope PMC-Sierra continues Adaptec’s MaxIQ SSD caching and expands it to work very well with commodity SSDs.

In the event that you missed it: PMC-Sierra, Inc. Investor Relations – Corporate & Product News Release on Adaptec Business Acquisition

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 2TB drives, and 4x 1TB drives, odds are that I would want to add another 6-7 2TB drives in the next six months if for no other reason just to spread the storage a bit more.

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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 Yet this is a somewhat outdated metric.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 normal computer users this is often in the sub-$5 per port since they have open SATA connectors on their motherboards and open spots in their case making the cost of adding a drive the cost of a SATA cable. Home servers are a different story all together. A quick audit of the Big WHS showed that my port costs were approximately $46/ port. Compared to the $70 going price of a 1TB drive, this can be a huge portion of costs and is certainly appropriate to add to the cost/GB  equation.

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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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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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Just as a note to anyone running multiple large disks in Raid 6 for Windows Home Server. I was setting up new Raid 6 arrays on the WHS this weekend, controlled by an Adaptec 31605 and was greeted by a nice error message. WHS is limited to four volumes per physical drive using basic discs. A quick search of the Adaptec site showed the problem and a proposed fix, dynamic disks. While this would be great under normal circumstances, WHS does not play well with dynamic disks.

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