My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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The Patriot PS-100 32GB continues to be a very low cost SSD after rebates. I purchased two of the drives early on and did both single drive and raid 0 benchmarks. After that I did PS-100 firmware 2.008 benchmarks. Recently, Patriot released a new firmware, v3.000 so I decided to try the flash and see if the claims of better small (4K) reads/ writes were better with the new firmware. I found that they are better, but there is a significant drawback.

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As a follow-on to the Supermicro X8SIL-F review, I had some interest in seeing power consumption figures for the CPU’s involved. I have already discussed the Intel Core i3-530′s low idle power consumption and relatively low maximum power consumption extensively. As I have a habit of doing, I decided to use an Intel Xeon X3340 in the new server for two reasons. First, I wanted to see a performance of the X3440 versus the other CPU’s I have tested for video encoding and transcoding on a Windows Home Server platform. Second, I wanted to have a server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating systems running in Hyper-V virtual machines. In the end, I found that the Xeon X3440 provides a great feature set, relatively low power consumption, and performance all at a reasonable cost.

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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 server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration. 

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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 further room to expand. The Big WHS now spans two 4U Norco cases (using a total of 8U of rackspace and another 4U chassis is in the works) has over 60TB of storage, and requires well over a dozen ports on the gigabit switch.

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The Supermicro X8SIL-F motherboard is an excellent board for home and small business servers. When building a file server built upon Windows Home Server (V1 or V2 Vail) or another open source NAS project such as FreeNAS, Openfiler, EON ZFS storage, the Supermicro has a feature set that differentiates itself from both AMD and Intel based consumer-level motherboards. Compatibility with those operating systems and virtualization platforms such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V make the X8SIL-F a strong contender for a DIY storage or virtual machine server.

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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. Adding a second (or third) enclosure for additional disks is a great option. This allows a server administrator to build a massive DAS storage system very inexpensively for applications like iSCSI, backup storage, media storage, virtual machine storage, and etc. Oftentimes, the ensuing research will lead IT professionals to JBOD DAS enclosures with SAS expanders built in.

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As I mentioned in the previous post on the compatibility issue, I had to RMA my Supermicro X8SIL-F (mATX LGA 1156 server board with IPMI 2.0 and dual Intel gigabit NICs) last week because it was version 1.01 PCB instead of v1.02. The difference being support for Clarkdale CPU’s.

Just to give an idea of why Supermicro’s support is so good here is the timeline:

1. Sunday (day 0) - Sent a note to Supermicro tech support explaining my problem.
2. Monday morning (day 1) - Received a confirmation that I needed v1.02 PCB of the X8SIL-F to use with my Intel Core i3-530.
3. Monday afternoon – submitted my RMA request online
4. Tuesday mid-day (day 2) - was contacted by Supermicro RMA support, I gave the requried information for advanced RMA. Later that day I got a follow-up e-mail saying that the advance RMA request had to be approved and that it may take until the next day.
5. Wednesday (day 3) – confirmed that I accepted the Supermicro advance RMA policy, and that ground shipping would be fine (I live only a few miles from a Supermicro facility).
6. Thursday (day 4) – New X8SIL-F shipped.
7. Friday (day 5) – X8SIL-F was at my doorstep. I was not home to sign for the delivery, so made arrangements to pick up at the UPS facility. Bottom line is that Supermicro had the replacement board at my doorstep within 96 hours of submitting my RMA request.

Overall great service from Supermicro! I have also decided that I will house this in the Norco RPC-4220 that serves as the DAS box for the Big WHS. That way I can use it to add drives for the test environments. Odds are I will either run ESXi with a few Linux/ FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris virtual machines or just run OSes directly on the PC. I am also planning to power this system independently of the rest of the enclosure and drives so that I can power cycle the server without taking the drives off of the Areca array.

After using one of the the lowest power AMD CPUs around, the Sempron 140 Sargas (single core) in a WHS, I decided to go to the other extreme and try a Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition. With the release of six core AMD CPU’s, and the existence of the Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition, the  Phenom II X4 BE chip is not the highest end AMD CPU out there. On the other hand, WHS is currently based on the older 32-bit Windows Server 2003 kernel, so it runs on dual core CPU’s just fine. The impending release of Windows Home Server V2 VAIL means that 64-bit will be the new requirement and a bit more power will be needed for future WHS systems. A quad core is overkill but a six core CPU is basically a waste for WHS. Luckily, with the Phenom II X4 955 BE’s unlocked multiplier, we can emulate a Phenom II X4 965 BE through a very mild overclock, and some other AMD CPUs as well. The following is a quick review of what I encountered with the Phenom II X4 955 BE, and how I managed to get the Phenom II X4 955 to boot using the PicoPSU (to get comparable idle power consumption figures).

Phenom II X4 955 Boxed

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