Pictures of my new Server Build

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 22:43

Well its taken a while to gather the parts and find the time to get round to building the server but its now all finished and been running for about a week now with no issues. I wont bore you with normal specs as most of you guys should be able to tell by looking. Raid card is a IBM M1015, CPU i7 920 and 12GB of ram

Drive Config
Corsair 120GB SSD for OS (Server 2008 R2)
WD 2TB for Virtual Machines
WD 3TB x 8 in Raid 0 for Main Storage

During the server's normal usage it draws around 130 watts from the wall so not to bad power wise. Usable storage are formatting it 21.8TB currently with 11TB to spare.

All comments are welcome

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 22:50

Transfer Speed

While copying my data back to server i was using two computers to get the data over fast as the Server has a 2GB Ethernet connection to the Network. Here's some of the results below

Network activity on the Server

Transfer status from one of the computers that was being used to copy my heap load of data back.

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 22:54

Current amount of data used as of today anyway

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 23:46

Well all my data is backed up on separate external drives at the moment might not be the fastest solution but its one that ive always used and served me well. and as for backup of the os drive i have that doing a daily backup to a networked drive not as good as raid 1 but didnt have the spare cash to splash out on another SSD. and same goes for VM drive that's also backed up to my external Networked drive.

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 23:49

Once i have the cash might go for a different backup solution but considering i had all my drives from previous server build plus other backup drives it made this way the cheapest solution.

iantaylor.1 · 30 Oct 2012 at 23:54

And to use the raid 5 feature on my IBM m1015 i would also have to buy a add on adapter to be able to use that feature sadly. and its only an 8 port so its already Maxed out.

If you know of any other decent backup solution's where it wont encounter to much of a cost please let me know as it would be something i would defiantly look into.

iantaylor.1 · 31 Oct 2012 at 08:33

The reason for it running an i7 was due to the fact that i had the motherboard and cpu spare from a previous gaming pc build so it made it the cheaper option to use them as i only needed to buy the Cooler and ram to have the base system ready. and like ive stated in previous comments once i have the cash im hoping to be able to invest in a better raid card if you have any recommendations please let me know.

Another thing thats comes in handy with the i7 is when im running virtual machines for WHS 2011 for pc backup's and other test install's ect. Thats also the reason i got 12gb ram.

And yes you are correct getting 10TB of data back onto the server if a drive was to fail would take a while but until i can afford a different solution this one seems to be working fairly well at the moment and i will look into the soft raid solutions you have mentioned.

iantaylor.1 · 31 Oct 2012 at 10:27

rotor said:
Cost to run a 130 Watt appliance 24x7 for a year: £162.96

That's a LOT of money to be burning on electricity. I can understand the nerd factor of a setup like this (even though it is ludicrous to be running 8 x 2TB drives with no redundancy), but by using existing parts that are not fit for purpose, you are doing yourself a disservice. The M1015 is clearly not suited for anything except RAID 1, and an i7 motherboard is not the best for something that you will leave running 24h a day!

By comparison, my ProLiant ML110 G7 with a Xeon E3-1220, 8GB ECC RAM and a single 256GB Samsung 830 SSD, idles at 30W, or £37.61 per year.

Without spending any money, you would be better off formatting each disk individually (i.e. having a bunch of 2TB drive letters), and configuring the OS to sleep the disks after 15 minutes. This will at least mean that if you lose a drive you've only lost the contents of that one drive (not EVERYTHING), and your power consumption will be a lot lower once most of the drives spin down.

First off im running 8 x 3TB drives lol and i will have a think about how i can improve my power consumption on the server. But at the moment i don't pay for the electric bill

. Thanks for all your input

iantaylor.1 · 31 Oct 2012 at 10:30

RimBlock said:
Yep that was understood and I highlighted it was understood in my reply.

M5014/M5015s are good and may be possible to find on EBay. They are 9260-8i cards and the 5014 has 254MB cache whilst the 5015 has 512MB. Try to get them with a BBU if you are looking to use raid 5. If you are lucky then you may be able to find a HP P812. There are a number on the US EBay going for very low prices (US$517 compared to US$1,300 new). They come with 1GB FBWC (Flash Backed write cache). I am running one in my home vSphere server (Not an HP server).

I run Win SBS 2011 Standard (inc Exchange, sharepoint etc), SABnzb CentOS server, CentOS Minecraft server (4 worlds), Playing with Openfiler and until recently WHS 2011 on an E3-1230 and rarely used more than 1/4 of its power. Unless you are doing some very processing intensive work then an E3 / i5 should be more than enough and less power hungry.

Ram is king with virtulization. I am running on 32GB ECC.

Sure, we all have to work within the means at our disposal so I can totally understand why you are where you are.

One option would be to sell up the board, chassis, processor and ram and get a HP ML110 G7 which is a great package especially if you catch it when the rebate is available.

Another is to sell up the i7 and board and get an E3 and something like the Supermicro X9SCM-iiF which is pretty well priced and both NICs are vSphere supported out of the box. You might be able to break even or even come out ahead.

There is nothing wrong with continuing as you are as it is your server after all. Just a couple of ideas you may wish to consider.

RB

Ive had a quick look at them Cards on ebay and price wise there not to bad could be something i could save up for and considering it supports Raid 5 it would be a worthwhile investment. I will have to see what i can save up after Christmas is out the way.

iantaylor.1 · 31 Oct 2012 at 10:33

Should be able to pick up a New IBM M5014 for around £150 on ebay just a matter of getting the BBU then.