Due to electrical problems within the house, I needed to have a inspection done on the system. Unfortunately when they arrived, I wasn't given enough warning and they powered off the mains and I hadn't shut down the media server.
When they left, I powered it back on; nothing. The machine was dead.
As the primary DNS server for my home network, and storage for all the media, I quickly killed the server I'd been building as a replacement for my hosted box, and plugged the harddrive into that machine. Things were working once again; phew.
I've since been thinking about options for replacing the server – I still want a new hosted box as the one running this website has is now over five years old – while keeping it cost effective.
My requirements are few:
- Any case will do. It's going in the loft, so noise isn't a concern.
- Space for a few hard drives. I want one drive for the OS, and three drives in a RAID 5 configuration for the data storage.
- Enough RAM for the few processes I have running (related, related).
- Not break the bank.
I briefly considered building another machine myself – the original was a custom microATX machine with an Atom processor, running at 1.6GHz – but the thought of time sourcing the materials and then actually building and maintaining the thing put a stop to that.
Enter Dell. They're running a deal on PowerEdge T110 II machines. I've just ordered one with a dual core processor, 2.6GHz, 4G RAM and one 250Gb HDD. It'll be here in about ten days. I would have ordered the additional harddrives from there too, but I'm allergic to paying £240 for a single 2Tb device. Complete with three year next business day onsite warranty, it's set me back £324. Not bad at all!
After a brief argument with Dabs.com when they increased the price of a drive by £30 in the space of five minutes, I settled on three 2Tb Western Digital Caviar Green Serial ATA, which will provide me with 4Tb usable storage, with capacity to have a single drive fail without losing data.
Once that's installed, I can go about getting my hosted server replaced; a task that's been on my list for just over a year. With any luck, all this can be done before the end of November.
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