I’ve been using Seagate IronWolf disks for a few years now and currently have about 20 in service, most of those are the 10TB (and 12TB) Non-Pro (ST10000VN0004) variety. Most of my experience with them has been great so when the new server build came along I bought a few more to run as my main ZFS pool. Sadly, things didn’t go exactly as planned, but I think I was also able to fix it, so let’s see what happened!
Continue reading Seagate IronWolf 10TB Firmware Fix (CRC errors with ZFS)
This article is to accompany my video about setting up Proxmox, creating a ZFS Pool and then installing a small VM on it. It’s a tutorial from start to finish!
Continue reading How to install Proxmox and setup a ZFS Pool
I’ve started replacing my old (6 year) old server! So join me on the journey of putting together a 100TB 10Gbit Server, installing Proxmox, migrating the old data and many more topics!
As I mentioned in my previous post about this subject, I recently built an AMD Ryzen 1700x based 2U server. Because next to running at LAN parties this server also needs to run at my home I wanted to have it somewhat quiet so I can run it in the garage without hearing it somewhere else like on my YouTube recordings
Continue reading Silencing the 2U AMD Ryzen server (Noctua PWM mod)
I recently had the need to build a 2U Server for home and LAN party usage. Since AMD Ryzen is now offering a very interesting 8 core CPU with plenty of PCIe lanes I decided to use a Ryzen 1700x. The server is running Proxmox and is even using GPU passthrough! This post will host the first video and some configuration details that are harder to convey in a video. A second video and post with more information about some hardware and the GPU passthrough will go up after this.
Continue reading Building a 2U AMD Ryzen server (Hardware configuration + ZFS settings)
I did a forum post about this a few years ago but I thought it was time to do a video and an actual blog post about my proposed solution for the new house to transport HDMI Video and Audio using Ethernet cabling! Continue reading Home Networking: HDMI extender over Ethernet
Don’t have enough ports available in your (Storage/ESXi) server? Even though modern motherboards come with 6 onboard port now a days, maybe it’s not enough for you. Or you are using a little bit older hardware and don’t have enough 6G ports (Only important to SSD’s really). A quick and easy way is adding a PCIe based storage controller. And while True Hardware RAID can be good to have, on lower end controllers it’s often more of a hindrance then a benefit. Especially when using something life software RAID or ZFS.
This guide will show you how to flash an LSI 9211-8i or 9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware. IT stands for “Intergrated Target”. This way the disks get presented to the OS is a raw form, much like your motherboard ports would do. This enables complete control, SMART data for your OS and Power Management such as spindown. It will also help you if you encounter the “Failed to initialize PAL” error while flashing.
I have been building private servers for over 12 years now, as written before my current server is incarnation/version 8 with several even having minor revision numbers between the big numbers. During this time I have accumulated some best practices for myself and one of them is to always perform a full surface scan on (new) disks I receive. Read more about it in this article!
Continue reading Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.1 – x: HDD Preperations
This third part will be a hardware and design overview of the Storage server that I am using. This server combines a NAS with some secondary functions for me such as SabNZBd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, FTP, CrashPlan, etc. I know that kind of taints it’s pure function (serve me storage) but since I used a pretty hefty machine for it, all seems to be working quite well and since this is not a company installation I believe the otherwise wasted CPU power can be put to good use! This article will be one of the most complex because it will hold the configuration I made and also partially the reasons why.
First in the line of my Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup posts will by my ESXi server. I will list the hardware involved, power usage, etc.
Continue reading Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 2 – x: VMware ESXi Server
