It's aliiiive

[greatbear]

What happens when one has a Friday off, a partner stuck at work all day and dreary nasty weather outside? If you were me, you'd blast music all over the house and tinker with crazy computers. I promised myself not to build any more 'god boxes', and I did. I made a tidy little server with low power components and lots of connectivity for future use, and a pair of tiny yet capable PC with energy efficient processors and integrated graphics and all that. But I just could not help myself. I can no longer stop building crazy computers (or most anything for that matter in fact) any more than Mormons can stop baptizing the dead in their faith. Even if you tell them to quit it. I pulled out the megasuperultraserver that had gotten set aside while trying to get ready for a party that never happened and I built another drive array in it. All the hardware seems to be working beautifully, now I gotta spend some time with all sorts of software to get the thing running like I want it to be. So far, five arrays are up and running, using a mere seventeen drives. I have one more to go, this will put the total at 21. Yes, I am mad, mad I tell you.

This is what it looks like at this point:



Yeah, I know, it's Vista. Shaddap. At least it's 64 bit. It will eventually get a proper server OS (most likely MS Server 03 or 08, and I will experiment with Home Server since I have it). The second RAID 1 set is there for another OS, and I can select which to boot from.

When this is finally put into use, it will be a repository for everything digital I have, as well as Jeff. It will be a full-on media and file server and a place for automatic and redundant backups, something that I got burned a few times for being lazy with. And it all sits in a gorgeous black monolith that will sadly be kept hidden in the basement and accessed remotely. with eight Xeon processor cores, it should be able to do everything I want of it.

No more god boxes for a while after this one, that's for sure.

Comments

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

Scary geeky question: How's it all put together? IE, mobo, what controllers are in it, what drives are on what controller, which drives are in which volume set,...

You get the idea.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

That was eventually going to be it's own post. LOL

In a nutshell, the mobo is a Supermicro X7DWA, a pair of Xeon quad core 5410s, 4 gig of Kingston HyperX FB ECC RAM, and two Adaptec controllers, a 31605 16 channel SAS/SATA RAID controller with 256meg of cache, and a 2230S dual channel Ultra 320 RAID controller with 128 meg of cache. The 2230 had 4 300gig gig drives running JBOD right now as an experiment. I might go back and just have individual drives or do a RAID 5 with them. The SAS controller has two pairs of 300 gig SAS drives in RAID 1 for the OSs, one's just sitting empty. There are four 500G drives in RAID 5 and five 1TB drives in RAID 5 that make up the bulk fault tolerant storage volumes. I added a firewire 800/USB2.0 card for more connectivity as well, considering too that the mobo has so few USB ports built in. Only one internal header, and I needed two. A pair of DVD burners, one with Blu-ray ROM that I will probably never use but will have on hand just in case. The video card is an All-In-Wonder 2006 I had for a while but never used, audio will be from a Soundblaster X-Fi Elite Pro. The thing will also be used as a self-contained jukebox that will feed the multi-room stereo setup I have.

[furrbear.livejournal.com]

I've just not ever seen a case for something like that LOL nor am I easily grokking the cabling. Last time I built something close it was all Sun hardware and I had a HUGE budget to play with.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Aside from the Ultra320 cables and connectors (68 pin parallel connectors daisy chained together to connect a total of five drives to one channel of the controller but as a newfangled rounded cable instead of an old school ribbon cable) the SAS and SATA look similar. An individual thin cable about the size of lamp cord goes to each drive from the controller. I have things neatly tied off and harnessed and it looks rather unremarkable inside aside from the sheer amount of hardware and drives. I hate boxes stuffed with haphazard wiring. It's all stuffed into a Lian-Li aluminum case. Looks like a tpical tower PC but on steroids. And wheels.

I'll take some pics of the setup soon.

[notdefined.livejournal.com]

Oh, I need to convert you to Linux, BSD or OSX (OSX86). That should keep you busy enough to keep you from building out more hardware. :)

[arktos62.livejournal.com]

I know what GB is, but what's a TB? Excuse my ignorance, I'm just a bambino when it comes to techy stuff.

[normalcyispasse.livejournal.com]

Jesus fuck.

[shuntphl.livejournal.com]

Why not try any Linux flavor as server OS??

More stable, much smaller footprint, less/no fragmentation, free.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Wow and I was thinking, oh, you have a pic of the physical box, but alas... I'd love to see that even if the inside is rather unremarkable, it's more of how it all looks together. :-)

My lil mid tower PC needs to be tossed and totally upgraded and what I did this past year was just to eek out about another year's worth of use before a total upgrade happens. I'll probably have 2 PC's, one a laptop and the desktop and leave one pretty much simple, geared more for email and all that but can do light video/audio editing but for the serious stuff, leave the desktop for all that but again, not stuff it with so many different types of programs either.

Right now, I run a 2.8G P4 processor on a crappy Foxxcon mATX MoBo w/ an 8 YO invidia graphics card and an 8 YO 16 Bit audio card w/ 4 channel surround for now.

[notdefined.livejournal.com]

You are indeed correct. The next increment is a petabyte, or PB (sans J) :)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I am considering that as well, since I can plop any other OS on another drive and boot from it without compromising any of the other installed OSs. Since I built this using server-oriented hardware, all the hardware has Linux support.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

It's almost the PC equivalent of a garage full of crotch rockets. ;)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I keep telling myself to delve into Linux just to get the experience and have an alternate. I plan on getting a little netbook with Linux as a gateway drug into putting it to use on my other boxen.

It should be pretty easy to fool OS X into working on this thing save for the RAID controllers, since it's basic makeup is that of a Mac Pro dual Xeon box.

I'm a MS slave simply because it's what I know and work with on a daily basis. Now, if I had a hunky, muscled *nix master to guide me...

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

But such a cute, pocket-sized bambino at that. ;)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I'm shooting for exabytes next. :D

[arktos62.livejournal.com]

Praise indeed from one so fair of face.

[arktos62.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I know! Thank you, sir!

[jrjarrett.livejournal.com]

yottabytes FTW.

[jrjarrett.livejournal.com]

You're mad, MAD, I tell you!

mwah-hah-hah! That's srsly cool stuff there Phil.

But why not build...oh. Never mind, I just read the sizes of your raids. Terabytes!

Is there data in there?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I'll take some pictures of the computer itself real soon. It's basically rather industrial looking inside, most everything is server-grade stuff rather than the uber-cool enthusiast/gamer hardware with all the colors and crazy heatsinks. But I wanted it this way, since the PC is actually a replacement for one I built ten years ago that at the time was just as 'out there' by the standards of the time. All SCSI, Supermicro mobo, lots of drives, two processors. I did pile it all into an attractive aluminum case this time. I hope this one last at least ten years.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Well, my PC will be geared to video editing and Photoshop along w/ graphics based programs but not much in the way of major gaming outside of Spider Solitaire and MS's own older Arcade Pinball from the late 90's type stuff and it will be in an attractive, yet not flashy case that can be easy to work on should that be needed. However, it will be fitted w/ a dual video graphics card, SATA drives and a dual core processor at least.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Build what? Tell me! I HAVE TO KNOW! I CAN BUILD IT!!! AAAAAAAGGGGHHH!!

No data there yet save for a couple hundred megs of miscellaneous music that I was shuffling around the arrays to see if they worked and how fast they are. They are damn fast. :O

[msclwolf.livejournal.com]

So when I turn up all meek and bashful on your doorstep you do realise I will not be visiting to see you, I will be there to get you to build me an all singing all dancin PC (snigger)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

But you have to be naked and flexing while I build the PC. :D

[msclwolf.livejournal.com]

OMG I cant believe I did not reply to this sooner (coughs,composes self)

Well then I guess we had better make it for the Summer else it could be chilly!!