After less than two years my media server was no longer able to be expanded. There was no more room to add disks and it had heating issues - it couldn't be kept cool enough.
So it was time to plan the replacement.
Based on what I have learnt from the build and operation of the first one I came up with a short list.
1. Must be able to be significantly expanded with more disks
2. Must have good cooling
3. It will run a recent linux
4. Because of the number of disks it will use RAID6
These criteria should help to address some of the shortcomings of the first file server. With RAID5 it was always a significant worry when a disk failed as the rebuild phase was a prime candidate to have another disk failure. With RAID6 there is the still a risk of a disk failure during the rebuild phase but it is reduced as there are two parity disks. Also if you have to wait for a new disk to arrive the RAID6 still has one parity disk left.
To get good cooling and room for lots of disks meant researching enclosures (or cases) carefully. A standard tower case was not going to be adequate so I chose a rack mountable (4U) server case - the Norcotek 24 bay RPC-4224. These cases are not cheap compared to a tower case (and there are options that take up to 15 drives) but it is designed to make adding disks easy and handles the cooling as well.
This case will be usable into the future - when 4+TB disk capacities are common it will still be usable. Right now it can be fitted out with 21(*) 2TB disks to give 38TB of storage. My plan was to start out with 12 2TB disks and expand as needed.
(*) Why 21? Well I used a 500GB disk for the operating system and the motherboard and SATA/SAS cards only allow 22 ports to be connected.
NOTE (23/Jul/2011): I have replaced the PCIe video card with a PCI card and installed a 4-port SATA/SAS card to take the possible disks up to the full 24.
So it was time to plan the replacement.
Based on what I have learnt from the build and operation of the first one I came up with a short list.
1. Must be able to be significantly expanded with more disks
2. Must have good cooling
3. It will run a recent linux
4. Because of the number of disks it will use RAID6
These criteria should help to address some of the shortcomings of the first file server. With RAID5 it was always a significant worry when a disk failed as the rebuild phase was a prime candidate to have another disk failure. With RAID6 there is the still a risk of a disk failure during the rebuild phase but it is reduced as there are two parity disks. Also if you have to wait for a new disk to arrive the RAID6 still has one parity disk left.
To get good cooling and room for lots of disks meant researching enclosures (or cases) carefully. A standard tower case was not going to be adequate so I chose a rack mountable (4U) server case - the Norcotek 24 bay RPC-4224. These cases are not cheap compared to a tower case (and there are options that take up to 15 drives) but it is designed to make adding disks easy and handles the cooling as well.
This case will be usable into the future - when 4+TB disk capacities are common it will still be usable. Right now it can be fitted out with 21(*) 2TB disks to give 38TB of storage. My plan was to start out with 12 2TB disks and expand as needed.
(*) Why 21? Well I used a 500GB disk for the operating system and the motherboard and SATA/SAS cards only allow 22 ports to be connected.
NOTE (23/Jul/2011): I have replaced the PCIe video card with a PCI card and installed a 4-port SATA/SAS card to take the possible disks up to the full 24.
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