Side Project: Server Upgrade

Some of you may have heard about my recent 7 terabyte windfall... (heya, Pottsey... ;) )

Obviously I couldn't just let those 6 2TB hard drives sit around and collect dust, so I decided to start upgrading the server last night. Unfortunately, that decision brought on a multitude of complications.

Problem #1
Powering the drives. Funnily enough, when I built the server, I did actually plan ahead (to some degree) by getting a nice beefy power supply. Sadly, while I had plenty of electricity, I DIDN'T have enough connectors for the SEVEN hard drives that I'm installing. (Original setup had only 5). I managed to solve this by pilfering a connector from another power supply and jamming it onto the wires. Nice and easy fix, but alas, it did nothing to prepare me for:

Problem #2
Mounting the drives. The one major hiccup I forgot to account for when thinking this out (at 11PM) was that I only have enough 3.5" slots for 5 drives. (Again, worked just fine for the original setup.) This can only be solved by picking up some adapter rails, which will happen next week if not sooner. Still, the RAID array (the thingy that makes all the BIG hard drives into a single GARGANTUAN one :D ) can be assembled, connected, and initialized (which basically means "plug all new drives in"). So, in the spirit of ingenuity, I did THIS:

The shiny plastic bits between each drive are the old drives in the static proof bags the new drives came in (just to be safe).






Now, I have a pile of drives IN the computer, a bigger pile OUTSIDE the computer, and for the next 24-48 hours, the whole thing will be doing this. ----->

Once it's finished building the array, I should have just under... 10 TB of storage.

Totally worth it :) .