Passion for Learning

 

 

I promised way back when I began this blog to write about more than just flying.  Here is just one of those posts.  About time eh?

Anyone who has shopped around for some storage these days realizes very quickly that drive sizes are becoming crazy!  When I started in this industry we were installing 1.0 GB hard disks and wondering how on earth one could fill a disk THAT BIG!  Nowadays a single DVD disc holds 4-8x as much.  To buy a disk today you’d be looking at sizes of 500 GB or 1.0 TB.  1 terabyte is effectively 1024 gigabytes which means that I’d need one thousand of those old drives to backup one of these new drives.  That’s getting wild.  So you figure, okay how about I backup my 1.0 TB drive onto DVD’s?  I hope you have some spare time.  At 10 minutes for 4 gb plus swapping it would take you 256 DVD’s to make a backup and at least 2 days to do it!  

Hmmm, so now what?  We could use RAID.  However using modern SATA drives in a RAID array can only get you so far.  In fact the size of today’s drives makes technology like RAID-5 obsolete.  Apparently at these drive sizes, Everything we know about storage is wrong!   These articles really opened my eyes.  I did not want to make my storage MORE risky.  So I turned to the internet to see what can an average person do to back up their stuff safely and be able to again have faith in these jumbo disks.

I found nirvana and her name is Windows Home Server!  There are many variations of this system but effectively it gives you a server for your home which is loosely based on Windows 2003 Server technology.  It offers many tools from backup/bare metal restore on up to a storage system that is flexible, supports these huge disks and doesn’t use RAID.    I can have my cake and eat it too.  I also won’t need to sit by my PC feeding it DVD’s until I turn old and grey.  

So where is the magic?  Well you find yourself a computer that has a gig or two of ram.  You throw at least two but as many as you dare disks into it and you run the system.  There are pre built examples you can buy retail but for my money, I wanted something I could do myself.   I used HP’s EX 485 with 1.0 GB of RAM and 1.5 TB of space as my benchmark.  

I discovered some websites where people were building home server’s out of a Shuttle PC.  The Shuttle was built as a small form factor unit that is very green in it’s power consumption and very tight on space.   Here you can see the detailed specs as well as links to order your own.

 

Shuttle XPC K45 Barebones Mini PC LGA775 GMA950 DDR2 1PCI SATA VGA Sound LAN   Intel Pentium Dual Core E2220 Dual Core Processor LGA775 2.4GHZ 800FSB 1MB Retail   Western Digital WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1TB SATA2 7200RPM 4.2MS 32MB 3.5IN Dual Proc Hard Drive OEM   GELID Solutions GELID Silent 9TC 900-2000RPM 92MM Thermal Control Fan 37.89CFM 11-23.5DBA HDB 3PIN   Corsair XMS2 TWIN2X2048-6400 2GB 2X1GB PC2-6400 DDR2-800 CL 5-5-5-18 240PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory   nGear SATA Serial ATA Hard Drive Data & Power Cable 18 Inch 7 Pin  

 

I decided to go with the WD “Black” series hard disks as they are higher performing than the “Green” series.  They are still very quiet and run at approx 40 celsius in my build.   Here are some photos of the buildup. 

I have been running this server at home now for about a month and my comments are:

1. Machine is FAST and QUIET!  In fact my laptop is louder than this at full roar.
2. The temperatures are approx 45 on the CPU and 40 on the HDD’s  CPU fan is 1600 RPM, case is 800 RPM
3. Backups over the network are slow at first but the delta backups are quick, even wirelessly
4. The user interface to the system is very intuitive

I expect to explore some of the add-ins at a later date but for now I am happy to have solved my problem of where can I backup my stuff.  I even read of some people getting this to work with Apple’s time machine.  So I haven’t forgotten you David!  

Total cost for the hardware?  $505 shipped on 04/04/2008.  Your price should be even cheaper today.

Tags: Home Server, NAS, WHS

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.