Re: Re: Motherboard Help (Again)

[Simon Pawson <simonp.lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I went for a green ish solution. Atom MB which only has two SATA ports
and
one PCI so I went for a port multipler supporting SATA card (3xINT, 1xEXT).
With three different manufacturers 1TB disks and an old 120G PATA drive as
system disk WHS runs about 65w maybe up to 70 when very busy. Idles about
60w. Hopefully all three drives won't fail at once and at the moment there
will be an external removable backup array (see later).

The card is a:
<
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Lycom-ST-125NR-eSATA-II-3Gbps-External-(eSATA)plus3Internal-4Ports-LP-PCI-32bit-Host-(Non-Raid)
>

and there is space for several more drives in a tower case that will be
hidden horizontally on the top of a boxed in shelf in the garage.

The idea is that as time and money permits I'll put in one of these drive
arrays and add disks which by then will be cheaper and bigger.
Array:
<
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Icy-Dock-MB-455SPF-3-x-525-Bays-Hosting-5-HDD-Drives-SATAII-Hotswap-Best-Seller
>
And put in one of these internally. Port Multiplier
<
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Lycom-ST-126RM-SATA-II-3Gbps-1-To-5-Port-Multiplier-bridge-board-(for-Rack-Mount)
> as not all drives will need to be accessed at high speed at once.
The SATA cards with a larger number of ports look good but they rapidly get
very expensive.

I've tested the PM going to an external drive array I made out of an old
Wide SCSI 4 way expansion case and the Icy Dock array and it works well.
I've a couple of 1TB drives in that and intend to connect it now and again
via a long eSATA cable for backup.

As a point of note I measured two different PSUs with my Maplin Power
meter.
All I did was connect them to a PSU tester and there was a large difference
in their idle power consumption so be careful selecting tehre as well..

I'm still at the testing stage with un-activated copy of WHS and trying
various failure scenarios. Before it goes "live" I want to test
the ATOM MB
with my Geovision card to see if it runs and I can justify another MB with
the saving.

I considered VMing but I think I need to run WHS on the metal and I'm not
sure what the options would be to virtualise that.

Any comments anyone?

Simon.

On Mon, Oct 12, 2009 at 4:00 PM, Mark McCall <lists@xxxxxxx>wrote:

>
>
> > Whatcha get Mark?
> >
> > Tim.
> >
>
> All in good time ;)
>
> Nothing special TBH, will cover the build in AH. Hope to reuse the
> existing case...
>
> <http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Content/Jukebox-Server.html>
>
> M.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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