Category: Site News

It certainly feels like Spring today, what with 65 degree temperatures. What a wonderful day for a ride – which is exactly what I did. I’m totally stoked about riding home, too! [but then, I usually am… did I tell you I love to go home to my wife?]

I finished building the new data server with the two replacement drives that came on Wednesday. It took quite a while to rebuild the large data storage array – but that’s because it’s 1.2TB. That’s right: 1.2 terabytes… or 1,200GB or 1,200,000MB or 1,200,000,000KB or 1,200,000,000,000 bytes. That kind of space only a few years ago would have taken up a whole room with storage racks from floor to ceiling – and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford it. And this is all on 5 hard drives – that’s it. In a tower-sized computer case. Yes, it’s larger than average, but all this space fits in a box the size of 3 CD ROM drives. Unbelievable. And those drives are not even the largest available today! I chose them becasue they were big enough and cheap. There are 500GB drives available today and that would be 2.5TB! Wow.

That’s a lot of space. Should last us a few years.

Next steps: data migration. I’ve started this already [it seems to not even make a dent in the available space – 30GB moved so far is less than 3% of the total space where before it was almost half my drive] but the big migration is yet to come. And, we’re going to be cleaning up the directory structure as well as eliminating any duplication.

Should be fun… heh.

No, not “Seven of Nine”, but two out of seven hard drives in my new system either failed to start at all, or went bad after a successful start. That fast: one hour. At least I got that out of the way early. The others seem to be working just fine. Of course, since one drive in each array died, I cannot even install the OS on my computer yet. At least, not permanently. I can “practice”. Or, just install the OS and run the hardware diagnostics to see if any other items need to be replaced.

This is my first major computer assembly from parts, at least from so many parts, and I suppose that statistically speaking, this is within the norm. However, I don’t want to be normal. I want it all to work the first time!

I did try to install the OS last night [Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition for 64-bit], but the CD I burned with the OS on it had a flaw, so I need to burn a new one. And I didn’t want to do that last night, or I’d have never gone to sleep at all… However, up until the point it failed to copy one file, it positively FLEW. The processor and the drive arrays I have are SO fast, that the usual 30 minutes until the customization stage was more like 5 minutes. Quite nice. I highly recommend 64 bit and SATA II.

Now, I must wait again… How long does it take to do an RMA replacement?

I have compelted Phase 1 of the LAN Upgrade project. For those of you who don’t know [which would be most], I have come up with a plan to update the hardware and software of my home LAN [by LAN, I’m loosly referring to computers, networking equipment, and other accessories] in order to bring it into the next generation of technologies.

The Phased Approach

For Phase 1, I upgraded all my wired machines to 1GB from 100MB [this was a network upgrade for those of you who aren’t familiar with technologies – 10x faster than before]. That included a new GB switch to replace my old, reliable Netgear, new GB network cards for two of my machines, and a new KVM [again: for those that don’t know, this device allows me to use one keyboard, monitor and mouse to controll up to 8 machines at once]. I know, the KVM isn’t “network” gear, but it’s part of the overall purpose for this upgrade. My old KVM was putting not-so-faint lines on the screen and was interfereing with digital photo editing and generally giving me a bad picture.

And that brings us around to the core reason for the total upgrade: Digital Photography. I am running out of file storage space on my current server and was looking for a way to make the entire LAN more capable. Phase 1 was networking capacity and usability – it’ll be much quicker to access that file store now. Phase 2 will be a new file server – but one made with current technologies, not one that is a year or so behind. It will have about 1.2 TB of storage. That’s Tera Bytes… 1000 Giga Bytes, 1,000,000 MB, … you get the picture. Lots of space. This server will be built on a dual core x64 processor. Phase 3 will add a second dual-core processor and lots more RAM. I will then move the email processing to that box and re-task the current email server.

Yep, it will be lots of fun! Cost? Well, let’s just say that there’s a financial reason for the phased approach. Phase 1 was fairly inexpensive, but I’ll have to save a bit for Phase 2. Phase 3 might be far out enoug that the extra processor will be much ceaper than it is now.