Project: Galaxy 4.75

Whoa dude, I want this rackmount! :D
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/default.aspx
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Correct, they are 400's I got for a great deal. The 1Tb's are in galaxy and in other rigs not seen here :)
 
Ockie, congrats on the nice looking pile of HDs!!

Are you planning to run this machine 24/7 or only boot it up once in a while??
 
Ockie, congrats on the nice looking pile of HDs!!

Are you planning to run this machine 24/7 or only boot it up once in a while??

Once in a while.

I decided not to use the 2.5" drive and the slot bracket adapter for it, I like the clean wiring on this system way too much. I'm just going to use one of the 400gb drives as a system/storage drive.
 
Once in a while.

I decided not to use the 2.5" drive and the slot bracket adapter for it, I like the clean wiring on this system way too much. I'm just going to use one of the 400gb drives as a system/storage drive.

Are these drives going to be in a RAID array or just JBOD??
 
o_O :eek:

Ockie what do you do with 25Tb ? I looked in the other thread but have not found anything :(
 
o_O :eek:

Ockie what do you do with 25Tb ? I looked in the other thread but have not found anything :(

i always wonder this too..

i think i remember something about storing HD movies and stuff... but hes been doing it wayyyy longer than movies on a computer.

massive databases n stuff i guess Oo
 
He has the world's largest gay, bi, and transgender porn collection. :D jk.

I always thought he had the world's largest collection of hardware pr0n. You know - pics of hard drives in RAID 69, RAID 0+1, hot-swap enclosures, rack mounted hardware, etc.
 
[LYL]Homer;1032763874 said:
I always thought he had the world's largest collection of hardware pr0n. You know - pics of hard drives in RAID 69, RAID 0+1, hot-swap enclosures, rack mounted hardware, etc.

haha, what a use for a RAID array!!!
 
lol @ alcuin.

Update: Raid card came, not much I can do without those enclosures, they come tomorrow!

I plan to have this entire system up and online by tomorrow night. I will post some benchies for you guys.

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Nice setup for someone copying Okie:

Same mobo/cpu + 2gb ram $212 shipped

Same Adaptec card $121 shipped

+ one of those Norco cases, psu, drives, optical, os.

Yes, I was considering the above. The wife would kill me however. :(
 
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What proccesor is on that raid card? It almost looks like those old Mendocino Celerons...

EDIT: Can't wait for you to get those 5 in 3 adapters, love to see how this looks afterwords!
 
Why do you have to keep doing this Ockie? I mean, I don't want to spend my money.....
 
Obviously, Ockie is a very rich man with a problem of having too much money and not enough things to buy. ;)
 
Okay, so the setup is complete, now critics time:

- Case had tabs for each drive bay, obviously this is an issue for 5 in 3's as they are not slotted for these tabs... so in the end, I found myself flatting the case tabs (pics will come later)
- These iStarUSA units does not show the HDD LED activity as all my previous units have, which absolutley blows
- Since the case has extra room between each hot swap unit (rather than tightly stacked as it has been before), the hot swap units are buckling and slightly bending under the hard drives weight...another negative.
- The raid controller will not allow me to create larger than 2tb partitions, so I had to toss out the idea of raid and created multiple smaller volumes and extended those volumes in the drive manager.
- Performance to the array leaves me with much to be desired
- These iStar units were a b_tch to populate with drives, for some reason the drive positioning wasn't aligned properly with the backplane interface so I had to seat and reseat each one. I have never had this issue with these things before... I'm really wondering if I got some older revision or a newer revision as the boxes are re-designed from the old ones.

In the end, you get what you pay for. I think once my transfers are complete, I will destroy the array and re-create on a proper raid controller. I guess supermicro spoiled me.
 
No 48bit LBA?...guess that's why it was so cheap. :(
Finding a decent controller for 20 drives isn't going to be cheap...I would sell you my 1130ML, but it wouldn't be enough.
 
No 48bit LBA?...guess that's why it was so cheap. :(
Finding a decent controller for 20 drives isn't going to be cheap...I would sell you my 1130ML, but it wouldn't be enough.


I'm not going to worry about it for now, I'll just let this one do its job until I'm ready for the next upgrade. All this system is anyways is just to hold static data, so I suppose it aint that bad.
 
I'm not going to worry about it for now, I'll just let this one do its job until I'm ready for the next upgrade. All this system is anyways is just to hold static data, so I suppose it aint that bad.

It is were me, I would throw the drives into JBOD mode and use Windows software raid, simple and not insanely slow....
 
Subscribed, how much did the 400's cost? you should of looked around for some cheap 750's or 1TB's or maybe even 640's.
 
Subscribed, how much did the 400's cost? you should of looked around for some cheap 750's or 1TB's or maybe even 640's.

He bought 20 x400GB for a total of $700 off the forums. So roughly $35 per each 400GB drive. Excellent deal.
 
So I get an email today from calpc stating that they misplaced my quote request email and that they would sell the units for me @ $28 each + shipping. Wtf. This is cheaper than I used to get them, but nearly half the price than what they quoted me over the phone.

Now I'm really curious. I will be quite upset if $28 per unit was the price they would get me... because that would have knocked off $300 on the project.
 
Ockie - how have you been? Haven't checked in in months. Hope all is well. I'm right about ready to embark on backing up my multi-terabyte beast too. Glad to see your Galaxy 4.5 build is underway.

Once again we have the same goal in mind - CHEAP storage this time around AND quiet. Any day here I'm going to lose it and tear open those Supermicro power supplies and do something about down-volting those fans - so noisy, albeit in the garage, but still.

I see that you've already bought the case. For anyone else considering a large storage build on the cheap, the Norco 4020 case was brought to my attention in another forum - $289 for 20 bays, and it's got a freakin backplane! Newegg's got it. No noisy internal hot-swap fans or crazy loud power supply fans (ofcourse no P/S redundancy either, but then again this is a backup application). You could buy THREE of these things for the cost of the 24-bay Supermicro in Galaxy 5.

Considering most "5 in 3" sata backplane modules cost over $100, this thing is ridiculously good value-for-money ratio. Where was this thing for us back in January, eh?

yhst-7703692025643_2009_20739563
 
<snip>
- The raid controller will not allow me to create larger than 2tb partitions, so I had to toss out the idea of raid and created multiple smaller volumes and extended those volumes in the drive manager.
- Performance to the array leaves me with much to be desired
<snip>

I just ran through your thread from the beginning and saw the Adaptec you were considering and thought "uh oh - no he didn't.." I wouldn't wish that thing on my enemy. I bought one back in January to test thinking it was too good to be true for the price on ebay. It was too good to be true. Insanely, ridiculously slow performance with any of the raid functionality. I created a Raid0 array (to avoid having to wait out a raid5 array init just for testing) with 16 drives and I was getting the throughput of a SINGLE drive (like 60mbps). Something's clearly wrong with that card (not defective - I mean a crap chip and shameful engineering) and after doing some reading online I noticed same issues experienced by others. Perhaps it'll serve your backup purpose, but I have mine sitting in a drawer since I don't even want to sell it on ebay and have someone ding my feedback with "it's so slow something's wrong with it I want a refund - wah wah".

No offense meant just my observations - I'm surely spoiled by my Areca 1280ML and 2 x Adaptec 52245 (the 5-series Adaptec's are the first Adaptec raid cards in their history that haven't SUCKED). I almost bought a 1680ix-24 recently when I thought my 1280ML died, but as I've read the 1280ML's are just touchy with the Supermicro X7DWN+ getting past BIOS/post firmware init.
 
Yeah the high end controllers makes everything else feel like childs play. As for that norco case, looks like you are sold on it also. I am planning on buying one in the future when I stumble over a bunch of hard drives for cheap again. I just wish Norco will come out with backplane options as they have done so before.
 
Ockie you got any HDD's your trying to get rid of....I need a bunch of cheap ones for my new build?
 
Yeah the high end controllers makes everything else feel like childs play. As for that norco case, looks like you are sold on it also. I am planning on buying one in the future when I stumble over a bunch of hard drives for cheap again. I just wish Norco will come out with backplane options as they have done so before.

By the way I don't know what your HTPC situation is these days but I'm about to build a new HTPC based on this new Intel G45 chipset motherboard coming out - you can check out my official threads on both the microATX and mini-ITX (tiny!) versions to see what I'm talking about. It's a next-gen chipset with Intel's most powerful IGP to date (Intel GMA X4500 HD) that does full 1080p hardware accelerated decoding, PLUS Intel's own 8-channel audio chip, HDMI 1.3a compatibility, uncompressed LPCM audio over HDMI, etc. The HTPC application is clearly Intel's squarely targeted demographic here.

The mini-ITX version has a lot of people starry-eyed since it'll be the most powerful mini-ITX motherboard ever given that is uses the same IGP as the microATX version, again with full 1080p decoding of all three Bluray codecs with only like 10% CPU utilization. mini-ITX with an HDMI 1.3a capable HDMI port - truly "next gen".
&#8730; Official Intel G45 DG45FC mini-ITX HTPC Motherboard Thread
&#8730; Official Intel G45 DG45ID microATX HTPC Motherboard Thread

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I just ran through your thread from the beginning and saw the Adaptec you were considering and thought "uh oh - no he didn't.." I wouldn't wish that thing on my enemy. I bought one back in January to test thinking it was too good to be true for the price on ebay. It was too good to be true. Insanely, ridiculously slow performance with any of the raid functionality. I created a Raid0 array (to avoid having to wait out a raid5 array init just for testing) with 16 drives and I was getting the throughput of a SINGLE drive (like 60mbps). Something's clearly wrong with that card (not defective - I mean a crap chip and shameful engineering) and after doing some reading online I noticed same issues experienced by others. Perhaps it'll serve your backup purpose, but I have mine sitting in a drawer since I don't even want to sell it on ebay and have someone ding my feedback with "it's so slow something's wrong with it I want a refund - wah wah".
I actually was/am going to buy Ockie's card, I just want it for the ports, nothing else, is it at least fast enough to do backup to 1 drive at a time in JBOD mode....???
No offense meant just my observations - I'm surely spoiled by my Areca 1280ML and 2 x Adaptec 52245 (the 5-series Adaptec's are the first Adaptec raid cards in their history that haven't SUCKED). I almost bought a 1680ix-24 recently when I thought my 1280ML died, but as I've read the 1280ML's are just touchy with the Supermicro X7DWN+ getting past BIOS/post firmware init.

That is one thing, I do not get why you guys like those Supermicro mobos so much, I just bought an Asus board with almost the same specs for $305, less the fact that all the connectors line so well in that Supermicro case.. I hate consumer Asus mobos, but their server lineup works very well..... just curious, not looking to start a brand fight!!!
 
That is one thing, I do not get why you guys like those Supermicro mobos so much, I just bought an Asus board with almost the same specs for $305, less the fact that all the connectors line so well in that Supermicro case.. I hate consumer Asus mobos, but their server lineup works very well..... just curious, not looking to start a brand fight!!!

Supermico has a good track record and their cases are designed for their boards. The remote managment support is good too.

Not saying asus is bad, supermico is just better.
 
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