-- Now dear reader you must be thinking. Colossus II? What was wrong with Colossus I? --
Nothing was wrong with it!
the original was and still is a great server. An amazing server. It does everything I need and more. But.. I need more drive bays.You see my current server has 15 bays and that is all I want for active storage. 15 is enough. The problem is when I replace my current 8x1TB with 8x2TB drives I'm going to have a problem. What do I do with those 1TB drives? Some of them are coming up on 3 years old which means they aren't going to be worth anything to sell. No one will buy them to risk their data when they are that old. Especially not with 24.7 use.
So instead of selling them or throwing them away I want to recycle them by using them as Backup drives. A single RAID 5 array made up of all my 1TB drives which I can turn on and off when I need to for backing up my main arrays. I already have offsite storage but I upload my data to that over the internet. It's automatic but it takes a very long time, even as I write this there is more than 500GB of data being transferred at around 30KB/ps - At this speed it will take a very long time.
So what I want is on-site storage. Something local, fast and that I can recover my files from very fast in the event of a failure of some kind.
So ergo Colossus II. So to begin with, what am I keeping and what am I throwing away?
I am keeping every component of my current server except the case. So that £50 CoolerMaster case? It's being trashed. And to replace it I am going to use the Lian Li PC-343B. This is a HUGE cube case. It's so big it comes with wheels.
Here are a few pictures:
Now basically this case is about 52% larger than my current case. Which means it's just like having two of my current case side by side. Doubling the total amount of storage I can have. This case has 18 5.25" drive bays (The kind you stick Optical Drives in for Compact Discs) I am going to use 5-in-3 converters which will turn 3 of these 5.25" bays in to 5x3.5" bays - This means I can fit a total of 30 hard drives in this case. (Now that 1000 Watt PSU is starting to become useful as it has enough connectors and the amps required to power all these).
This case is quite exspensive. Right now in the UK it is £230, Quite pricey. And I need to buy it before Christmas because the VAT in the UK is going up from 17.5% to 20% early next year which will obviously increase the price of the unit. The other issue is that this case is actually quite hard to get. I've had a brisk look around and I've only found 2 stores in the UK that have a single unit in stock. I'm starting to think that maybe Lian Li have discontinued it and there is only stock left in the supply chain.
Anyways I'm looking forward to this upgrade as I've been looking at this case for years thinking about how cool a server inside it would be. I have a lot of upgrades planned for my Server. The move to larger 2TB Disks, The new Case, More RAM and perhaps some toiling with ZFS. I am also going to need another RAID card if I am going to setup my 8x1TB disks in this case for backups. I've found a nice controller for about £180 but I'm hopeful I can source something for around £100 on Ebay like I did with my last build and the 2320 RAID Card.
Once it is all complete the final spec should be:
16x2TB = Main Arrays
7x1TB = Backup Array
1x1TB = Boot Disk / Swap
For a total of 40TB. And I'll still have 6 bays free. And in-fact this case has even more space for drives as on the back you can fit in two more drive holders which won't be quick-access & hot swappable but will give me 8 more drives. This is a case with a lot of room to grow.
The rest of the spec will be the Core i7 920, 24GB of Mushkin Memory (6x4GB Dimms) 1000Watt Corsair PSU, Gigabyte UD5 Motherboard, HD 4320 Graphics Card. And all the other stuff from the previous build obviously. I'll update this with Pictures once I get the new case and start building
