# Finished my 10TB Windows Home Server



## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

I call it _WHS Galactica_

26 Drives + WHS = *10,820GB* before raid and formatting, Somewhere around ~*9.55TB* after.

4x750 (Storage Pool) (Hitachi)
7x500 (Storage Pool) (2 Samsung F1, 5 Seagate 7200.9 & 7200.10)
2x400 (Storage Pool) (Seagate 7200.10 & ES)
9x320 (Storage Pool) (Seagate 7200.10)
4x160 in RAID10 (OS) (WD Scorpio 5400RPM 2.5")

* Lian Li PC-75 Full Tower
* PCP&C Silencer 750w
* Intel Entry Server Motherboard SE7221BK1-E w/ Dual Intel Pro1000MT NICs
* Pentium 4 540 3.2GHz HT w/ Thermaltake something heatsink
* 3GB (2x1GB + 2x512MB) DDR2 RAM
* SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 (8 port SATA controller)
* Adaptec AAR 21610SA (16 port SATA controller)
* Eight 80mm fans, two 120mm fans all under-volted
* Matshita Slim CD-RW/DVD via Vantec USB to IDE
* Samsung Floppy for all those controller card drivers!!!






^ Where it all began, picked this up for $100, comparison next to my Stacker










^ Here she is today, many months later and many $$$ later.















^ Ghetto modded brackets to fit two extra drives. (Excuse the disconnected drive, waiting on a IDE to SATA thing from Newegg)





^ More ghetto modding to add 6 more drives on top of the PSU.





^ Cardkeeper saves the day, the card was bending pretty bad prior.










^ Got a old Compaq server slimline mount, shoved a newer drive in it, connected it with a Vantec USB to IDE cable and then used the extra space to shove one last hard drive above it. I need to make a bezel for it though. It's ugly.






I use this for backups and media storage, mainly movies and TV shows.

Oh and a nice fun fact. It weighs over 65LB.

If I were to guess total cost, since I got a lot free or at huge discounts from work, I'd say under $1500.


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## RevengE (Feb 18, 2009)

Nice man How much did all that run you?


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## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

About $1500, but most of it has been adding up over the last year or so. Kind of a long term project.

Right now I have like 6TB left so I should be set for a while. Provided something doesn't explode.


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## exodusprime1337 (Feb 18, 2009)

that is awsome.. i've got a simalar setup for a file server, although very simple.  i took 3 raid cards threw them in an old a8n32 board with a 4800x2 and a crappy ass vid card and just started stacking 1tb seagate drives, i put in 8 so far and got room for 4 more including onboard.  

sad thing is, i use freenas lol... it's prolly the simplest shit when it comes to running a home server.


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## MRCL (Feb 18, 2009)

Dude, huge! Props for the ghetto modding, looks pretty professional at first glimpse.


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## FordGT90Concept (Feb 18, 2009)

I think that PSU is liable to explode (at least turn off and never come back on). 24 HDDs to spin up is an awful lot of load.  :X


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## Deleted member 3 (Feb 18, 2009)

Why bother with all the ancient disks? Aren't you better off using less and larger disks? ie sell the smaller ones, replace with larger ones.

Apart from that, not bad at all. I'm still busy creating my storage cabinet, the servers case is too small to put so much crap in. Looking for a cheap way to connect the cabinet externally without having a zillion cables. will probably end up making my own cabling.


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## Homeless (Feb 18, 2009)

that is very impressive cable management


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## Marineborn (Feb 18, 2009)

wow thats a sexy job, very nice.


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## h3llb3nd4 (Feb 18, 2009)

Really love your cable management and drive layout


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## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

DanTheBanjoman said:


> Why bother with all the ancient disks? Aren't you better off using less and larger disks? ie sell the smaller ones, replace with larger ones.
> 
> Apart from that, not bad at all. I'm still busy creating my storage cabinet, the servers case is too small to put so much crap in. Looking for a cheap way to connect the cabinet externally without having a zillion cables. will probably end up making my own cabling.



I'd had most of the smaller ones from my previous server and I just reused them. I figure as I need more space I can slowly just replace them one by one with larger units.

I made some custom cables for power and that helped me a lot with getting 26 drives connected.


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## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

FordGT90Concept said:


> I think that PSU is liable to explode (at least turn off and never come back on). 24 HDDs to spin up is an awful lot of load.  :X



My UPS and my Kill-a-watt show about 700ish peak load for about 2 seconds at power on but just normal running is under 350w. That PSU is rated at 800 or 850 something peak and 750w sustained at like 40c or 50c so I actually have some grow room.


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## spearman914 (Feb 18, 2009)

10TB = nice. Keep it up!!!


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## lemonadesoda (Feb 18, 2009)

You've done a great (and tidy) job building your fileserver!  However I agree with Dan that a smarter move would be to buy a set of 1TB or 1.5TB new drives.  Much greater storage density. Much faster. (Esp. for backing up). And much lower power consumption. And quieter. And cooler.

Excepting Seagates recent mess with their drives, newer drives tend to be more reliable too.

Even though you CAN and DID do what you did... I would suggest selling those drives off and replacing with new/hi-capacity ones.  RAID arrays will be much easier to manage too.

Remember... for ultimate safety... it's good to have identical drives in a RAID array... AND to have a spare identical to rebuild the RAID in situation of failure.  Unless you are JBODing.

I find it funny you have such an "advanced" system with pretty set of RAID controllers and then run Windows Home Server! LOL. Do you trust it?

HEY, wait a minute. Got a question. What is the final number of drives the OS sees?


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## Tau (Feb 18, 2009)

To bad you cant monitor smart on athe drives on the controller.... I would be interested in seeing your temps with that kind of setup.

And damn now i really want to play with WHS....

Nice setup though, looks smooth, and that 750 silencer is loads for that setup.


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## kyle2020 (Feb 18, 2009)

what do you actually do to warrant needing that much storage space?


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## Jakl (Feb 18, 2009)

Wow man, great Home Server you got! I should round up all my old HDD's around and build one aswell lol... I got my NAS to hold all my data, and my whole network shares it aswell, but I should setup a server...

How often you have to manage the server? or does it not even need to be looked after?

Love your server name aswell, "WHS Galactica" Im thinking I should name mine Cylon Mainframe lolz


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## iStink (Feb 18, 2009)

That's beautiful man.  Congrats.  I wish I had something like this for all my porn-- er I mean, STUFF.


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## Polarman (Feb 18, 2009)

That's a lot of TV shows.


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## Jakl (Feb 18, 2009)

Polarman said:


> That's a lot of TV shows.



Especially if you save BR Movies... takes tons of space... thats what's hogging up on my HDD space


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## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

lemonadesoda said:


> You've done a great (and tidy) job building your fileserver!  However I agree with Dan that a smarter move would be to buy a set of 1TB or 1.5TB new drives.  Much greater storage density. Much faster. (Esp. for backing up). And much lower power consumption. And quieter. And cooler.
> 
> Excepting Seagates recent mess with their drives, newer drives tend to be more reliable too.
> 
> ...



The only RAID I run is on the boot drive which is a RAID10. The rest are JBOD. How WHS works is any important data I can tell it to run "duplication" which is a pseudo software RAID1, it backs up the important files on two separate drives. The rest like TV and things like that which I can always get again are just JBOD so if a drive fails I lose those things but the important things are in another place.

I am fine with the insane amount of drives, it really doesn't run that hot, hottest drive is around 40c and that is one above the CD drive that doesn't get any airflow.

I have two external eSATA ports connected to the onboard SATA and I have two more free onboard SATA ports left as well. But... there is no more room in the case so 26 it is.

As I deem it neccessary I can always yank the small drives out and put bigger ones in their place.

WHS has been good to me, I trust it, but it took some getting there and a lot of experimentation. You just gotta read up on it to know what and how to do it, especially with so many drives and controller cards. I still have an issue where sometimes I get a BSOD when I try to reboot or shutdown, its a problem with my 16 port Adaptec card having bad Server 2003 driver support but I have never had an issue with data corruption and I have been running this for almost 6 months.

The final number of drives the OS sees is 23, 22 JBOD drives and the 23rd is the RAID10 array.



Tau said:


> To bad you cant monitor smart on athe drives on the controller.... I would be interested in seeing your temps with that kind of setup.
> 
> And damn now i really want to play with WHS....
> 
> Nice setup though, looks smooth, and that 750 silencer is loads for that setup.



WHS is fun to play with, it makes it extremely easy to manage lots of mismatched storage.

As far as SMART, the controllers in their management software can check that, but not the temps. But as I said earlier the hottest drive is around 40c with 25c ambient room temps. (there are a lot of fans in that case)



kyle2020 said:


> what do you actually do to warrant needing that much storage space?



As you can see from one of my pics, I have about 6TB free, I mainly built it to last a long time.

I also setup the remote web access for the server and gave my friends individualized user accounts and storage folders.



DjJakl said:


> Wow man, great Home Server you got! I should round up all my old HDD's around and build one aswell lol... I got my NAS to hold all my data, and my whole network shares it aswell, but I should setup a server...
> 
> How often you have to manage the server? or does it not even need to be looked after?
> 
> Love your server name aswell, "WHS Galactica" Im thinking I should name mine Cylon Mainframe lolz



The server pretty much sits there and does its thing, I check in on the vitals about twice a week for updates or things like that.

Yea I named it Galactica mainly because A) I love BSG and B) its big and silver and packs a punch like BSG does.



DjJakl said:


> Especially if you save BR Movies... takes tons of space... thats what's hogging up on my HDD space



BR and HDDVD movies take up anywhere from 7.5-15GB each in my experience. Those add up fast.


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## lemonadesoda (Feb 18, 2009)

> The final number of drives the OS sees is 23, 22 JBOD drives and the 23rd is the RAID10 array.



You can only have 26 drives! (Drive letters) And A and B are floppy. And saving ONE for CD and at least ONE for USB stick, means 26-2-2=22. You are OVERBUDGET.

WATCHA... if one drive in JBOD goes down you *could* loose the whole thing. There are reports of the TOC getting "stuck" and recovery needs to be done via raw data recovery. In theory, if JBOD is not running in "linear" or "concatenate" mode, they you *should *be ok, but not for everyone. There are war stories. And your BSOD aint promising.

Test this. Pull one drive out of your JBOD array and see if all is cool.


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## thebeephaha (Feb 18, 2009)

Well its not real JBOD raid, its all software managed its fake raid. I can pull one at any time and put it back and WHS would be like "psh whatever I'm good". I can also read any of the drives from another computer just fine too.

Also WHS does not use drive letters. It sees D as all the drives in the storage pool

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT WHS 

Read about the drive extender, that is how the JBOD and duplication work.


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## DaveK (Feb 18, 2009)

Here I am struggling with 160GB and here you have 10TB haha, sweet setup man!


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## Castiel (Feb 18, 2009)

Very nice setup!


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## PVTCaboose1337 (Feb 18, 2009)

Very nice.  Where did you get your uber long sata cables.  Those are NICE.  Also, it would be nice of you to get red zip ties.  I bought green ones for my case!


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## DrPepper (Feb 18, 2009)

I'd love to build something like that. Especially as well done as that  Congrats


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## ntdouglas (Feb 19, 2009)

Totally impressive!!!!!!


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## BrooksyX (Feb 19, 2009)

Woah! Looks like you went a little overboard there but it is still a pretty sweet setup. Imagine running all those drives in raid 0!


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## thebeephaha (Feb 19, 2009)

PVTCaboose1337 said:


> Very nice.  Where did you get your uber long sata cables.  Those are NICE.  Also, it would be nice of you to get red zip ties.  I bought green ones for my case!



Some came with my SATA controller cards but the blue and gray ones I grabbed from some Dell computers at work.


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## h3llb3nd4 (Feb 19, 2009)

Haha fraud.


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## crtecha (Feb 19, 2009)

Thats pretty wild stuff dude.  I dont even have a terabytes worth of data.  Hahaha I thought my 100gigs of music was impressive.


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## Deleted member 3 (Feb 19, 2009)

lemonadesoda said:


> You can only have 26 drives! (Drive letters) And A and B are floppy. And saving ONE for CD and at least ONE for USB stick, means 26-2-2=22. You are OVERBUDGET.
> 
> WATCHA... if one drive in JBOD goes down you *could* loose the whole thing. There are reports of the TOC getting "stuck" and recovery needs to be done via raw data recovery. In theory, if JBOD is not running in "linear" or "concatenate" mode, they you *should *be ok, but not for everyone. There are war stories. And your BSOD aint promising.
> 
> Test this. Pull one drive out of your JBOD array and see if all is cool.



You can have as many drives as you want. You don't have to use drive letters to mount. You can mount drives as folders. 

As for having so many disks and no redundancy, ouch.


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## hat (Feb 19, 2009)

hard drive fails...


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## crtecha (Feb 19, 2009)

hat said:


> hard drive fails...




Hahah thats awesome.  I want that as a poster in my office


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## h3llb3nd4 (Feb 19, 2009)

ha rip off of STFU...


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## Nitro-Max (Feb 19, 2009)

You sound like a man that likes his own space you must have a great porn collection 

good job


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## h3llb3nd4 (Feb 19, 2009)

nope I'm not a pervert...


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## CyberDruid (Feb 19, 2009)

Nicely done. I didn't think it was possible to get that many drivesin that PC-75.


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## thebeephaha (Feb 20, 2009)

CyberDruid said:


> Nicely done. I didn't think it was possible to get that many drivesin that PC-75.



Yea seriously.

Oh FYI for anyone interested, Windows Home Server also has remote web access provided via Microsoft, so like "mysecretservername.homeserver.com" which lets me obviously access my things anywhere anytime but also by using that web address it gives me the extra capability so I can remote manage my router, and I am running my own personal proxy server to bypass restrictions at work. (need my YouTube & Pandora internet radio you know)


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## PVTCaboose1337 (Feb 21, 2009)

thebeephaha said:


> Yea seriously.
> 
> Oh FYI for anyone interested, Windows Home Server also has remote web access provided via Microsoft, so like "mysecretservername.homeserver.com" which lets me obviously access my things anywhere anytime but also by using that web address it gives me the extra capability so I can remote manage my router, and I am running my own personal proxy server to bypass restrictions at work. (need my YouTube & Pandora internet radio you know)



I am totally going to do this.  Thanks.  I'll tell you how it goes!


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## thebeephaha (Feb 23, 2009)

Here is a side note I thought I'd share.

At my work, we are a computer parts retail store along with a repair shop.

In our tech department we have a hodgepodge of random crap customers leave behind that we use to make our workstations for virus scanning, driver downloads, testing, etc etc...

They break ALOT. 

I decided to make a Windows Home Server to keep our workstations backed up along with serving all of our tech utilities over the network and to be a print server as well.

The hardware:

ASUS P3V4X w/ VIA Apollo Pro chipset
Intel Pentium III EB Coppermine 733MHz
768MB PC133 (2x256 + 2x128)
1x 120GB WD Caviar (on board IDE)
2x 60GB IBM Deskstars (Promise TX100 IDE card)
2x 40GB Seagate 7200.7s (Promise TX100 IDE card)
DVD-ROM, CD-RW
GeForce Ti200 64MB
Dual Intel 10/100, one is a WOL Management Adapter
Dell Pull 350ish watt PSU, replaced fan with high CFM 80mm fan.
Antec Case, lots of high CFM 80mm fans.

If we do the maths it has 300GB of space, and I have duplication turned on for most network shares so about 150-200GB usable space. It isn't much and it isn't fast but it is going to make life a lot easier at work. Best part it cost nothing to make and it works like a charm.

Backs up out workstations daily and serves out all the utilities we need on a read only share so that viruses cannot infect it. Something that our flash drives cannot do.

Pics:





















It's ghetto but it works great. I just love Windows Home Server.


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## Mark_Hardware (Feb 24, 2009)

Very nice man! Stuffed full but still looks good. 






Picture this; 5 western digital 2TB HDD's. Same amount of storage.
Or even, 
Replace all those HDD's with the 2TB's. Holy cwap!


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## thebeephaha (Feb 25, 2009)

Hardware_Mark1 said:


> Very nice man! Stuffed full but still looks good.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Sad isn't it? 5 drives as much as my 26? 

Oh totally, 26 x 2TB. Yea. AWESOME. 

Too bad I don't have that kind of cash.


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## 1Kurgan1 (Feb 25, 2009)

Very nice setup, I don't know whats with everyone saying buy new drives. He could sell the old drives at a low cost then ball stomp his wallet to get all bigger drives. Notice it's just using a P4, he isn't looking for speed, something to just hold files.

And for that I say... I'm jealous, wish I had that much storage!


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## Easy Rhino (Feb 25, 2009)

wow that thing is awesome! but why waste all that on winblows server 2008?? i bet you would see a vast increase in performance when loading those massive arrays over a media server with linux.


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## AsRock (Feb 25, 2009)

thebeephaha said:


> My UPS and my Kill-a-watt show about 700ish peak load for about 2 seconds at power on but just normal running is under 350w. That PSU is rated at 800 or 850 something peak and 750w sustained at like 40c or 50c so I actually have some grow room.




Very nice more tidy then some around here and they only have 1 or 2 HDD in the box ha..

The PSU is rated 750W Continuous @ 40°C 825W Peak with a 5y warranty.


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## thebeephaha (Feb 25, 2009)

Easy Rhino said:


> wow that thing is awesome! but why waste all that on winblows server 2008?? i bet you would see a vast increase in performance when loading those massive arrays over a media server with linux.



Ah but Windows Home Server is more Server 2003, stripped down running the proprietary WHS "Demigrator" hard drive management software. The next WHS will be 2008 based.

I've also never been a linux junkie. I break linux when I try to use it.

Performance? How about getting up to 75MB/sec read and write over gigabit network, and managing 50MB/sec read and write on average. That's faster than USB and firewire folks.


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## Easy Rhino (Feb 25, 2009)

thebeephaha said:


> Ah but Windows Home Server is more Server 2003, stripped down running the proprietary WHS "Demigrator" hard drive management software. The next WHS will be 2008 based.
> 
> I've also never been a linux junkie. I break linux when I try to use it.
> 
> Performance? How about getting up to 75MB/sec read and write over gigabit network, and managing 50MB/sec read and write on average. That's faster than USB and firewire folks.



you should definately give linux a try if you have the time. as far as performance, have 50 people access that rig at once and you will see that linux performs a lot better and wont crash.


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## thebeephaha (Feb 27, 2009)

Easy Rhino said:


> you should definately give linux a try if you have the time. as far as performance, have 50 people access that rig at once and you will see that linux performs a lot better and wont crash.



But... I don't have 50 people. I have me and a friend or two.

But alas, I might try linux one of these days.

Any specific distro in mind?


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## Easy Rhino (Feb 27, 2009)

just give ubuntu a shot.


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## Solaris17 (Feb 27, 2009)

Very nice dude im impressed.


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## 1Kurgan1 (Feb 27, 2009)

He isn't running anything that requires that many people to access it, wouldn't it be easier to stick with windows. At his read/write speeds nothing really to complain about. And I never used linux a ton, but wouldn't figuring out the networking be more of a hassle then pretty much plug and play?

If he was running a server with more people accessing it and he wanted to increase speed he would obviously upgrade quiet a bit of things, but on a small scale operation, no real point, it does what it's meant too do and sounds like it does it quiet well.


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## DreamSeller (May 7, 2009)

*it looks very good 
*

i thought of building a file server too but i don't know where to get started ...


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