 So I talk about my Windows Home Server an awful lot, but I don't think I've ever actually shown it to you guys. So here it is in its current configuration. It's running Windows Home Server V1, and I actually just recently made some changes to it. So I went from an LGA 775 configuration to a Xeon board and a low-power Xeon 1155 processor. I've got some old-school Aeneon memory in there. Remember Kimanda? Yeah, they're out of business. So I've got 2 gigs of RAM. I actually recently changed the power supply as well. I used to have an 850-watt power supply in here. I've gone to a 1050-watt power supply, but that's not actually because I needed the extra wattage, but rather because I needed a power supply that had the ability, or the foresight, to separate and put the peripheral connectors on two separate rails. So that way I'm able to plug in my up to 24 drives in the front to two separate rails on the power supply. The other one had all of the peripheral connectors running off of a single rail, which overloaded it as soon as the drive started to spin up, even when I turned on staggered spin up, which means that the drives, some of them spin, and then the other one spin, and the other one spin, so they don't all hit your power supply at the same time. So that was why I went with a different power supply. I'm using a Norco case that has a SFF8082, or whatever this connector is called, I can't remember. So up to four SATA or SAS channels per connector, although I'm only running SATA drives because I am running Windows Home Server. I also recently changed my SSD. So I had my Corsair, what was it, I can't even remember. I posted this on Twitter because I thought it was pretty lulz, but my Corsair S series, so this was back when they were using the Samsung controllers. I posted this on my Twitter as like a tombstone outside. So this is the first SSD that I've actually had legitimately die on me when I had it deployed, and I think the reason for that is just Windows Home Server really trashes your boot drive. Windows Home Server V1 is what I'm running because it uses it not only as the OS, but also as a storage drive, as part of the drive pool, which balances itself around all the time so it just really gets hit pretty hard. So I went with an Intel drive just because, you know, legendary reliability and all of that. 510 series just because it's a little bit older so I got a good deal. In terms of the RAID card, I'm running, again, this is a bit of an older RAID card. It's not SATA 3 or anything like that, but it's an Arika 1680 IX. This is a 24-port RAID card. I think it's got like 256 megs of memory on it. I haven't really upgraded it. Is that 512? 512 megs. I haven't really upgraded it because it hasn't been necessary because I'm not actually running in RAID yet, but I will in the future when I upgrade to Windows Home Server V2 or 2011 or whatever it's called. I'm going to put a proper RAID array because right now I have, well, I have what Windows Home Server V1 was basically designed for and that is the most ghetto possible arrangement of drives ever because V1 is all about taking random assortments of drives and configuring them in the drive pool. So what the drive pool does is it redundantly stores all of your data on at least two drives at any given time and it rebalances it constantly to make sure that it stays on at least two drives at any given time. So the performance isn't great. However, I can usually get 70 to 100 megabytes per second read and write from the whole server at any given time, but it's really not good enough anymore because I'm editing video directly off the server these days and so that is what's prompted my next upgrade. So here, check this out guys. So I've got any sort of random variety of drives. So there's a Seagate 7200.10 320 gig drive. Here let's go through and look at them all. There's another one of those. So let's slide that back in. Here's a 250 gig 7200.10. Here is an empty one. Here's an empty one. So we've got three drives so far. This whole sort of space should be empty here. Three drives, three drives, four drives. So there's a WD 1 terabyte black. Five drives, another WD 1 terabyte black. Empty. Six drives, a WD 1 terabyte black. Seven drives, a WD 1 terabyte black. Eight drives, a Seagate 7200.11 500 gig. Nine drives, a 7200.10 500 gig. Ten drives, a WD 1 terabyte black. Eleven drives, a WD 1 terabyte green. Twelve drives, a WD 1 terabyte black. Thirteen drives, a Hitachi 1 terabyte. Fourteen drives, a Hitachi 1 terabyte. Fifteen drives, a WD 2 terabyte black. Sixteen drives, a WD 640 gig black. And seventeen drives, a Hitachi 1 terabyte. So what I want to do is I want to build, Windows Home Server 2 doesn't include the drive extender. So I can no longer use my random mishmash of drives here in order to get my, you know, eight or nine terabytes or whatever it works out to a storage over a span of like sixteen drives. I have to build a proper RAID array. So what I'm going to do is I am going to get a new boot drive. So you have to have at least, I think it's a 160 gig boot drive for Windows Home Server 2. So I can't even use my 120 gig Intel SSD. I'll have to get something bigger. I still want to go with an SSD for the boot drive. I've still had more hard drives fail over the last few years than SSDs. I've had one SSD fail and I've had anywhere from about eight to ten hard drives fail in that given time. And it's not that I don't deploy enough SSDs. I mean my personal RAID has eight SSDs in it for the boot drive. So it's not really that I don't think. So I'm still going to go with an SSD for the boot drive. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to build myself a RAID 6 array with some new Seagate 3 terabytes. The consumer level WD drives aren't that great for RAID these days so I'll find enough empty ones. Build a RAID array on the card and then in the Windows Home Server V1 operating system I will then transfer all the data off the drive pool drives to the RAID array. And a RAID array has a few advantages. The performance will be dramatically better and I'll tell you how I'm going to leverage that because a single gigabit per second connection isn't going to do it. Performance will be better. Also, it will be more real time in terms of the data reliability. So the drive pool takes in the data and then it kind of waits for you to be idle and then it shuffles it around. Whereas RAID will actually dynamically in real time be shuffling it to all the right places and RAID 6 can lose up to two drives before you lose any data as long as you throw a new one in there and rebuild the RAID before an additional two drives fail. Like RAID 5 I don't think is reliable enough because if one drive fails and then another one fails while you're rebuilding it then you've lost your data. But RAID 6 you can lose up to two. So that's why I want to go with RAID 6. Other advantages, I mean disadvantages are that you can't just dynamically throw drives in it and just kind of increase your storage. You have to actually plan it and build it properly but I don't need that much storage space anyway so it's not really the end of the world. Okay, that's just Twitter going crazy. Yeah, you have to have like all matching drives and stuff like that. It's kind of a pain. I think you just generally manage it better. However, the RAID card should help me because at least with a high-end RAID card you can change the RAID level on the fly if you want. You can add drives to the RAID on the fly if you want. You can remove drives from the RAID on the fly if you want so that will help a lot. So that's the migration plan here. And then I'm also going to be changing my motherboard because I need more than one PCIe slot too. There's a single PCIe 16x slot on this board right now. That's where I've got the RAID card plugged into. I'm going to be adding a quad-port ethernet card next. So I've already added one to my personal desktop. You can see right here I've got an Intel server NIC. It's got four ports on it there. That plus the Intel NIC built into my motherboard is going to give me up to, assuming I'm using Cat 6 cables and assuming I have a compatible switch, which is why this is sitting here, is going to give me up to 5 gigabit per second to anything else that is similarly connected using Teening or whatever it's called. So they all work together and you basically combine the theoretical maximum throughput of all the ports you're using together. So I'm going to take a new Z77 board that just has sort of all of the PCIe slots that I need and then I'm going to still use the low voltage Xeon assuming it will run in it. I think it should be fine. So I'm going to put this in there, use the Intel ethernet here, throw another one of those, we'll probably put it in this one so it runs directly off the PCIe controller on the CPU rather than down through the south bridge, and then I'll run the RAID card off this one and that will give me the expansion that I need to do my 5 gigabit per second connection. Now the requirement for that though is you have to have a switch that's ready. You have to have a manageable switch. So I'm going to be using this guy is like a couple hundred bucks and then there's even like a $25 MIR. So this is a 24 port gigabit smart switch and so what is it called? It's the ProSafe GS724T300NAS. So I'm really excited to try this out. So that means between my computer here and the Windows home server which is on the other side of that wall, I will have a 5 gigabit per second connection and then the rest of the house will just be gigabit and that will give me plus the RAID 6 so the additional performance I'm going to get from not using the ghetto drive pool should give me just screaming performance between those two PCs and then gigabit to everywhere else. So I'm very excited. So basically I'm going to try and find a cheaper power supply that I can put in here because it's a total waste of this thousand watt. I need a new boot drive. I need to get Windows home server v2 going. I need to upgrade the motherboard. I need to add the 4 port NIC and then I need to get some hard drives. So that is my project over the next little while. It's a bit more of a sort of it's a less sexy project than upgrading my personal PC but I just haven't had the time for a variety of reasons lately and this seems like more of a priority in terms of increasing my productivity. So that's what I'm working on. Thank you for checking out this update and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing, reviews and other computer videos.