A new home server

Thats weird, hope it ships soon.

In the mean time I have set up flex raid on my desktop with all the available spare hard disks I had and used 2x 1tb + 1x 160 gb as data drives with another single 160gb parity drive and it works. Copied a bunch of stuff off my drobo and it filled the drives up one by one. I also found out that it is quite difficult to add another drive to an existing configuration. But deleting the configuration and creating a new one resulted in no data loss and everything was OK. I might name my drives R1 DRU 1, R1 DRU 2, R1 PPU 1 etc so that it is easy to see which drives belong in which raid configuration if I have to do it again to add drives.

As I was setting up the above I noticed that I could not get access to my music which is stored on an HP mediavault that I've had for a few years, turns out 10 days before I get my new server up and running the hard drive has crapped out and I've lost the lot!!! Not ammused. Now to try to find where my backup copy of the music is living now.
 
wow, sorry to hear of the data loss!

How can you have a 160Gb drive as a parity drive? I thought it had to be the as big as the largest data drive?

It seems odd that adding new drives isn't easier.
 
Im not sure how the parity drive works really. I thought the same as you that it had to be the same size as your largest data drive. It would not initialise the raid without a parity drive. And the data I had to move required that I have both 1Tb drives available. I have not tried updating the parity drive yet either. I don't really want to play with it too much at the moment with all my movies on it. Once they are on the new server I will try updating the parity drive and see what happens when I replace one drive with an in formatted one.

For extra drives it seems that they recommend that you use expert mode and create empty drives in the array that you will fill later. I,m researching how to do this at the moment.

My case arrived the other day. Its pretty huge. I'm still waiting for the reverse breakout cable from case. Its out of stock now although I'm sure it said 13 in stock when I ordered.
 
Hi gents

Thanks for an interesting and useful thread, might save me money!!

The MoBo of my old WHS ver 1 has just failed, and will replace it.

As I have cases etc it wont be as expensive but please keep us upto date, as I will probably go with one of your motherboards as I have similar requirements Edd!

Will read again when more awake esp regarding your cables!!

Edited:

Ed see you got the motherboard that is on my current shopping list...

Also realise those cables are for the PCL-e SATA card, i would have been stump, thanks :)


Adrian
 
Last edited:
I hope it helps Adrian. It was from Smurfin's thread that I got started so hopefully it will follow onto your's or anothers thread when you build yours.

The specs we bought should be a good guide but its fair to say servers can be built for far less, I think we have both over specc'ed our servers.
 
I hope it helps Adrian. It was from Smurfin's thread that I got started so hopefully it will follow onto your's or anothers thread when you build yours.

The specs we bought should be a good guide but its fair to say servers can be built for far less, I think we have both over specc'ed our servers.

Thanks..

Do you have a link for Smurfin's thread?

Yes am aware of the debate for server components etc. I have a case that can hold some 15 HDD already.

I need to replace teh MoBo, memory and CPU everything else should be okay other than a new system drive and possibly for ease, a new 2 TB drive to transfer data from my existing drives before adding them to the drive pool.

So not a huge amount of cash.

I do need to sit down and write a list of what would like my server/HTPC/network achieve....

Adrian
 
Hi gents

Thanks for an interesting and useful thread, might save me money!!

The MoBo of my old WHS ver 1 has just failed, and will replace it.

As I have cases etc it wont be as expensive but please keep us upto date, as I will probably go with one of your motherboards as I have similar requirements Edd!

Will read again when more awake esp regarding your cables!!

Edited:

Ed see you got the motherboard that is on my current shopping list...

Also realise those cables are for the PCL-e SATA card, i would have been stump, thanks :)


Adrian

Adrian,

The main reason I went for that board is that it will take 3 expansion cards at PCIe x4 with a couple of spare x1 slots if I decide to stick a TV card into it. for now i will only use 2 8 drive expansion cards and 4 onboard satas for my pool (20 Drives) plus an optical drive and a system drive.

The cables i've ordered are multilane sata cables that connect direct from the supermicro sata cards and the SAS backplanes on my case. The other one that i'm waiting on from x case is to connect 4 of the normal sata ports on my Mobo to one of the backplanes in the case. unless you have a case like this you will most likely get away with the cables that Dan ordered. Which go from the expansion card direct to the drives.

Are you using expansion cards? I'm guessing you will if you have a 15 bay case.

Let me know if you need any more help and I'll do my best but bear in mind I'm kind of picking this up as I go too :)
 
hi all.

Just read through this post, after having posted my own page about a similar sort of setup.

Just wondering if you can clarify something for me about Flexraid that you're using.

At the moment, I have (for arguements sake), about 10 x 2TB drives, full of content. They are not backed up in any way.

If I build a new similar setup.....and install WHS2011 (or even Win7?), and install FlexRaid on the OS drive,

then I can install all 10 x2TB drives into my case (making 11 drives total).........all reading as regular drives, without formatting etc required........

...and then stick a single (12th) 3tb drive in, to work as a parity drive.

And then should a single 2TB HDD fully fail, I can still recover the full contents of the 2TB drive once replaced with another drive similar or larger in size?

Or is it not that simple? :) I know nothing about Raid configs etc but trying to learn, and it sounds from what I can gather, that FlexRaid might be what I need
 
From what I understand of flexraid that is correct. Once you install the new replacement drive the raid array would rebuild itself, replacing the lost data.

If a 2nd drive fails at the same time or before you get a replacement then you will lose data but only what was on the failed disk.

Id like to know if flexraid has dual parity disk options for 2 disk failures. I think I read somewhere a while ago it does.

My stuff arrived today so ive been playing with the parts for a few hours. Its mostly together now but itll be a while until I get it up and running.Ive not built a PC before and I think it will take some time to work out where all the case usb cables etc go into the mobo.
 
thanks Dan201 - hopefully someone else can confirm too.

having 2 parity drives would be a better failsafe if its a viable option in Flexraid for the event of a (less likely - touch wood) double drive failure

I'm trying to figure out though, with my limited knowledge of how these multiple drives connect up. Please see my other thread http://www.avforums.com/forums/netw...nectivity-parity-drives-etc.html#post16207579 so I don't take over this thread with my own questions.

Does FlexRaid work on Windows 7 too? As also debating whether to oomph up the cpu and gfx to an i5/i7 and geforce card so I can have the occasional spot of gaming on it too (would be mostly overkill I know)
 
Well, I just had a text from scan my stuffs coming on Monday.

Has it arrived? I see scan have stopped stocking that motherboard at the moment....
 
Check out this link http://www.flexraid.com/2011/08/20/understanding-the-flexraid-raid-engines/ it explains the different raid engines used in flexraid.( sorry posting from my tablet don't know how to do hyperlinks) the TX engine seems like it will do dual parity disks to protect against two drive failures.

Most of my parts have arrived I just need the adapter for my optical drive which is coming tomorrow along with a couple of 3Tb drives. And figure out if I need to do any configuration to the data cards then I'm good to go.

You can install drives with data on them and add them to an array without any data loss. This is how I'm transferring everything to my new server. I created a flexraid pool on my windows 7 machine with my spare drives. Copy the data to the pool then delete to configuration in flexraid leaving the data intact on separate drives. These are then removed from my desktop ready to go into the server and be added to a new pool in there.

Edit - seems like it hyperlinks for you :)
 
I need to read about this flexipool though intend to use something liek driverbender on my WHS 201 box
 
sapper said:
Has it arrived? I see scan have stopped stocking that motherboard at the moment....

Yes its here the board has been superceeded by the Gen 3 version. I would think this is why its not on the scan website anymore. I think its The same spec but with PCIe 3.0.
 
Yes its here the board has been superceeded by the Gen 3 version. I would think this is why its not on the scan website anymore. I think its The same spec but with PCIe 3.0.

And an extra tenner I think

Ebuyer has it for a similar price....
 
I think ive put mine all together now. So many sata cables, it looks like Stevie Wonder did the cableing. Im not going to turn it on tonight, ill have that adventure for tomorrow. Something is bound to go wrong! lol.

It does look pretty awesome. I just hope no one opens a drive as there r no locks on the xcase ones.
 
I think ive put mine all together now. So many sata cables, it looks like Stevie Wonder did the cableing. Im not going to turn it on tonight, ill have that adventure for tomorrow. Something is bound to go wrong! lol.

It does look pretty awesome. I just hope no one opens a drive as there r no locks on the xcase ones.

I have a fre weekend so might order my parts tomorrow so I can rebuild on Sat/sun taking photos again..

Did it previously but the website i posted the build on has vanished :(
 
Dan201 said:
I think ive put mine all together now. So many sata cables, it looks like Stevie Wonder did the cableing. Im not going to turn it on tonight, ill have that adventure for tomorrow. Something is bound to go wrong! lol.

It does look pretty awesome. I just hope no one opens a drive as there r no locks on the xcase ones.

Quite satisfying isn't it. Well it will be when you turn it on and everything works.

Mine should be up and running tomorrow. Although it will only have 16 drives as I'm still waiting fow my reverse Breakout cable from x-case
 
16 drives is full capacity on mine! Hopefully more than enough. I only have 5 drives at the moment.
 

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