Tony
Staff member
I was 'thumbing' through eBay tonight after work and located some 4TB SAS drives in a lot of 10 for $100. Now, these are I'm sure very used, and that definitely came into play when I decided on them.
Back a few years ago, a member on a live stream we call "NIC" donated to purchase this server. And I have used this to play around with for a long time now. I love this server. I would like a new one but my bank account refuses to cooperate lol. But the Dell R710 is a great little server. And I have upgraded the raid card to the H700 (I think, would have to look through my purchase history to know for sure without digging into the BIOS).
When I found those drives, 24TB worth, It kind of sparked the fun I had with the server. Since it was new, I had 2 8TB drives in bays 1/2, I had a 500GB drive in 3, a 2TB drive (lappy drive) in 4, and drives 5/6 were 500GB 10,000 rpm SAS drives where Rc-Help lived for a long time. I have since removed the 8TB drives and they are in my computer here at my desk. The 2TB drive is on my shelf here in my office, and the 1TB... well, I have no idea but it's not in the server lol. It's probably on the shelf as well. The two 500GB drives are still in the server.
Now I do not currently have any plans to bring Rc-Help back home but stranger things have happened lol. Right now I'm paying what I think is a good price for a fast server that is not at my house and if anything dies, I have backups on a 10GB line and I can have the server restored in about an hour at most. And it's secure behind some of the best firewalls there are. So it's safer to keep RCH where I have it now and just pay the bill every month. Yes, I have to pay for this site every single month, and yes I removed ALL ads from this site. I make no money from this site. Want to know why, check out my thread Turning A Hobby Into A Business, Then Back Into A Hobby which explains why I removed the ads.
When I located these 6 drives, It is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. Put 6 drives all the same size in this server and have it as a backup server. TAKE YOUR FINGERS AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD, I'm not done yet lol. Yes, these were enterprise drives that likely spent the last 2+ years running 24/7. I know they are going to die. I hope they don't, but it's easier to just assume they will. For this reason, I have put in a question to the seller to see if they can toss in two more drives and keep those sleds that I can't use and will just toss in the trash.
With 6 4TB drives, this will give me a theoretical size of 24TB. Of course there is overhead and I will likely end up with about 22TB, maybe a little more. Not sure how much will be allocated. Then on top of that, I will be running these in RAID5 or RAID6. Haven't decided yet. 5 you can lose one drive and not lose data, and 6 you can lose 2 drives and not lose data, but you have less usable space on 6 than you do 5.
With RAID5, it's 20TB of usable space, but can only lose one drive. With RAID6, that is 16TB usable space, and can lose up to 2 drives. Now there are some going to think "dude, you have 2 8TB drives already (16TB)" And you would be correct. Here's my plan.
Setup the RAID6 for double parity and use the two 8TB drives as backup drives in a separate enclosure. Now this is not a good all around solution as the two 8TB drives would be RAID1, so I would only be able to backup 8TB of data, or half of the server. I think this will be fine as I have all of my files now (after some heavy deleting) on one of the 8TB drives. So all I would need to do is zip those files, send them over to the server, set the two 8TB's up in RAID1, then backup the sever onto the 8TB drives. I don't think any critical files will ever really exceed 8TB and if it does.... I will just build a bigger backup solution lol.
I know there are some in here that like playing with this stuff. bigone5500 comes to mind and he just acquired quite a few new 'toys' lol. So I thought I would make a little post about it. It's hard to do any kind of video about this as a lot of it has my public IP address, and lets face it, there are asshats out there. I do have a dynamic IP and no longer have a static IP, but still, not really worth the risk.
This will all go onto the server that already has UnRaid installed on it and I plan to continue to use it. It's done me good since I purchased the license. I do plan on starting from scratch with it though as I did a lot of testing and there are a LOT of abandoned files in there that would just take forever to clean out. And since I no longer have anything other than the RCH drives in there (and RCH has since been updated a LOT since going to the new server), I can pull those out and not have to worry about them. Just wipe them and keep them for a rainy day. Who knows, maybe I will get a 4 bay server and toss the 4 500GB SAS drives in there to play with sites again... You just never know lol.
So I think this will be fun. I could pull the H700 (I think) out and put the H200 back in as the 700 does not support any kind of SMART detection, and I believe the 200 does. As you can see, lots of research to do in the near future as these drives will be here on Halloween. Can't wait.
Back a few years ago, a member on a live stream we call "NIC" donated to purchase this server. And I have used this to play around with for a long time now. I love this server. I would like a new one but my bank account refuses to cooperate lol. But the Dell R710 is a great little server. And I have upgraded the raid card to the H700 (I think, would have to look through my purchase history to know for sure without digging into the BIOS).
When I found those drives, 24TB worth, It kind of sparked the fun I had with the server. Since it was new, I had 2 8TB drives in bays 1/2, I had a 500GB drive in 3, a 2TB drive (lappy drive) in 4, and drives 5/6 were 500GB 10,000 rpm SAS drives where Rc-Help lived for a long time. I have since removed the 8TB drives and they are in my computer here at my desk. The 2TB drive is on my shelf here in my office, and the 1TB... well, I have no idea but it's not in the server lol. It's probably on the shelf as well. The two 500GB drives are still in the server.
Now I do not currently have any plans to bring Rc-Help back home but stranger things have happened lol. Right now I'm paying what I think is a good price for a fast server that is not at my house and if anything dies, I have backups on a 10GB line and I can have the server restored in about an hour at most. And it's secure behind some of the best firewalls there are. So it's safer to keep RCH where I have it now and just pay the bill every month. Yes, I have to pay for this site every single month, and yes I removed ALL ads from this site. I make no money from this site. Want to know why, check out my thread Turning A Hobby Into A Business, Then Back Into A Hobby which explains why I removed the ads.
When I located these 6 drives, It is something that I have been wanting to do for a long time. Put 6 drives all the same size in this server and have it as a backup server. TAKE YOUR FINGERS AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD, I'm not done yet lol. Yes, these were enterprise drives that likely spent the last 2+ years running 24/7. I know they are going to die. I hope they don't, but it's easier to just assume they will. For this reason, I have put in a question to the seller to see if they can toss in two more drives and keep those sleds that I can't use and will just toss in the trash.
With 6 4TB drives, this will give me a theoretical size of 24TB. Of course there is overhead and I will likely end up with about 22TB, maybe a little more. Not sure how much will be allocated. Then on top of that, I will be running these in RAID5 or RAID6. Haven't decided yet. 5 you can lose one drive and not lose data, and 6 you can lose 2 drives and not lose data, but you have less usable space on 6 than you do 5.
With RAID5, it's 20TB of usable space, but can only lose one drive. With RAID6, that is 16TB usable space, and can lose up to 2 drives. Now there are some going to think "dude, you have 2 8TB drives already (16TB)" And you would be correct. Here's my plan.
Setup the RAID6 for double parity and use the two 8TB drives as backup drives in a separate enclosure. Now this is not a good all around solution as the two 8TB drives would be RAID1, so I would only be able to backup 8TB of data, or half of the server. I think this will be fine as I have all of my files now (after some heavy deleting) on one of the 8TB drives. So all I would need to do is zip those files, send them over to the server, set the two 8TB's up in RAID1, then backup the sever onto the 8TB drives. I don't think any critical files will ever really exceed 8TB and if it does.... I will just build a bigger backup solution lol.
I know there are some in here that like playing with this stuff. bigone5500 comes to mind and he just acquired quite a few new 'toys' lol. So I thought I would make a little post about it. It's hard to do any kind of video about this as a lot of it has my public IP address, and lets face it, there are asshats out there. I do have a dynamic IP and no longer have a static IP, but still, not really worth the risk.
This will all go onto the server that already has UnRaid installed on it and I plan to continue to use it. It's done me good since I purchased the license. I do plan on starting from scratch with it though as I did a lot of testing and there are a LOT of abandoned files in there that would just take forever to clean out. And since I no longer have anything other than the RCH drives in there (and RCH has since been updated a LOT since going to the new server), I can pull those out and not have to worry about them. Just wipe them and keep them for a rainy day. Who knows, maybe I will get a 4 bay server and toss the 4 500GB SAS drives in there to play with sites again... You just never know lol.
So I think this will be fun. I could pull the H700 (I think) out and put the H200 back in as the 700 does not support any kind of SMART detection, and I believe the 200 does. As you can see, lots of research to do in the near future as these drives will be here on Halloween. Can't wait.
). Definitely play time that day. I'm actually thinking about ordering another lot of 6 just to have as backups. It's only $100, and it would provide enough drives to replace the entire server once over. Now to convince the wife it's a good idea...... 