After being constantly on since april 2002, it is time that the current Pentium III server is replaced. It is making a lot of noise and sooner or later, I expect it to stop working anyway. Also, the storage is approaching its 200GB limit so it is time for a change. Now, for the past days I have been googling like an idiot for days figuring out exactly what I need and where to order it.
Basically, what I am looking for is a server with low noise and power consumption and external storage. From previous experience, using a RAID array inside a standard PC tower just generates too much heat, so I need some dedicated external storage which is optimized for heat.
After a lot (and really a lot) of googling. I settled on a the following system:
- Pentium M based small server: Aopen H420A tower, Aopen i915GMm-HFS motherboard, pentium M 740 (1733 MHz), and 2 GB of memory. Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 card (PCIe x1), SATA to eSATA bracket for access to external storage using eSATA.
- Firmtek/Seritek 2EN2 storage enclosure for two drives.
Deciding on the exact storage requirements was a pain in the ass. Of course, I could have gone for the Highpoint X4 which is cool but expensive and requires a more expensive RAID card. I also spent a lot of time configuring an addonics storage tower together with the sales people from addonics. But then, in the end I stumbled on reviews saying that the storage tower makes a lot of noise. Then I started to question my basic assumptions, one of them was that I wanted to be able to reuse the 3 200GB disks that I currently use.
Looking at the options, reusing the old disks becomes more and more of a non-issue. Suppose I would buy a new 300GB SATA disk then I would have more than 100GB storage left so then, what would be the point of the old disks except more power consumption and noise? So, instead of reusing the old disks I am now just getting a really big disk for the server (400GB SATA). That should last me a long time. At least it removes the need for a storage tower of 4 disks completely. The Firmtek/Seritek 2EN2 in this case is a nice quiet external storage for two SATA drives with eSATA connection which fits the bill perfectly and it also looks great and takes up very little space.
Buying the stuff was also a pain in the ass. FIrst of all I consulted my old PC farmer (a-sys.nl) and they were prepared to talk but looking at their list of vendors for motherboards, it turned out that not a single of their vendors produced pentium M mainboards. Then I started to use the alternate.nl PC builder, which basically sucked. Really really slow and unusable. So, looking a bit further, I found the alternate.de PC builder which worked much better. Also, it seems that alternate.de has much more (and newer) stuff than alternate.nl, so I now want to order my PC there.
After sending out a request, I discovered that the Highpoint 1640 RAID card I selected was really suboptimal. There is a PCI express x1 slot on the motherboard which could be used and now I was using only the PCI slot. The problem here is that the Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 which is needed for that is brand new and that only fews shops sell it. Looking around for shops I found pczone.ch which only ships in Switserland and Liechtenstein and ncix.com which only ships in USA and Canada, both of which of course do not have the card in stock. Then I stumbled on excaliberpc.com where they do have the card in stock and can even ship it outside of the US (a real accomplishment for a USA-based company). Nevertheless, the description on their web site says it is compatible with PCIe x8x16, which is probably just a mistake but I do need to check this anyway.
I am now also waiting for a quotation from alternate.de and have to remove the RAID card from that order. Of course, alternate.de does not support credit card payment for international orders (sigh) so if this works out I have to transfer the money in the old 20th century way.
But, after all this is done, I will have a nice tiny fast, beast of a server which will last me for the coming years. Of course, then the installation fun will begin. And transferring the content of the old 200GB disks to the new disk will also be fun (will take at least a couple of days in my local network). As for the old 200GB disks, I will probably dismantle the old server and then put the RAID card and the three disks inside my desktop PC and use RAID 0 (striping), just to see how fast I can make this gaming PC.