A new NAS

After 10 years (or so) of using a PC as a file server, I finally decided enough is enough.  The size, noise and upkeep of my old PC was just a bit too much for me to want to deal with any longer.  Not that there’s an issue with using a PC as a file server, but it just seems, now, a bit overkill.

My original goal when I build the PC server was to use virtualization in order to run various servers and experiment with various technologies.  While that worked for a time, the amount of memory I needed ended up growing beyond what I have and the price to upgrade became too much for what is basically an eight-year-old machine.

The size also became a bit too much to handle.  When I built the machine originally, I bought a huge full tower case.  I assumed that I would ultimately need multiple HDDs and a big power supply.  Had I stuck with the virtualization, then this may have made more sense.  Now, it’s just a noisy boat anchor that serves (pun intended) as a file and iTunes server.

One other reason to move away starts with the advent of streaming music services (Google Play, which I use).  I now rely much less on the iTunes sharing than ever before.  My kids have a bedtime play list they use every night to go to sleep, but other than that (and the occasional Sonos use), I don’t rely on it as heavily as before.

With this in mind, I started looking at stand alone Network Attached Storage devices.  I like the idea of a bespoke device to manage this setup.  I also like the size of the device as opposed to beastie I have now.  The new devices also appear to offer more functionality and can, basically, replace a lot of the things I needed a stand alone PC for before.

If you’re curious, I ended up with a Synolog DS416play.  It was slightly more expensive than I was planning on, but it does offer better media capabilities, including hardware-based media transcoding.  This was something I’d tried on the old system and it just couldn’t keep up.  I’m hoping to dump much of my media on there and share them out to my Chromecast and Roku devices.

As I spend more time with it, I’ll post more.

Mindy 2.0 Part 1

So, about a two weeks ago now my server computer, named Mindy (named for the Animaniacs character), decided that it was too hot to work and died. Well, at least sort of died. When I got back from a trip, she was no longer responding to pings and when I tried to reboot her, she would power down after about 20-30 seconds. Best as I can tell, I have a temperature management failure on either the power supply or the motherboard, not sure which.

In thinking about how to approach fixing the problems, I was stuck with two basic paths: try and find the failing component or replace the core components and build a version 2.0 Mindy. If I had a good computer store handy, I would have tried replacing the individual components, but the closest real store I have access to is MicroCenter out in Fairfax or Rockville. (And no, BestBuy does not qualify as I need real parts, not the desktop/consumer parts they have). In addition, my hope was to get this back and running ASAP, so ordering a new power supply and then a new motherboard, etc, just seemed to be a slow process.

In the end, I decided to just replace her guts and upgrade the mainboard, power supply, CPU and memory. This was a good excuse for me to upgrade from the 18-month old Core2 CPU and desktop motherboard and move to a server-type board with a dedicated PCI-E slot for the RAID card I have and to target the new Intel Core i7 chip. So on the recommendation of a friend via Facebook/Twitter, I went with a SuperMicro C7x58 motherboard. In addition, I purchased 12Gb of RAM, a Corsair 630 watt modular power supply and 3 1TB hard disks.

The parts arrived from Newegg on Wednesday, but we had friends over for dinner that night, so I wasn't able to start working on the transplant until Thursday evening while watching Burn Notice and Royal Pains on USA (good shows, btw). I took my time and slowly moved the parts and completed the upgrade about 10:30, too late for me to want to try starting the system. But at least everything fit and looked like it was going to work well.

Friday morning came and I woke up a bit earlier than normal, so I thought I'd give it a quick run. When I went to hook the monitor up to try it, it was at that point I discovered that the motherboard I picked did not include on-board video.

Crap. I didn't even think to look at that. I assumed that it would include Intel integrated video, but alas I was wrong.

Friday came and went and I hadn't been able to get out to get a video card. I did take a few minutes to try and ID the right one both by online shopping and asking friends via Twitter/Facebook what they recommend. Saturday came and went and I had ID'd the card I wanted to buy from BestBuy, a PCI-E 16x passively-cooled video card. Seemed like a good choice as it didn't draw much power and didn't need a cooling fan to work.

Only, it didn't fit. Turns out the card had a HUGE heatsink that spanned both sides of the card. Crap again. The two PCI-E 16x slots I have available surround the PCI-E 8x slot that holds my AMCC/3ware RAID card. I had planned on using the one furthest away from the CPU as it was clear on the non-RAID card side. Unfortunately, the heretofor unknown back-side heatsink wanted to take the same space as the RAID card's jumper pins. And if I tried the CPU-adjacent slot, it hit the humongo CPU fan that came with the i7 processor I purchased.

Sigh, so that meant my first attempt at a video card failed, so back online I went. This time, I decided to purchase a PCI-based inexpensive video card, since the area round my PCI slot is completely clear. As I type, it's being delivered from NJ, so hopefully it'll arrive tomorrow so I can give this whole thing another shot. In the meantime, thank goodness for the Lenovo S10 and Google Apps for domains as they can temporarily replace some of what I relied on Mindy 1.0 (or maybe 1.5) to do.

Promising so far ...

Ok, so I've only been playing with Mindy for about 24 hours, but this build is looking a bit more promising. Right now, I'm copying files to my file server, listening to music off my Roku (also from the same VM) and importing CD audio on a second and nothing seems to be bogging down like before.

I still don't seem to get the write performance that I would want from the network. It still seems to be writing in spurts (20-30 Mb straight and then a pause), but I think these can be fixed via filesystem fine tuning.

Once I have a good, working system, I'll post my complete settings.