1st Home Media Server (working blog)

I used to think that way, too.  I always thought I'd set up a nice media server or desktop computer with a RAID setup.  However, I've spent far too many hours and way too much money on 3rd party recovery software trying to recover from a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array failure.  I wish other people would come to this conclusion as well.  As it turns out, it's usually not worth the hassle for a couple reasons:

1.  Most RAID is proprietary, meaning that if your hardware RAID controller (i.e.  onboard mobo or even an add-in card) dies, you will lose your data.  With quite a bit of work, I've been able to get previous arrays recognized on new motherboards, but it wasn't worth the time and effort.

2.  RAID is overkill and overrated for home use.  It's intended for uptime, not redundancy.  A prime example is that a company can't afford to have their network drives or applications inaccessible to their users.  It took me a VERY long time (only within the past few years, as a matter of fact) to finally realize and accept this reality. Oh, and the "performance benefit" of RAID 0 will never be recognized by a home user.

When I finally accepted the above, I was turned on to FlexRAID and realized that using it, in combination with routine backups of important data (not simply backing up everything), is what a home user really needs.  Let's face it:  If your array fails, you'll be reinstalling Windows anyway, so why did you bother backing up your Windows directory?  :

The hardware I'm purchasing for this WILL support RAID 5, including the RocketRaid and the motherboard itself.  However, I won't be using those features.  Because of that, if any of my hardware dies, I'll STILL be able to recover the data using ANY other SATA card and/or ANY new motherboard!  And, if I can't, guess what?  I'll have a true backup solution in place, which will allow me to access the data while I work to get the server running again.

All that being said, port multipliers seem like a really good technology for adding more storage capability and I'm really looking forward to implementing it.

I'll see about getting Matt to host some pictures of the Lian-Li case for the time being.  It's empty, but it's very, VERY cool!  ;D

I haven't even bought anything yet, however, I believe I found a bit of an issue with my plans.  The Addonics 5x1 cards require a PCI bracket to hold them in place.  The Lian-Li has space for 7 brackets and the Supermicro mobo has 6 slots.  This means that if I ever max out the storage, all my PCI-e x8's will be blocked.

My only alternative will be to remove the PCI brackets from the 5x1's and mount them to the case itself.  My initial thought is that I'll attach them to the opposite side of the mobo tray in the middle of the case.  I may even be able to attach mobo standoffs by utilizing the existing standoff holes, maybe only adding one or two per card.

Anyone have suggestions on how to go about drilling a hole I could screw a standoff into?  My modding skills are severely lacking.  ;D

No problem.  As far as your recording errors, I'm not so sure NCQ is going to help you out there.  You may want to take a look at this Wiki on the subject, since it seems to indicate a DECREASE in performance when using NCQ.

If I was working with wood, drywall, or anything else with some amount of thickness to it, that would've been my thought, too.  However, if I simply drill a hole in the very thin aluminum motherboard tray, I don't think there will be any threads for the screw to align with.  I think I'd just wind up with a hole.  :(  I'm thinking I need a hand tap to create the threads.  Anyone have experience with these things?

I purchased just about all of the hardware, including a WD Green 1TB drive for storage and another WD Green 500GB for the OS, but I believe I'll be using the Samsung Spinpoint F1's for actual storage needs when the server goes into production, since the Samsung has significantly better performance and is nearly as quiet.  I may wind up replacing the 500GB OS drive with a Spinpoint, too, since I don't want the drive speeds to create a bottleneck.

I happened to find a Thermalright cooler for Socket 771 Xeons and picked up one of those instead of the Noctua I was originally going to get.  Supposedly, it can run fanless!!!  I'll certainly be checking the temperature difference both with and without a fan, just to be sure.

I also picked up a bunch of AcoustiPack sound proofing foam for the Lian-Li, since I want this to be as quiet as humanly possible for a server of this magnitude.  It sure seems like I'm on the right track for that objective.

To recap:

SuperMicro dual Xeon X7DWE
Xeon 5410 50W 2.3GHz Quad Core (x1)
THERMALRIGHT HR-01 X
Crucial 4GB DDR2-800 ECC
SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card
HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card
Addonics 5x1 SATA Port Multiplier
Addonics 5SA 3-bay, 5 drive enclosure
Corsair HX1000W

Once I have the parts installed, I'll be checking for proper SATA cable lengths, as well as angles, and ordering locking SATA cables of the appropriate type.  At that point, I'll also be looking at gaskets and rubber grommets for securing and silencing as many components as possible.

I'm still trying to figure out how to mount that little Addonics 5x1 card, so I'm up for any suggestions.  I'm considering taking a piece (or several pieces) of aluminum, drilling the appropriate mounting holes and trying my hand (noob!) at soldering them to the mobo tray.  This would definitely be the most secure method... assuming I can solder!  ;D

I actually like the idea of using those clips rather than soldering.  I'm wondering if I can find a small enough square file to make the edges.  I could easily drill a pilot hole, but the file might be a difficult thing to find.

Another option might be a square punch.  I could probably put a block of soft wood on the opposite side to hold the motherboard tray in place and still punch through the aluminum.  I hate using force like this, though, since it tends to not be precision work and may lead to collateral damage.

I don't think a dremel is the right way to go, except for maybe drilling the pilot hole to stick the file through... unless that's what you were getting at.  I just have to find a small enough square file, probably no bigger than a 1/4" and an 1/8" would be ideal.  I'm not seeing tiny ones on the Sears site, so I may just "need" to pay them a visit.  ;D

Thanks for the idea of using those clips!

A very minor update for the server:  I picked up a PSU rubber silencer, HD grommets, some rubber fan "screws" and an HD isolation strip.  I'm not sure which things are going to produce the best results, so I'm trying a little bit of everything.  If I wind up wasting $10 in the process, so be it.

I haven't had time to put anything into the case yet, so there hasn't been much to share on the build itself.  As I took the case out of the box, I did manage to break one of the caster wheels on the bottom of the case by dropping the case about 4 inches.  MAN, that thing is heavy!  I really wish Lian-Li wouldn't have used rivets to attach the wheels, though.  Metal wheels would've been a little sturdier, too.  I need to figure out how to replace a riveted wheel now.

I actually have a replacement wheel already.  I've just never tried to remove and/or replace a rivet.

Server Case

The Lian-Li PC-343B is an enormous case by any measure. It’s overkill for all but the most hardcore PC builder and the premium price certainly reflects that. With space for 18 front-accessible 5.25” bays across 2 columns, you’re practically looking at two full tower cases side-by-side. It’s all aluminum, so it’s extremely light for it’s size, but not after adding 18 drives, let alone the 30 I was planning to allow for by using the Addonics 5-in-3’s (5 hard drives, lying on their side, in three 5.25” bays). Thankfully, the case comes with large caster wheels at the bottom. Unthankfully, the case was a little awkward coming out of it’s box, slid out of my hand and landed on one of the wheels, resulting in this “oh sh*t!” moment:

I received some great suggestions for fixing the wheel and drilling out the rivets and screwing a new wheel onto the bottom should work just fine. But, I’m focused on finishing the build at the moment, so that’ll have to wait. I did purchase replacement wheels, though, so I do intend to do it at some point. I picked up a few “optional” parts for the Lian-Li, which added a decent amount to the cost.

First, I added a PSU filter which attaches to the bottom of the case. I also purchased a top panel replacement which can hold dual 120mm fans, so I can exhaust mucho heat out from both halves of the case. I picked up a 3 drive, rear mounted cage, which I intend to use for the OS and WHS backups. As you can see, the cage also has a spot for an 80mm fan.

The white strips are silicon drive dampeners meant to absorb vibrations. They’re meant for the sides, but the bottom drive will touch the cage and I didn’t want that.

That’s only 2 drives, but I’ll probably just throw a 3rd in there and find a use for it. I just don’t want these to be part of the drive pool, since I can’t hot-swap them and I’d need to crack open the case to replace them. I also found I had a few unused fan mounts to cover up and needed a dual 80mm cover plate, as well as a 120mm cover plate for that purpose. Finally, I picked up a bunch of mesh fan grills for where I would be installing fans.

Motherboard

I went with the SuperMicro X7DWE server motherboard for several reasons.  First, it’s a server motherboard, so it’s meant to run 24/7 in fairly harsh environments.  I also know that the parts will be top-notch.  Beyond that, it has 5 PCI-e slots, and a single PCI-X slot.  4 of the PCI-e’s run at x4 and one runs at x8.  The PCI-X runs at 133MHz.  With this many slots, I have quite a bit of room to grow with SATA cards or tuners.  Finally, this is a dual Xeon mobo, so I have the ability to double my CPUs should I ever need to.  Honestly, I doubt that time will come, but the other features were the primary drivers for my mobo choice.

Freshly unwrapped:

There’s a large mounting plate which attaches to the mobo tray in the case.  At first, I was attempting to attach it to the motherboard.  After so many years of building computers at home and at work, you’d think I’d be able to figure this stuff out in my sleep.

Power Supply

I chose a pretty beefy PSU, since this was a server and I wanted to make certain I had a decent amount of breathing room as I added hard drives.  While a DVR alone probably wouldn’t need too many hard drives, archiving high def movies on the server certainly will fill them up quickly. When I first installed the PSU, I had one of those Homer Simpson moments and went “D’oh!”

As you can see in the picture, the brace for the PSU is slightly beyond the rear of the PSU and really isn’t doing much to support it’s weight.  Sadly, this wasn’t a mistake, rather a moment of not thinking about what the bracket was for.

In keeping with the goal of building a “quiet” server, I installed the PSU with a silicon gasket.  Even though the big fan in the Corsair HX1000 is nearly silent, I wanted to ensure that no vibration was being transferred to the case itself.  With the cavernous nature of the Lian-Li PC-343B, all the minor vibrations from each of the components will surely add up and make for an overly noisy server.  As you can see, the gasket isn’t a perfect fit, but it will definitely do the job:

From the inside, you can see that the gasket wraps around the back of the PSU:

I also picked up Lian-Li’s PSU filter to try and filter out as much dust as possible.  The filter is apparently meant for “normal” PSU’s and does not entirely enclose the fan on the enormous Corsair HX1000.  The fan probably continues for another 0.5”-1” beyond where you see the filter stop.  The only change I think I may make is to seal up the rest of the mounting holes for the PSU support, which still fall outside the filter.

Here’s the initial look of the PSU from outside the case:

Rear-Cage Install

The rear cage was something I hadn’t originally planned on, but I didn’t want to take up the front bays with the OS drive.  At any rate, I needed to figure out how to minimize vibrations and went with rubber grommets for the drives:

I seem to have lost one of the black ones, but I had a big bag of blue grommets on standby.

As I mentioned before, I also put two silicon strips on the bottom of the cage where the drives would otherwise be touching:

Here’s how the bottom hard drive lies on the isolation strips:

All 3 drives installed:

I also decided to put an 80mm fan gasket between the drive cage and the back of the case:

Once I knew how things would fit, I moved on to noise isolation.  I tried some rubber screws for the fan grill, but they didn’t fit very well:

I eventually settled on some very long, rubber screws.  I also installed a fan gasket inside the drive cage to avoid transferring vibrations from the fan to the cage:

I picked out a quiet, 80mm Nexus, 4-pin PWM fan for cooling the drive cage:

Getting those bottom mounts through the fan holes required some work with needle nose pliers.

I attempted to show the space between the grill and the drive cage, but you can’t really see it.  Trust me, though, there’s a decent amount of gaps where air can get into the case, bypassing the grill.  I’m not too happy about that, but the gasket makes for a nice seal against the case:

Here’s what it looks like from outside the case:

Just to let you know the difference made by this 80mm fan, at idle, I had been running around 114 degrees F on the 3 drives in this bay.  After installing the 80mm fan, this dropped a whopping 26.3 degrees to just 87.8 degrees F!  Additionally, the bottom, system fan is now 10 degrees below the other two at just 77 degrees F.

I've got about 3 or 4 more updates to add and a couple more to finish writing.  I will be including a total writeup on the costs.  I've been keeping track of the associated costs because I was curious what this server would wind up costing.  In all honesty, I think people are going to be somewhat surprised at what it (didn't) cost.  Maybe I'm wrong, though, and completely off my rocker.  ;D

OS Install

I had no idea how well any of my hardware choices were going to work, particularly the motherboard, so I wanted to try installing the OS as soon as possible.  I jury-rigged my main DVD burner and the intended OS hard drive:

While the install was very simple and straightforward, you will become very accustomed to the following screen:

Sound Dampening

All the little things I’ve done so far to lessen vibrations and the use of low noise parts are going to be pretty much useless if I don’t attach some material to the inside of the case.  The cavern that is the Lian-Li PC-343B is all aluminum and there are no less than 5 very large, metal surface areas throughout the case.

I picked up Acoustipak to try and cover as much interior surface area as possible without raising the temperature of the case too much.  I started with the easy part by doing the two, removable side panels.  The dual layer material was quite difficult to cut with scissors and even with a razor blade, but it worked well enough to get a pretty straight line.  It’s as simple as peeling the backing from a corner, lining it up, and slowly attaching it.  Here are the results:

Hot Swap Bays

The little workhorse that is the SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 gives me 8 additional SATA ports over the PCI-X bus.  This card will be attached to the Addonics 5SA drive cage.  Physical installation was pretty simple, but I knew routing the cables would be lots of “fun”.  I knew the first order of business was to lay the SATA cables flat against each other and secure them that way, since that would take up the least amount of space on their way from the card to the drives.

The other end was in a little more disarray, but I knew I’d work on cleaning up the cable routing later.

My biggest problem was with the Addonics drive cage, since I couldn’t seem to find a tool long enough to push each drive’s power button in!  Once that was done, a couple of reboots indicated an issue with one of the Samsung drives, since it was being recognized during the initialization of the drives (prior to Windows).  Sometimes the drive would be MIA and other times it would hang there for an extended period before continuing into Windows.  I swapped drive trays and drives and it pointed to an issue with that particular bay.  Eventually, I swapped out the SATA cable and that fixed the problem.

After I had everything powered up for a while, I heard the vibrations from all the Samsungs in the cage and it was the noisiest part of the server.  Sadly, there wasn’t enough room to get grommets in the case’s drive rails to separate the cage from the case.  My next thought was to cushion each drive in their respective tray using some felt I picked up from Ace Hardware.

I used a push-pin to work a hole through the felt, stuck it onto the tray and then struggled to get the screw to line up with the drive.

The vibration is still there, so I’m trying to determine the next steps to quiet the drive cage down.  I even tried putting some felt on the corners of the drive cage, but it’s such a tight fit in the rails, they just peeled the felt right back off.  I’m wondering if a second drive cage, along with further sound dampening foam on the bottom of the case and beneath the drive cage will help reduce the vibrations.  Overall, it’s really not that noisy, but it’s enough to be annoying at times.

REMOTE Remote Desktop

With a headless server, you want to be able to do just about everything without pulling out a keyboard and monitor to hook up.  That’s easy enough to solve using remote desktop.  However, I found that I couldn’t get to the WHS desktop when accessing my server from outside my network.  Instead, you get the WHS console.  In my mind, that kind of defeats the purpose of the event monitoring and email alerts I set up, since I wouldn’t be able to act on issues unless I was already at home.  This would also curtail many efforts to remotely resolve issues for the family.  Luckily, I wasn’t the only one wanting to do this and found a solution here.  It may not be as “simple” as a registry hack, but it’s not rocket science either.

After I did the above modification, I found out that Advanced Admin Console (which I previously installed and wrote about) can be used to access the desktop by using RUN -> explorer.exe and minimizing the WHS console.  So, pick your poison.

Hot Swap Bays (Part III)

I’m sure a number of people have been very interested in my experience with the port multiplier I picked up.  If you’re unfamiliar with these devices, what they do is take a single SATA port on your motherboard or a SATA card (RAID or otherwise), plug it into another card, which in turn has multiple other SATA ports on it, giving you additional SATA ports to connect hard drives to.  Obviously, you need to be careful about saturating the available bandwidth on your SATA port, but a media server shouldn't be all that disk I/O intensive and I’m not running 10k RPM drives or SSDs and figured I would be safe.  Since it’s been a while, to recap, I picked up an Addonics 5x1 SATA Port Multiplier.  The key piece to this was ensuring that everything was PM (port multiplier) aware.  I verified with Addonics that the 5SA drive cage and the 5x1 were both compatible.  Back to the bandwidth issue, since I already had 8 SATA ports available (though, not all in use) on my PCI-X slot, I didn’t want to add a PM to that card.  Instead, I added the HighPoint RocketRAID 2300 PCI-e card, which adds 4 SATA ports.  Since I’m using the drive extender feature of WHS, I’m not going to be utilizing the RAID features of this card.  The card installed just like any other PCI-e card.

The fun part now was trying to figure out how to mount the Addonics 5x1 PM card, since it doesn’t require a slot in the mobo.  While it does have a bracket to attach to the rear I/O shield, I didn’t want to block any ports on the mobo.  Additionally, with the size of the Lian-Li case, running SATA cables from one side of the case to the other was becoming problematic, even with proper routing techniques:

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/pcix1.jpg[/img]

I decided to mount the PM card on the opposite side of the case, closer to the 5SA drive cage.  I received a bunch of ideas on how to potentially mount this tiny thing to the motherboard tray, but ultimately decided to go simple and use nylon ties and adhesive mounts:

[img width=200 height=200]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/admount.jpg[/img]

Here’s what it looked like after installation:

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5x1-1.jpg[/img]

I had purchased just about every length of SATA cable I could find in order to make all this routing as simply and direct as possible, but with this many cables, it’s still quite perplexing.  I must’ve routed these cables at least 8 times from scratch before settling on this:

[img width=410 height=519]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5x1-2.jpg[/img]

This is probably a very good time to point out that I actually took the time to write down which SATA cables were plugged into which ports on the PM card, as well as marking the other ends for which drive in the 5SA they were going to be attached to.  Without doing this, you can never be certain which drive is attached where once the case is closed and you could also have problems figuring out which drive you need to remove when one is failing.

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5x1-3.jpg[/img]

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5SA1.jpg[/img]

[img width=360 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5SA2.jpg[/img]

After hooking up the cables and the hard drives, I sealed up the case, powered everything up and wanted to marvel at my creation.  What’s this?  No drives?  No PM card?  Oh man!  Don’t tell me the card doesn’t work!  So, I pulled the case apart again and checked all my connections, even changing a few cables out.  Power it up and…  nada.  CRAP!  WTF?!  So, I take a look at the little sheet that came with the PM card.  (I think it’s called “directions” or “user guide” or something.)  It’s also online for those who may lose it during their build.  What’s that say in step #3?

A what?  Oh.  THAT:  The fairly large, white plug on the card.  It’s so difficult to see, isn’t it? 

[img width=281 height=254]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/5x1-4.jpg[/img]

Once I hooked up the power cable to the PM card, suddenly everything was working.  I made the necessary, simple changes in the RocketRAID BIOS so that the drives were set up as individual drives (JBOD) and was all set.  Overall, I’m very happy with the cable routing and the mounting of the PM card.
I do want to point out a serious design flaw with both the SATA cards I purchased and, from what I've read, it's a very common issue.  Most people are aware that SATA cables are not all that secure.  Already aware of this, I purchased the locking type of cables.  This works great...  when the port/card you plug them into also supports locking cables.  Sadly, neither of my cards do.  In fact, the PCI-X card from SuperMicro can't even use locking cables because the latch sticks out too far and bumps into the other ports.

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/supermicro.jpg[/img]

The Highpoint card, on the other hand, does allow locking cables to fit, however, they do not lock.

[img width=640 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/highpoint.jpg[/img]

This was a serious flaw I found out when going back to take the photos for this blog update.  I managed to lose all 5 drives attached to the Highpoint card, as well as one drive from the SuperMicro card.  Thankfully, WHS doesn't go ape**** like I did and took everything in stride, waiting patiently for me to get things hooked up correctly again.  After about 5 reboots and an hour or so of “colorful metaphors”, I rechecked all the cables, rebooted, and WHS came up like nothing had ever happened.  Have I mentioned just how much I love WHS?  ;D

As I suspected, when I installed the second 5SA cage, vibrations popped up again, but at a significantly lesser sound than before.  I figured it was the screws for sliding the cage onto its rails, so I decided to put some electrical tape on the bottom of the rails.  This has completely eliminated the hard drive vibrations.

[img width=360 height=480]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/tape.jpg[/img]

The noisiest part of the server is now back to the fans, but this thing is still extremely quiet for a server with 13 drives in it.

The final piece was to add all my new drives to the wireframe in the WHS Disk Management add-in.  Oooh… ahhhh:

[img width=300 height=282]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/wireframe1.jpg[/img]

[img width=304 height=303]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/wireframe2.jpg[/img]

I noticed that the drives on the PM card no longer report their temperatures to WHS.  The RocketRAID 2300 shows the temps just fine.  Sadly, I believe this is a limitation in the PM card just not passing the info along.  Oh well.  It still looks frakkin’ wild in that wireframe!  Here’s what my hard drives look like in WHS:

[img width=503 height=295]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/diskstatus1.jpg[/img]

Even with all these drives, I only have duplication turned on for a couple of folders.  However, I have had a few instances where WHS has said that a drive is failing.  Every time, this has been on a drive with duplication turned on.  After some searching on the internet, I found the fix is simply to disable duplication on the drive and then re-enable it.  Thus far, this has fixed it every time.

There are two drives at the top of this picture which are not currently being used.  One is a hot spare, ready to go whenever necessary and the other is not in a hot swap bay, so I decided to take it out of the drive pool.  I should probably just remove it completely so it's not powered up at any point.  I also saw a deal on WD drives and picked up 2 spare 1TB drives to have lying around at the house, just in case anything else begins to fail.

SageTV

Throughout all of this quite lengthy blog, you may have noticed that the only mention of SageTV was back at the very beginning when I simply stated that I installed it without issue.  I also didn’t mention any tuners.  The reason I skipped all that is because I was fighting with my Hauppauge HD-PVR throughout most of this build.  Now that I’ve finally completed the hardware build and have a reliable server to record my media to, I can get back to the PVR software I’m using:  SageTV.  Clearly, I’ve built a server that runs Windows Home Server, so I purchased the WHS version of SageTV.  This is just a service that runs under WHS.  You choose an account to run it under, ensure this account has the proper permissions to any folder it needs access to (i.e.  media folders for music, videos, recordings, etc.), and start it up.  That’s about all you do with SageTV on WHS:  start or stop the service.

[img width=620 height=151]http://www.missingremote.com/images/stories/misc/blog/SageSS.jpg[/img]

Note that you can access this screen from the WHS box or any client PC with the WHS Connector software installed on it.  Again, WHS is intended to be headless, so you should very rarely be logged into the server itself.