(click to enlarge)
Party! The “Bits” Arrive
[UPDATE – After you’ve read this, jump to our updated JukeBox MkII article]
Old Timer – since ripping and centralising all our DVDs and CDs a few years ago our “Jukebox” server had grown and grown and was in need of replacement. With 5 years of digital photographs taking up 10s of gigabytes alone and ripped DVDs taking anywhere from 3gig to 9gig each!, no matter how much disk space you have it never seems quite enough.
The donated ancient motherboard and RAM that I had received three years ago had performed well. despite being a lowly Pentium pro 200 with 128meg, it had coped admirably with serving multiple PCs, Xboxes and other IP clients. however the drive bay configuration in the old AT rackmount case (that had been “modified” with a hacksaw to allow the ATX board to be fitted) meant there was no room left to add any more hard disks, and keeping the drives that were already in there amazing was becoming a major issue too.
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The “Old Timer” Retires
NASty – In my hunt for a replacement I considered buying the Buffalo Terastation NAS (network attached storage) device. This gives you 1 terabyte of drive space in a small, quiet, stand alone box for under £700. A nice option, but more than I wanted to spend. I also have plenty of large drives to re-use out of the old Jukebox, as well as some smaller 120gig and 160gig drives that I wanted to utilise too.
Hardware – After getting some input from the guys on our Mailing list and IRC channel I finally settled on the Compucase S411 4U rack mount case from xcase.co.uk. There are many better, stunning rackmount cases out there with caddies included etc, but they are way beyond my budget. This case costs under £90 and allows me to fit 6 drives in caddies all accessible from the front of the machine, with space for at least another 6 drives internally if required. Be warned this is a full depth case and requires a large rack to accommodate it. It also weighs 23Kilos with the 8 drives fitted.
I chose an EPIA motherboard with the via M10000 (1Ghz) Nehemiah CPU. This tiny little main board is a big improvement in terms of speed on the previous via machines I’ve owned (500Mhz and 800Mhz). Although it only has one PCI slot (it can take a dual riser in the appropriate case) it already features pretty much everything you need on-board – 10/100 LAN, USB2, Firewire, Graphics, Sound. The PCI slot is used for the promise TX2 IDE controller card I was already using in the old Jukebox machine.
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Some of the Caddies in Place
This card along with the 2 IDE channels included on the motherboard allowed me to connect up 8 IDE devices. To reach the full potential of 12 drives in this case, you would need to replace the IDE controller card with a more expensive one with more channels. You could also change the IDE controller for a SATA one if you are buying new drives. one of the biggest advantages of this setup is the running costs. The EPIA board is a miser when it comes to electricity usage when compared to most modern boards/CPUs. In a server running 24/7 that has to be a consideration.
I had some old IDE caddies spare which I used for this project. using caddies has several advantages:-
It’s very simple to remove and replace drives
The fan in each caddy helps keep the drives cool
There’s no need for rails to mount the 3.5″ HDs in the 5.25″ bays
I fitted the 5 drives out of my old jukebox, plus 3 more spares I had lying around from previous upgrades. So the finally tally is 400gig x 1, 300gig x 3, 160gig x 2, 120gig x 2 giving a total of 1.86 terabytes
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Spot the tiny EPIA via Motherboard!
Although the fold up case front does just close with the caddies in place I decided to remove it for convenience – it’s really so I can see all the Flashing Lights!
OS – rather than take up a bay with a CD-ROM drive I just hung one out of the case temporarily to install the OS and then disconnected it when done. I chose to stick with Windows XP pro as the OS, despite protestations from my “mates” on the IRC channel. I need to run a couple of other apps on my jukebox that run under windows
and whilst I could probably have found Linux alternatives, I’m still pretty much a Linux virgin and so have stuck to what I know. I need good control of the rights for the jukebox data. I want my 4-year-old to be able to access media from his PC, but not delete it! Anyway, here are a couple of interesting NAS specific OS’s which the more sandal wearing amongst you may like to try NASlite – open Filer .
The 8 Drives in device Manager
IDE Drives on the promise Card appear as “SCSI”
I haven’t employed any kind of raid in this new setup. Experience here seems to differ quite a bit, but I seem to have heard more horror stories of people losing data with raid than saving it. problems with cheaper raid devices that are usually used in a home servers typically mean you lose the data auf allen deinen Laufwerken, anstatt der mit den Problemen. Ich unterstütze die “Daten” abends auf einen anderen PC im Rack (dh Dokumente, digitale Fotos usw.), aber die “Medien” werden jedoch überhaupt nicht gesichert. Ich besitze die Originale der CDs und DVDs, sodass sie auf dem Server zurückgesetzt wird, ist nicht ein Problem, mit Ausnahme der Unannehmlichkeiten und dem Zeitfaktor. Es gibt keine praktische, kostengünstige Möglichkeit, ein so großes Volumen an Daten zu unterstützen, den ich gefunden habe.
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Neue Jukebox im Rack!
Probleme – mit einigen nicht unwissenschaftlichen Tests mit einem kleinen Stück Papier, ist es klar, dass die Fans vor einigen meiner Kaddien auf den letzten Beinen sind. Ich untersuche derzeit Ersatzkadie und dieser Vantec MRK-102FD sieht nur den Job aus. Obwohl kein Problem für mich als mein Knoten Null ein kleiner Bereich von unserer Garage ist, klingt diese Box ein bisschen wie ein Jet-Kämpfer ab. Mit diesen vielen Laufwerken und Fans wollen Sie diesen Fall nicht im Schrank unter Ihrer Treppe.
Schlussfolgerung – Da das Sprichwort sagt, gibt es viele Möglichkeiten, eine Katze zu haut, also ist dieses Setup genau das, was für mich geeignet ist. Wenn ich noch nicht die Antriebe hatte, wäre ich möglicherweise für die Terastation gegangen. Oder vielleicht wäre ich für das gleiche Setup gegangen, aber mit neuen Sata-Laufwerken anstelle von Pata. Mein Switch hat zwei Gigabit-Ports, daher wäre es schön gewesen, wenn das integrierte Ethernet auf dem Motherboard dies auch unterstützt hat, obwohl ich in der Realty keine Probleme habe, die mehrere Clients gleichzeitig über das 100-MEG-LAN dienen. Am Ende ist es jedoch schwer, die Flexibilität dieses Setups zu schlagen. Es ist leicht, die Laufwerke als größere, billigere zu ersetzen. Sogar das Wechseln der Ganzen an SATA ist nicht schwer, eine Änderung der PCI-Karte und Kaddien zu erfordern. Rollen Sie nun bei den nächsten Jahren 800GiG-Laufwerke bei £ 200
[Update – Nachdem Sie dies gelesen haben, springen Sie zu unserem aktualisierten Jukebox-MKII-Artikel]
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(Ungefähre Preise – einschließlich der MwSt.)
Concompase S411 Rackmount 1 x £ 86.50
HIPER HPU-4S 425WATT 1 x £ 35
Via Epia M10000 Nehemiah Mainboard1 x £ 96
Kingston 512MB PC2100 266MHz DDR DIMM 1 x £ 48.50
Versprechen TX2 Ultra IDE Controller 1 x £ 21.50
Runde IDE-Kabel 4 x £ 3.80
Ide caddies 6 x £ 4.00
Gesamt – £ 326.70 (plus Antriebe & OS)
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