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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 Yet this is a somewhat outdated metric.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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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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Question: How does a OCZ Vertex 120GB compare to an 8 drive 15k RPM 2.5″ SAS Raid 5 array with a fast Adaptec 5805 controller?

Answer: It is slower… kind of… but both options have some great features! Read the full story

Did some testing this weekend with the new Adaptec 5805. Since I wanted to see what this card could do, I decided to try it with some cheap Seagate Savvio 15k.1 36.7GB SAS drives. Overall performance is fine, however there was a consistently interesting note in ATTO’s benchmark at 64k. I tried every stripe size imaginable, and there was a distinct fall-off every time in read speeds. I also tried the newest firmware, same result. Truly odd indeed.

8x Seagate Savvio 15k Raid 5 Adaptec 5805

Notice the dip in read performance at 64k. This seems to be very strange and did not go away with three different firmware versions.
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