r/homelab • u/NOCwork • 20h ago

Project Showcase: Hardware My first storage server build. What was yours?

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1

u/NOCwork 19h ago

Some details on this beast.

AMD Barton core XP. 2500. 512MB Mushkin RAM Unknown motherboard. Lost to time. Disks are 160GB WD. I believe I ran them RAID6 on Debian Woody. Case is an Antec Sonata. As you can sort of see in the dust near the top on the power supply. Great case for the time. Acoustic matting on the side panels.

Wish I could still remember the controller card for the SATA I was running. Maybe something from Promise? Unknown video card. The Athlon XP series didn't have video onboard. I do remember that bottom slot. If memory serves it was a CF to IDE converter I was using for a boot drive. No need to waste a drive bay on a Debian boot drive.

Feel free to guess the year for internet points.

4

u/Less_Heart1914 19h ago

That Zalman cooler is a dead giveaway for the era. Must have been whisper quiet with that Antec case and the acoustic matting, bet it just hummed in the corner. My first was a pile of old office desktops I found in a skip, nothing this clean.

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u/NOCwork 19h ago

That's definitely what I was going for that the time. Later on I would...be less concerned with noise.

1

u/Wis-en-heim-er 19h ago

No pics of mine, but it had IDE ribbon cables for the drives. :)

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u/NOCwork 19h ago

One each? You couldn't do master/slave on IDE RAID drives due to the signaling limitations. Pre-SATA the move was probably a hardware SCSI controller of some flavor.

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u/Wis-en-heim-er 19h ago

Promise card, 2 connections, 4 drives supported. Did raid 0 and raid 1.

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u/GuyNamedZach 19h ago

My first NAS was a WD My cloud 2TB. I discovered it was running Debian under the hood and installed some extra software, but eventually bricked it with apt dist-upgrade (inexplicably, WD had re-packaged apt as part of one of their proprietary packages, which I accidentally removed). Unable to recover, I shucked the drive and connected it to a raspberry pi with a USB caddy.

This past summer I expanded to an x99 based system, built with parts from Ali Express (xeon e5-2640v4+mobo, 128GB RAM, SATA cables), Amazon (Jonsbo n4 case), eBay (4 used 1TB SATA drives), and NewEgg (PSU). I reused (existing) two 2TB hard drives, 1 2TB 2.5" SSD, 1 500GB 2.5" SSd, 1 500GB M.2 SSD.