Although I've been 'boasting' about my Fileserver's new capacity for a few months now, the new drives weren't actually installed until last night.
I've had 4 x 250GB IDE Samsung Spinpoints sitting on my bedroom floor since almost Christmas it seems. But finding a good few hours to install, format, transfer, test and backup the drives is hard. Luckily, the Easter holidays has allowed me to finally 'upgrade' my Fileserver.
It still boasts most of the same hardware as before, but with a few additions (in bold):
- AMD Athlon XP 2000+
- 1GB (2 x 512MB) PC3200 DDR
- ACorp 7KT333 (Via) Motherboard
- ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB (powah!)
- Yeong Yang Cube case
- 1 x 80GB IDE Maxtor HDD (O/S)
- 8 x 250GB IDE Samsung Spinpoints HDD (4 x Data, 4 x Backup)
- 4 x Lian-Li caddies
- 2 x ATA133 PCI IDE Raid Cards
- 12 fans ranging from 40mm - 120mm
- and some other thingys
I ran into a problem that had me stumped for a few hours, as the 3rd and 4th caddy wouldn't pickup the drivers contained within them. But after removing and reconnecting all the cables, the problem seems to have sorted itself out.
8 x 250GB gives a raw total of 2TB. However, due to Windows and the whole bits/bytes thing, it's slightly less. But, I've now got 1TB (or there abouts) of Data storage - split into Documents/Downloads/Music/Video and 1TB (or so) of removable Backup storage, which takes a copy of the Data drives via batch files. I could have opted for a RAID setup, but I wanted as much storage as possible, with minimal problems.
The only side-effect of all this new storage, is that it's going to take the whole day to complete a full backup. Afterwards, I'll resort to incremental backups once a week, but my fingers and toes are crossed, in case I lose any data during this transition.