All the parts of my new home server have arrived!
I ordered a reconditioned Dell PowerEdge 2950, Dual quad core Zeon 5450’s, 32Gb EDD RAM, an IBM M1015 SATA controller and 6 x SATA drive trays for $600 from http://www.stalliontek.com/
That’s a beast of a machine for the price!
I also picked up 6 x Western Digital 3TB Green drives for $85 each on Black Friday from an Amazon marketplace seller.
My current home server setup is made up of
HP N40L ProLiant Microserver, 16Gb EDD RAM, Intel Pro/1000 NIC, IBM M1015 SATA controller and 6 x 2TB HDD’s (a mix of green, non-green and SATA I and II)
HP N40L ProLiant Microserver, 16Gb EDD RAM, Intel Pro/1000 NIC and the stock 250Gb HDD it shipped with
One of the Microservers is running FreeNAS 8.2 and the 6 x 2Tb drive array is set up as ZFS-RAID-Z2 for maximum data resiliancy and redundancy. The dataset is not partitioned in any way, and is just exported as an iSCSI target
The other Microserver is running Windows Home Server 2011 on the stock 250Gb HDD, and the data drive is the iSCSI target from the FreeNAS Microserver. The two Intel NIC’s in both machines are hooked up via a crossover ethernet cable, and the iSCSI interface is bound directly to those NIC’s — dedicating that 1000Mb/s link to sharing the ZFS protected space with the Windows Home Server machine.
Originally, I chose this layout because I wanted the protection of ZFS-RAID-Z2, but I also wanted the features of WHS (PC backups, easy SMB shares, etc)
Under normal circumstances, this would suffice for a few years, but I’ve found that I’m in need of more space and some additional services that the Microservers just don’t have the CPU grunt for.