Gadgetory

so I talked about my Windows Home Server an awful lot but I don't think I've ever actually shown it to you guys so here it is in its current configuration it's running Windows Home Server v1 and I actually just recently made some changes to it so I went from a LGA 775 configuration to a Z on board and a low-power xeon 1155 processor i've got some old-school a neon memory in there remember c'mon des yeah they're on a business so I've got two gigs of RAM I actually recently changed the power supply as well I used to have an 850 watt power supply and here I've gone to a 1050 watt power supply but that's not actually because I needed the extra wattage but rather because I needed a power supply that had the ability or the before site to separate and put the peripheral connectors on two separate rails so that way I'm able to plug in my up to 24 drives in the front to two separate rails on the power supply the other one had all of the peripheral connectors running off of a single rail which overloaded it as soon as the drive started to spin up even when I turned on staggered spin up which means that the drives some of them spin and then the other ones spin and the other one spin so they don't all hit your power supply at the same time so that was why I went with a different power supply I'm using a Norco case that has a SFF 80-82 or whatever whatever this connector is called I can't remember so up to four SATA or SAS channels per connector although I'm only running SATA drives because I am running Windows Home Server right I also recently changed my SSD so I had my Corsair what was it I can't even remember I posted this on there because I thought it was pretty lulz but my Corsair S series so this was back with day out when they were using the Samsung controllers I posted this on my Twitter as like a tombstone outside so this is the first SSD that actually had legitimately died on me when I had it deployed and I think the reason for that is just Windows Home Server really trashes your boot drive Windows Home Server v1 is what I'm running because it uses it not only as the LS but also as a storage drive as part of the drive pool which balances itself around all the time so it just really gets hit pretty hard so I went with an Intel drive just because you know legendary reliability and all of that 510 series just because it's a little bit older so I got a good deal in terms of the raid card I'm running again this is a bit of an older made card it's not SATA 3 or anything like that but it's an arica 1680 IX this is a 24 portrayed card I think it's got like 256 Meg's of memory on it I haven't really upgraded it it's not 512 512 Meg's I haven't really upgraded it because it hasn't been necessary because I'm not actually running in raid yet but I will in the future when I upgrade to Windows Home Server v2 or 2011 or whatever it's called I'm going to put a proper raid array because right now I have well I have what Windows Home Server v1 was basically designed for and that is the most ghetto possible arrangement of drives ever because v1 is all about taking random assortments of drives and configuring them in the drive drive pool so what the drive pool does is it redundant Lee stores all of your data on at least two drives at any given time and it rebalances it constantly to make sure that it stays on at least two drives at any given time so the performance isn't great however I can usually get 70 to 100 megabytes per second reading right from the whole server at a given time but it's really not good enough anymore because I'm editing video directly off the server these days and so that is what's prompted on my next upgrade so here check this out guys so I've got any sort of random variety of drive so there's a Seagate 7200 point 10 320 gig drive here let's go through and look at the mall there's another one of those so let's slide that back in here's a 250 gig 7200 point 10 here is an empty one here's an empty one so we got three drives so far this whole sort of space should be empty here three drives three guys for drive so there's a WD one time fighting black 5 drives another WD one terabyte black empty 6 drives a WD one terabyte black 7 drives or WD one terabyte black 8 drives a Seagate 7200 point 11 500 gig nine drives a 7200 point 10 500 kick 10 drives a WD one terabyte black 11 drives a WD one terabyte green twelve drives the WD one terabyte black 13 drives a Hitachi one terabyte 14 drives a hit at two one terabyte 15 drives a WD 2 terabyte black 16 drives the WD 6 40 gig black and 17 drives a Hitachi one terabyte so what I want to do is I want to build Windows Home Server to doesn't include the drive extender so I can no longer use my random mishmash of drives here in order to get my you know eight or nine terabytes or whatever works up to a storage over a span of like 16 drives I have to build a proper raid array so what I'm going to do is I am going to get a new boot drive so you have to have at least I think it's a 160 gig new driver Windows Home Server 2 so I can't even use my 120 gig intel SSD you'll have to get something bigger I still want to go with an SSD for the V Drive I still had more hard drives fail over the last few years than SSDs and at one SSD fail and I've had anywhere from about 8 to 10 hard drives fail in that given time and it's not that I don't deploy enough SSDs I mean my personal rig has 8 SSDs in it for the boot drive so it's not really that I don't think so I'm still going to go with an SSD for the boot drive and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to build myself a raid 6 array with some new Seagate 3 terabytes the consumer-level WD drives aren't that great for raid these days so I'll find enough empty ones build a raid array on the card and then in the Windows Home Server view 1 operating system I will then transfer all the data off the drive pool drives to the raid array and a raid array has a few advantages the performance will be dramatically better and I'll tell you how I'm going to leverage that because a single gigabit per second connection isn't going to do it performance will be better also it will be more real time in terms of the data reliability so the drive pool takes in the data then it kind of waits for you to be idle and then it shuffle it around where as raid will actually dynamically in real time be shuffling it to all the right places and raid six can lose up to two drives before you lose any data as long as you you know throw a new one in there and rebuild the raid before you know an additional two drives fail I grade five I don't think is reliable enough because if one drive fails and then another one fails while you're rebuilding it then you've lost your data but breed six you can lose up to two so that's why I want to go with raid six other advantages I mean disadvantages are that you can't just dynamically throw drives in it and just kind of increase your storage you have to actually plan it and build it properly but I don't need that much storage space anyway so it's not really the end of the world okay that's just what you're going crazy um yeah you have to have like all matching drives and stuff like that is kind of a pain you have to just generally manage it better however the raid card should help me because at least with a high end raid card you can you can change the raid level on-the-fly if you want you can add drives to the raid on the fly if you want you can remove drives from the raid on the fly if you want so that that will help a lot so that's the migration plan here and then I'm also going to be changing my motherboard because I need more than one PCIe slot see there's a single PCIe 16x slot on this board right now that's where I've got the raid card plugged into but I'm going to be adding a quad port Ethernet card next so I've already added one to my personal desktop you can see right here I've got an Intel server Nick it's got four ports on it there that plus the Intel Nick built into my motherboard is going to give me up to assuming I'm using cat 6 cables and assuming I have a compatible switch which is why this is sitting here it's going to give me up to five gigabit per second to anything else that is similarly connected using a teaming or whatever that's called whatever so they all work together and you basically combine the theoretical maximum throughput of all the ports are using together so I'm going to take a new z77 board that just has sort of all of the all the PCIe slots that I need and then I'm going to still use the low voltage be honest with me it'll run in it I think it should be fine so I'm going to put this in there use the Intel Ethernet here throw another one of those that will probably put it in this one so it runs directly off the PCIe controller on the CPU rather than down through the self bridge and then I'll run the raid card off this one and that will give me the expansion that I need to do my five gigabit per second connection now the requirement for that though is you have to have a switch that's ready you have to have a manageable switch so I'm going to be using this guy is like a couple hundred bucks and then there's even like a twenty five dollar mir so this is a twenty four port gigabit smart switch and so what is it what is it called it's the pro safe GS seven to forty three hundred NES so I'm really excited to try this out so that means between my computer here and the Windows Home Server which is on the other side of that wall I will have a five gigabit per second connection and then the rest of the house will just be gigabit and that will give me plus the raid six so the additional performance I'm going to get from not using the ghetto drive pool should give me just screaming performance between those two PC's and then gigabit to everywhere else so I'm very excited so basically I'm going to try and find a cheaper power supply that I can put in here because it's a total waste of this thousand watt I need a new boot drive I need to get Windows Home Server v2 going I need to upgrade the motherboard I need to add the four port NIC and then I need to get some hard drives so that is my project over the next little while is a bit more of them sort of it's a less sexy project than upgrading my personal PC but I just haven't at the time for a variety of reasons lately and this seems like more of a priority in terms of increasing my productivity so that's what I'm working on thank you for checking out this update and don't forget to subscribe to learn his tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos