First of all, hello! I am new here. My background....electronics technician. College professor- teaching A+ Cert, CCENT, Basic Electricity. Also have done HV Substation work. Current occupation is Steel Mill maintenance electrician......anything from conduit to PLC and HMI Programming.
Dell is irritating me.....greatly.
What I am trying to do and why.
1-my own private Netflix - Emby
2-my own mail system.
3-my own VPN server
4-my own web server
5-my own Minecraft server
6-my own Facebook. Discordia
7-my own cloud storage. NextCloud
Equipment I have
1 -r510 with 2 X5675 and however much memory all 8gb sticks of ecc ddr3 give.
2- I have 7 r710 servers with varying options
3-r5500 precision workstation
2-Compellant Sc200 shelves with 12 2TB Constellation ES drives in each one.
1-Compellant Sc220 shelf with 24 500GB Constellation drives.
AFTER doing research...some of which was sourced from posts on this site, I bought the compellant enclosures. The posts I saw said they pretty much worked fine...... That is a relative thing. Here are my issues and what I have done and am thinking.
1-the r510 has an H800. It complains of a topology error. Yet, if I boot it without the enclosures attached and go into the controller setup, I can then hook up the enclosures and all is fine. If I reboot, it again whines about topology.
2-The sc and md shelves are very closely related. I thought, fine, I will simply buy the md1200 controller modules and it will be fine.... no. The MD1200 Modules in the SC shelf only power HALF the module. I am not talking reading half the drives. Literally, when looking at the back, the ‘in’ port side of the MD controllers is not powered. If I plug in to the out port, the H800 sees and recognizes the drives in that enclosure. There is no backplane communication top to bottom on the modules, so I can not hook to any more than a single shelf per H800 port.
SO! I am at a crossroads. I am considering the following.
1 - I have the H200e. I am going to flash this to IT mode. I am going to hook it to the shelf with the SC controller modules installed. I am going to hope it doesn’t whine and simply sees the disks.
If that doesn’t work,
2 - I am contemplating getting the MD1200/1220 backplanes off EBay. I am hoping that I will then be able to run as a true MD1200/1220 sans the option to split the shelf in half...since the compellant shelf doesn’t have that switch on it. I am not certain how it will default without the switch hooked up. If it defaults to a bifurcated shelf, that is fine since I have the cables and modules to handle that.
I would like some feedback. I have been accumulating this equipment for about 3 years now.
I asked one guy I follow on YouTube. He advocated scrapping most of it.....especially the used SAS drives and enclosures and doing something else.
So far, electrical draw isn’t that bad. The r510, r5500, and 3 shelves are relatively quiet. My intention is to run only one or two of the r710s and use either VMs or docker to do the rest. The r5500 is the only windows box and that is to support my ripping software and Emby Server. I have a pretty healthy Nvidia card in it to help with encode/decode of the video streams.
I realized used drives aren’t as nice as new. Also realize I am not hitting them as hard as an enterprise entity. $15 to $20 per 2TB drive is a dream and an easy remedy for the bad drives. Upon powering up and configuring, the h800 flagged 2 drives out of 24 as bad. I bought 3 more for $60. I have about 6 consumer raid one desktop 2bay enclosures. H800s..any of the Dell/LSI crap is easy to get and replace. The consumer stuff...not so much. And Western Digital in all it’s glory set it’s firmware in its nas boxes to require ONLY WD drives and ONLY a specific model WD drive. Ask me how I know. I fought hard with them until they found an old drive laying around and sent it to me.....but it means I can’t use a newer drive of the same capacity. And of course..all these are raid 1 units. By the way...it is redundancy I am after. I have separate usb drives that I copy to for backup.
I am in the process of learning Linux. I am not afraid. I started in the time of the Vic 20 and Timex Sinclair 1000.
I appreciate and welcome any and all advice.
Dell is irritating me.....greatly.
What I am trying to do and why.
1-my own private Netflix - Emby
2-my own mail system.
3-my own VPN server
4-my own web server
5-my own Minecraft server
6-my own Facebook. Discordia
7-my own cloud storage. NextCloud
Equipment I have
1 -r510 with 2 X5675 and however much memory all 8gb sticks of ecc ddr3 give.
2- I have 7 r710 servers with varying options
3-r5500 precision workstation
2-Compellant Sc200 shelves with 12 2TB Constellation ES drives in each one.
1-Compellant Sc220 shelf with 24 500GB Constellation drives.
AFTER doing research...some of which was sourced from posts on this site, I bought the compellant enclosures. The posts I saw said they pretty much worked fine...... That is a relative thing. Here are my issues and what I have done and am thinking.
1-the r510 has an H800. It complains of a topology error. Yet, if I boot it without the enclosures attached and go into the controller setup, I can then hook up the enclosures and all is fine. If I reboot, it again whines about topology.
2-The sc and md shelves are very closely related. I thought, fine, I will simply buy the md1200 controller modules and it will be fine.... no. The MD1200 Modules in the SC shelf only power HALF the module. I am not talking reading half the drives. Literally, when looking at the back, the ‘in’ port side of the MD controllers is not powered. If I plug in to the out port, the H800 sees and recognizes the drives in that enclosure. There is no backplane communication top to bottom on the modules, so I can not hook to any more than a single shelf per H800 port.
SO! I am at a crossroads. I am considering the following.
1 - I have the H200e. I am going to flash this to IT mode. I am going to hook it to the shelf with the SC controller modules installed. I am going to hope it doesn’t whine and simply sees the disks.
If that doesn’t work,
2 - I am contemplating getting the MD1200/1220 backplanes off EBay. I am hoping that I will then be able to run as a true MD1200/1220 sans the option to split the shelf in half...since the compellant shelf doesn’t have that switch on it. I am not certain how it will default without the switch hooked up. If it defaults to a bifurcated shelf, that is fine since I have the cables and modules to handle that.
I would like some feedback. I have been accumulating this equipment for about 3 years now.
I asked one guy I follow on YouTube. He advocated scrapping most of it.....especially the used SAS drives and enclosures and doing something else.
So far, electrical draw isn’t that bad. The r510, r5500, and 3 shelves are relatively quiet. My intention is to run only one or two of the r710s and use either VMs or docker to do the rest. The r5500 is the only windows box and that is to support my ripping software and Emby Server. I have a pretty healthy Nvidia card in it to help with encode/decode of the video streams.
I realized used drives aren’t as nice as new. Also realize I am not hitting them as hard as an enterprise entity. $15 to $20 per 2TB drive is a dream and an easy remedy for the bad drives. Upon powering up and configuring, the h800 flagged 2 drives out of 24 as bad. I bought 3 more for $60. I have about 6 consumer raid one desktop 2bay enclosures. H800s..any of the Dell/LSI crap is easy to get and replace. The consumer stuff...not so much. And Western Digital in all it’s glory set it’s firmware in its nas boxes to require ONLY WD drives and ONLY a specific model WD drive. Ask me how I know. I fought hard with them until they found an old drive laying around and sent it to me.....but it means I can’t use a newer drive of the same capacity. And of course..all these are raid 1 units. By the way...it is redundancy I am after. I have separate usb drives that I copy to for backup.
I am in the process of learning Linux. I am not afraid. I started in the time of the Vic 20 and Timex Sinclair 1000.
I appreciate and welcome any and all advice.
