I’ve been putting off upgrading my server for a while but at the weekend I installed two 2TB hard drives. The main reason I’ve put this off it because I don’t like spending money on my self so I delay until I’m sure I want something. Whilst putting this off Thailand, the main producer of hard drives, was hit by floods and sent prices rocketing. Some retailers introduced rationing of hard drives and others ran out of there usual stock.

Most of this year I’ve been running out of disk space on my devices, as I write this I have less than 114MB free on my laptop and I’ve been unable to do a full backup onto the server because that doesn’t have enough space on it. I had planned on getting three hard drives and putting them into RAID 5 but I’ve settled for RAID 1 with two 2TB drives for now.

As always there were issues: the main being the server was unable to POST until I disabled the motherboard’s RAID functionality. In the past I tried to use mdadm with my 500GB drives before I gave up and used the Fake RAID on the PCI card. Some old configuration of this was still hanging about when I installed the two new drives on the motherboard which shuffled the PCI card’s ones down, meaning it was trying to create a RAID with the wrong hard drives.

Now that I’ve got all this space I can backup more computers but before I do that I want to get some kinda plan into place. To organise and separate people’s data and provide some level of encryption. The power usage of the server has increased over time with upgrades and more hard drives being added; It has five hard drives and idles at 85W. It might be time to look into getting a new motherboard and processor they will be faster and use less power, the current server only has SATA1 so getting SATA3 will be a big performance boost.