Geekgothgrrl

So whilst I was away over the weekend my UPS, which has for a while now been complaining at me about the batteries being knackered, decided to cut out when it complained, so turning the power off to my server.

I of course only noticed this fact when I got home. At first I was wondering if it was a hardware issue. Then it happened again today whilst I was listening to music off of the RAID array on the server.

I decided that whilst the server was off I'd give it a clean (spiders had moved in!!) and upgrade the RAID array with the 3 2Tb drives I bought back in July/August sometime. I then thought I'd upgrade the CPU as I'd been meaning to put an C2D E6550 cpu I had in - in place of the E4600 - so I could make use of virtualisation on it again.

That all worked out fine till I went to put the non-stock heatsink on... where the plastic lugs that attach it to the board, snapped!

The Intel stock heatsink isn't capable of cooling the E6550, I tried, the CPU idled at 80C! the E4600 with the stock cooler is currently at 55C and that is with a 3Tb RAID array rebuild going on. So better heatsink/fan needed before that upgrade is done I think.

Checking all was working I added the first of the 2Tb drives. I was going to create a new array with them and then transfer data. It would of been far faster probably. But I didn't have by this point the energy to delve about in boxes for SATA leads and wiring all of the extra drives up. So fail one 1.5Tb drive, add one 2Tb drive, rebuild is the current plan. The first drive is about 85% rebuilt... only taken 5 hours... and two more disks to go yet! [this is using mdadm under Debian Linux running kernel 3.0.0]

Am thinking of what to do with the 3 1.5Tb drives when I've finished doing the upgrade. One option is to give FreeNAS or OpenFiler a try. The only downside I see with OpenFiler is it seemingly wants 2Gb of ram minimum. And FreeNAS is FreeBSD based - in itself not an issue as such, but I'd prefer Linux and XFS based to allow me to use the raid array/drives in the other Linux boxes I have for emergency situations. I might just throw them in a low spec box (have an old Dell P4 server) and put Debian on that and use mdadm and use it as another normal Linux server and keep it in sync with the maid server raid array for backups of stuff etc.

I'll leave it there I think.