Shamoozal.com - Smorgas Board

You can typically replace fans, even in power supplies. Check that you don't still have a warranty on it, as opening it to replace the fan will void that. Also, be VERY careful in there. Don't touch ANYTHING metal aside from the outside cage. I highly recommend learning a bit about draining capacitors, as they can pack quite a punch in a power supply (possibly fatal as well). But the fan(s) are typically easily accessed and replaced. You can probably see a model number for the fan and go search online and buy the exact same one. If you can't see/find a model number, things get a little more tricky as you need to then figure out what type of fan and speed control it uses, PWM or voltage control (this can be ascertained by the fan connector, as PWM fans require 4 pins, voltage control fans use 2 or 3 pins (3pin version include RPM monitoring capability which the power supply may utilize as well)).

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2 things:

First, finally shelled out for a nice micro-server and an 8bay enclosure. Going to build that shit out next weekend. I'll post pics.

Second, With ISP's now snooping on basically all of our traffic (starting in July), i've upgraded my Giganews to get ViperVPN. I'm actually hoping this will actually increase my download speed as well, since i'm pretty sure Verizon is throttling my speed based on deep packet inspection.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

Now they're going to think you're a terrorist.

Nah, they will just think you work from home....

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Holy crap. It took 27 hours to initialize the 8x 2tb drives in RAID5.

Now the slower process of copying data over the fucking 10/100 network begins.

I just caved and bought a gigabit/N router just so that we can stream more effectively.

I'm also having a weird boot problem. So, i have the OS on two striped 500GB drives on the onboard controller. I have the 8x 2tb drives in an external box on a PCIE controller. When i boot with the external box on, it tries to boot from the PCIE card, fails, and ends up in a pxe boot loop. I check the BIOS, and the only available drive(s) are the external. If i boot with the external off, it loads up fine. I guess i just have to power the external on after i boot the machine.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

So, i fucked myself over.

This was about 3 weeks ago, now.

My streaming playback was stuttering. Badly. I spent a week or more checking everything OS and network related. Watched event viewer and Task manager like a HAWK trying to see if there were any errors, or if something was spiking CPU/bandwidth. Ran wireshark and pored over logs of network traffic. I had just installed a VPN client on my media server so i thought that might have been the culprit. Nope. Nothing. No fucking dice.

So, i figure what the hey, I'll update the firmware of the card that hosts my external bay. Update goes fine. I check the drive health snap-in thing. One of my drives has several thousand errors. That thing is failing.

I have a spare 2TB for just this situation. So, i check which controller and drive are bad (controller 1; drive 2), i pop in the new drive, and re-scan the drives to start rebuilding. But something is fishy. The web interface is showing a 7 drive RAID5 and a 1 drive RAID something (don't remember at moment). The new drive is showing as "locked," the RAID is showing as "disabled," And i can't figure out how the fuck to add this drive to the array. And the rebuild is not starting automatically, like it should. I chalk this up to shitty consumer-grade controller card, and start looking around for ways to fix it. So, after several hours of trial-and-error and frustration, i get the bright idea to drop another disk from the RAID (i.e. re-initialize and wipe it) and see if it would rebuild THAT disk. No dice.

So, to summarize, now I've got two disks with 0 data on them. The new disk, and the one i just wiped. And I've got the bad disk.

So, i go back into the controller GUI, and i'm looking further at the disks. and I check the drive health again, and it's still showing a bad disk. So, i look closer at the info, and i see that i can get the serial number of the bad disk; i check this against the disk I pulled as failed, and I PULLED THE WRONG DRIVE. Fuck. Me.

So, now, my array is back to its original config, with the bad drive, and the drive i wiped like a noob. And it's trying to rebuild to the wiped drive from the fucking bad drive. Which means that it errors out and crashes the rebuild every couple hours. So, i started this rebuild about 8 days ago. And it's at about 20% now. and once the array is re-built, i have to swap the ACTUAL bad drive with the new drive and RE-rebuild the array.

Worst part is, this is shit i do every day at work and i feel like a total fucking idiot for screwing it up.

Fuck. My. Life.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

Have you heard of this thing called RAID 6?


(Sorry had to do it)... And yes, with consumer drives and controllers, you really can be F'ed. One of the biggest issues, to be honest, is actually the number of silent read errors that occur (even without your bad disk), to the point that I think you may be completely screwed. Someone wrote a paper on this, in which the average number of unrecoverable read errors from a SATA disks is around 1 in 10^14 bits (or 1 in 12.5 TB). So with 8x 2 TB disk RAID 5, you have 14 TB of potential data, which is over the 12.5 TB expected for an unrecoverable read error, which means you are almost expected from the read error rate alone to not be able to rebuild that array. Now add in a faulty/failing disk as a part of it, and you are really screwed. I feel for you though. I hope you have backups of anything important.

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Not gonna lie, I didn't even look at RAID6. I was going for the most usable space, since it's not super-critical data. I'm pretty sure these controllers don't support it anyway. They are cheap as shit. Typical 0,1,5,10 if i recall.

I don't have ANY backups -- It's all my TV shows. So, i mean, it sucks if i lose it, but it's not a huge deal. Coincidentally, today the rebuild went from 18% to over 30%, so i think i may be (hopefully) out of the woods. The drives i am using are Hitachi Deskstar xxxxxxxxx(whatever)BLA642, and, imo, they are at the high end of SATA reliability (from my anecdotal experience). I chose these drives specifically because these are what Megaupload switched to when the terrible Seagates were failing fucking constantly. After we started replacing the Seagates with these Hitachis, there were sooooo many less drive swaps, it was crazy. On the bright side, The other 7 drives show 0 errors or relocated sectors.

Guess we'll see.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

Well, it's now at 71% and failing rebuild much less often.

Fingers motherfuckin crossed.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

I really do hope you make it. My next project is a data server. Gonna pick up something like one of these:

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php ... 8cb64b148c

Three SAS drive controllers and a bunch of the new WD 3TB Red drives. I have the parts for everything else (I think, depends on if I can use a 1x PCI-E graphics card on motherboard I have).

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Shit, you shoulda said something. I've been ebaying some LSI 3WARE sas controllers i had laying around. If that's a 24 bay case, you only need two of these LSI's to fill it.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

Well, it depends on what they are, since not every controller is supported by Solaris (however LSI has pretty good support if I recall). I don't remember seeing any controllers which supported more than 8 drives without doing port multiplication which cuts the bandwidth in half (not that big a deal though on 7200RPM drives...). But I would need 6 SFF-8087 connectors between the cards (most controllers as I said only have 2).

I was looking at something based on the LSI SAS2008 chip since it supports SAS 6G and 3TB drives and is fully supported under Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD.

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OMG it literally took a month, but it rebuilt to 100%. Now i'm rebuilding AGAIN with the good drive in.



The ones i have are the AMCC 3Ware 9650SE. I still have one left, i think.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

Thanks for the offer, but reading up on that controller and it looks like there are issues with it and Solaris support. Some people have it partially working on the latest OpenSolaris builds, but there are still all kinds of performance issues.

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Well, my HTPC front end finally bit the dust.

Basically, it was the remnants of my old gaming rig from like 5 years ago. Asus crosshair II mobo. First gen phenom quad core. 4GB RAM. This thing went through the ringer. It used to have two nvidia video cards in SLI. One day i was carrying it in the ice and slipped, and dropped it. Right on the corner of the case. case it was in warped. Plastic window broke. Killed one of the pcie slots, one of the video cards, and the onboard video. I played games on it for another three years before i upgraded, and then i chucked it in a full size ATX media center case. But now it's dead. The SATA controller is dead, or at least, the ports are dead. My wife and I were watching "the Newsroom" and it bluescreened and never came back. Truly a Sad day. It has been a trooper. It was big, loud, and inefficient, but it was my first media center build and I loved it.

So, now, it's time to get smaller, more fully featured, more efficient, and quieter.

I still have a really beefy backend (12tb), so all I really NEED up front is something that can stream HD over my network. Don't need big storage or anything like that, though i would like a little extra space to maybe play some controller-enabled steam games.

I knew I wanted a case with a smaller footprint than my current case, and moving down from a full-ATX case will definitely help in that respect. I went back-and-forth a lot between mini-ITX and micro-ATX. I really REALLY REALLY like some of the mini-ITX cases aesthetically, but i was really hesitant about jamming all that stuff into such a small space, let alone the deal with the power supply needs. Other considerations: Limited almost exclusively to one HDD (i don't want to buy an SSD yet); lots of slot-load DVD bays -- not many with 1x external 5.25in bays; cooling can be a bitch. In the end, I decided to go with micro-ATX. Sidebar: I don't see why so many micro-ATX cases are so big and/or ugly. If some of these manufacturers (Lian-Li, i'm looking in your direction) just scaled up their mini-ITX cases even the slightest bit, they would have great stuff. But, i digress. I decided on the Silverstone GD05B. It's simple, smaller than my last InMediata case, and has a single external 5.25in external bay with a door. I just opened it up tonight, and I'm very happy with what i see so far.

After i decided on form factor, I had the joint task of choosing mobo/processor. I could have really gone a lot of ways with this; just about every mobo manufacturer makes several mATX boards, some marketed towards desktops/gaming, some marketed towards HTPC. So the questions are: 1.) What features do I want in a mobo? 2.) What features do I want in a processor?

Motherboard specs I wanted weren't all that demanding. I could give or take onboard graphics (they can be a nice fallback). Required 4 DIMM slots. Standard 24pin ATX power. Fanless or mostly fanless (Read: quiet). SATA III capability. RAID 0/1.

In a processor I was looking for: Low power consumption. 2 - 4 cores. Speed negotiable.

The decisions on these two components obviously hinge on each other. I make no attempt to hide the fact that I'm an AMD fan, So that narrowed my choices by 50% (give or take). I looked at some of the low-power laptop chips, but when it was when I started thinking about Video Cards that my decision was really made for me. Rather than add yet another fan to my rig, I decided to go with one of the new(ish) Trinity core APU's from AMD/ATI -- this is a big deal for me as it's the first time I've bought anything with ATI graphics since i build my very first computer in 2002. I grabbed the AMD A10-5800K APU. Black edition. 3.8gHz, quad core, AMD Radeon HD 7660D Graphics, no extra fan or PCIe slot necessary.

Once I had the processor picked out, I was locked into socket FM2, and it was time to decide on a motherboard. Full disclosure: I love ASUS products, especially the mobos. I have build so many PC's with ASUS components, that usually when it's time, I just click around on the Asus website until I find something I like, look it up on Newegg, and make the purchase. Not this time. I did poke around on the Asus website, and did find a mobo i liked well enough, but at the last second, I went in a completely different direction and picked up the ASRock FM2A75 Pro4-M. It's black, it's cheap, and the reviews were pretty ok.

I guess here i should note that I was able to re-purpose a couple 8GB DIMMs as well as a couple 10kRPM, 2.5in Enterprise drives that were slated for recycling at work. That saved me a bit of cash. They were SAS, so I picked up a couple SAS to SATA converters for a few bucks.

What's left?

Oh yeah, how to power this thing. My estimated power consumption is pretty low (somewhere in the league of 320w, if i recall). I was able to find a decent 400w (overkill, but not by much) fanless PSU from a decently reputable company that looked ok. That PSU is the SeaSonic X series SS-400FL. It's a little pricey, but I was willing to pay for a little quiet. 100% 5egg reviews. Winner.

Last but not least, the optical drive. I think this is the most boring component to buy on any build. They all do the same thing. I wanted a Blu-Ray drive (upgrading from a plane jane dvd-r/w). I wanted writable blu-ray capability. I could go either way on 3D. Solution solved: LG Black 14X Blu-ray writer.

Oh yeah. to cool my processor, i went with the Scythe Big Shuriken 2. Good reviews, relatively inexpensive, QUIET.

I'll be sure to throw some pics up here during/after the build process. I love building new machines.

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

I should add, I now have this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6811204032 which I am no longer using. I'd be fine with giving it away, if anyone's interested. You'd just have to paypal me for shipping. If you have leftover parts and you want an HTPC looking case, let me know and we can work something out. Especially if you'd like to swap a spare mobo that will run a first-gen Phenom

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"Cook Free, or Die" -- Anthony Bourdain

My buddy has been asking me to help him build a low budget HTPC for the past 2 summers (damn teachers and all their free time in the summer). I would gladly take that case off your hands if you're willing to part with it for cheap.

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- Oh, great. You killed the invisible swordsman!
-- He's dead, all right.
--- How was I supposed to know where he was?
- You were supposed to fire up. _We_ both fired _up_.

Yeah, my HTPC's motherboard/BIOS imploded a few months back, and I just havn't felt like fixing it. I have as a result been watching a lot less TV. I should go and fix it while I can still get a new motherboard for that socket. My HTPC had been giving me nothing but headaches the last few years. I need to update the video card in it as well (the video card is now I think almost 3 years old). I was extremely happy with this system when it is/was working, but I have had so many failed hard drives, and now a dead motherboard...

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