X10SRi Storage Server rebuild

I felt inspired by Linus Tech Tips storage server on the cheap build, see my previous post for a link. So in true send up of Linus here is my version. Unlike Linus I don't have any sponsor and have to pay for my own hardware and reuse parts where possible.

The case is a 2015 vintage Fractal Designs Define R2 which has excellent build quality, and lots of room to stuff things inside. We're going to need it. It also weights a hefty 12 kilograms.

You can see the sound-dampening foam on the front panel. It also has thicker padding on the side panels (not shown) as well as the top of the case.

Its has louvered doors. There's nylon mesh in front of the fans to keep out the dust. As Linus pointed out with his build this arrangement usually means the airflow isn't the best. To counter that I have replaced the original fans with Noctua ones all round. Better airflow, reliability and they are fairly quiet.

This is what we're starting with. It had 4 x 4TB drives. They started off life running Windows Server 2008 R2 using the RAID controller in hardware mode and then most recently its been switched to Linux and the controller is in JBOD mode with ZFS on Linux providing the RAID functionality.

So its out with the old. The bits on the side are the drive caddy.

And in with the new.

But wait there's more. We're doubling the number of drives in order to fill all 8 drive bays. I'm not counting the 5.25" drive bays at the top of the case. Besides these cost me a small fortune.

Here is the finished product. Yes I know it needs cable management Linus.

And what does all this look like in Linux I hear you ask, Like this:

# zpool status
  pool: pool1
 state: ONLINE
  scan: scrub repaired 0B in 0 days 00:02:09 with 0 errors on Sat Mar 28 03:59:10 2020
config:

        NAME                        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        pool1                       ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz2-0                  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c13b97  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c143ed  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c13f04  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c16623  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c14c7f  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c16afa  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c152cd  ONLINE       0     0     0
            wwn-0x5000cca298c1431f  ONLINE       0     0     0

errors: No known data errors

# df /pool1
Filesystem       1K-blocks      Used   Available Use% Mounted on
pool1          75325838848 162769536 75163069312   1% /pool1

Thats 71TB of usable space. Probably more because I turned lz4 compression on for the pool. I went with two drive redundancy so I can lose any two drives and still not lose my data.

Well that's it for this post. If you like this post then give me the thumbs up and if you don't we'll it doesn't matter because this isn't YouTube.