Fileserver History

In the process of tracking our financial investment into owning and maintaining a file server, I have found it necessary to review and remember all of the details of our Fileserver's growth over the years. I decided to make a post of it, to go along with the Fileserver iteration list, for posterity's sake.

Our journey with the whole concept of a file server had fairly humble beginnings. Since building my first computer I had been convinced of the wisdom in storing all of my data on a drive separate from the windows installation drive. Back in the days of Windows 95/98 sudden computer reinstalls were commonplace as systems more quickly and easily became bogged down. Keeping my data separated was more utilitarian than anything - it served the function of allowing me to reinstall the computer without the hassle of doing file backups.

Though this seemed forward thinking to me at the time, the idea that my secondary hard drive might fail had not yet crossed my mind. And in 1999, that's exactly what it did. The 40GB Western Digital drive I had stored all of my precious data on ceased to function. I had no other backup. I felt foolish. Many years of writing had been consolidated into files stored solely on that hard drive, meaning I could not simply walk away from the catastrophe like I would had I merely lost something trivial like an mp3 collection. I needed to restore that data. So began a long and involved process which verged dangerously close to costing me more money than I could have possibly afforded. Eventually, the drive spun up enough to recover the most important bits of data before being given up for lost. My faith in computers was sorely shaken.

Happily, I had an acquaintance at the time who was more than a little familiar with all things computers. He had been managing complex data systems for schools and businesses for a few years at this point and his suggestion was to look into a RAID 1 setup. Though this might seem extreme in the context of the options available in our modern setting, it is important to understand that external hard drives, at that time, were both expensive and unreliable.

I chose my next motherboard accordingly. With a RAID setup in mind, I purchased an Asus A7V333 motherboard - one of the best motherboards I have ever had the pleasure of working with. This board allowed me to easily set up two 60GB hard drives in a redundant array on my own personal computer. I continued to store all of my data on this RAID with newfound confidence in its reliability. Years passed and the motherboard supporting our RAID moved from my computer to my new wife's computer where it continued to operate without incident.

From these humble beginnings came the idea to create a computer dedicated to data storage. The concept of building a file server was born partially out of a sister desire to create an HTPC for our new home. After much discussion, research and consideration, I approached the project with a degree of confidence that the newborn Fileserver would provide us with always on, secure data storage as well as a killer media center experience to replace our Tivo.

So, in 2004 when it came time to upgrade my wife's computer, we resolved to purchase a few extra parts and an extra case to house our new machine:

2004.06.23 Fileserver Born  .  $444.91
(Parts: Case, Drive Coolers, Aesthetic Accouterments, Heavy Duty PSU)

And then a month later, we decided to move forward with the HTPC side of the project as well as add some additional storage both to the Fileserver and my own personal PC in the form of two 200GB hard drives. I include the cost of both here now because the second one eventually moved from my personal computer into the Fileserver.

2004.07.27 Fileserver HTPC Parts Added  .  $452.37
(Parts: Netgear GA311 NIC, Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250, Asus Radeon 9200SE-T, 2x200GB HDD)

The Fileserver worked fantastically well in its primary goal. Sadly, however, the HTPC side of the project quickly turned into a dismal failure. Copyright restrictions and a lack of a truly satisfying free media center solution relegated these features to mistakes not quickly forgotten. WindowsXP proved a solid basis for running our setup and it provided solid, password protected shares to our entire apartment. It followed us faithfully as we moved from Chicago to Washington and I moved the second 200GB hard drive from my main computer into the Fileserver to accomodate our growing data needs. Everything moved forward smoothly until one of the 60GB hard drives failed on us.

Fortunately, thanks to the RAID, this was no major tragedy except for the fact that 60GB hard drives were no longer readily available. Finding no suitable replacement, we were forced to make an emergency purchase of two 300GB hard drives so we could rebuild our array. Sadly, I have no record of this purchase and cannot say for certain when this failure occurred. However, shortly afterward it became time to upgrade my main computer once more anyway.

Having filled one of the 200GB drives in the Fileserver with music and being forced to relegate portions of it to the second 200GB drive, I decided it was time to upgrade the Fileserver's storage once more. So, in 2009, when I upgraded my personal computer I also purchased two 400GB hard drives to replace the two 200GB ones in the Fileserver at the time.

2009.02.24 Media Drives Updated  .  $114.22
(Parts: 2x400GB HDD)

What happened next was a major discouragement. When I upgraded my personal computer, I decided to make the move to 64 bit computing and purchase a copy of Windows Vista. I found, much to my confusion and dismay, that Microsoft had chosen to drastically change the way networking functioned. So much so that my new computer could no longer communicate with the Fileserver. Certain this had to be a mistake of some kind, I dove into the file sharing options on the Fileserver head-first. I could not simply disable password protected file sharing as our (now old) router had wireless which could not be turned off. It bore too much risk to leave our data unprotected on our network in the middle of an apartment complex. And when our network was hacked into by one of our neighbors I became even more convinced of our need for data security.

All of my mucking about in the Fileserver's settings did it no favors, though, and eventually we lost the ability to communicate with it via any computer. The project quickly took a turn for the worse and I ended up abandoning it for quite some time, leaving us with no options other than to store our data locally and accept the fallout - whatever it might be.

I knew at this point what my next course of action must be. It was time to either regress back to WindowsXP on all of my computers or make the move forward into Windows 7 for every system on the network. This represented a huge financial investment, though, as both the Fileserver and my wife's computer would need to be upgraded to newer hardware to accomplish this goal. It was time to start saving our pennies.

Along with this goal of resurrecting the safety and security provided by the Fileserver came the resurrection of another, older and abandoned concept. With Windows Media Center now integrated into every copy of Windows 7, the proliferation of free and full-featured media center offerings like Boxee and XBMC, and the advent of Hulu combined with Netflix streaming video, I decided it was time to try to make another attempt at building an HTPC. This time, however, I was determined not to purchase any specialized hardware for that purpose. To that end, I obtained an HDHomeRun networked digital tuner, capable of being accessed by any computer looking for a television signal.

So, in February of 2010, fully one year after losing unfettered access to the Fileserver, we committed funds to upgrading every computer in the house:

2010.02.23 Fileserver Upgrade  .  $919.91
(Parts: 4x1TB Western Digital Green HDD, 500GB Western Digital Blue HDD, Win7HP, Asus M4A785-M, AMD Phenom II X3 705e "Heka," Coolermaster SilentPro 600W PSU, G.Skill Trident 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM)


Everything worked beautifully. The Media Center experience was as expected and, more importantly, we had access to all of our important files restored. Having lost the old Fileserver for a year had an impact on both of us, though. It reinstated bad habits, pushing us to store important files on our local systems once more and reinforcing data usage paradigms. Nevertheless, the new Fileserver was up and running like a rockstar.

Unfortunately, the new Western Digital Green hard drives were specifically designed not to work in a RAID and thus showed abnormally high rates of failure. Constant RMAs forced me to remove the hard drives from the system repeatedly until my frustration level peaked in October. It was time for another Fileserver upgrade. This time, the upgrade would focus on the usability of the system itself. To that end:

2010.10.10 Fileserver Ease Of Access Initiative  .  $418.55
(Parts: SNT 5x3.5@3x5.25 hotswap bay, SNT 3x3.5@2x5.25 hotswap bay, Highpoint RocketRAID 2310, 2xVantec NST-530SU External Enclosures, LG 22x DVD-RW)

With so much added space in the Fileserver, we began to finally take hold of the initiative to transfer our sizable DVD collection into the digital space for ease of access. The voracious appetite of video proved difficult for the Fileserver to handle in its current state and more space was added:

2010.11.14 More Video Storage Added  .  $199.98
(Parts: 2x2TB Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS)

This addition plus the mistaken replacement of two of the original 1TB HDDs with 2TB HDDs by Western Digital gave our Fileserver quite a boost in space - enough so that concerns of running out faded into the background. Alas, the story has not yet ended as, without warning, in December the system suddenly destabilized and caused the series of conundrums discussed in the other posts about the Fileserver. After finding a plethora of errors on the C: drive, I opted to replace it in the hope that this simple fix would solve all of the issues.

It did not:

2010.12.18 Replaced Maindrive  .  $50
(Parts: 500GB Western Digital Green HDD)

Further inquiry into the problem lead me to the belief that the power supply had failed. Typically, when a computer starts to have a wide array of unidentifiable issues, there is an issue with unstable power. It seemed entirely logical, however financial pressures prevented us from addressing the issue immediately. After a month of frustration with the system and plagued by the fear that this latest issue would once again reinforce our bad habits with data storage, I pushed to get a new PSU into the system sooner rather than later:

2011.01.11 New PSU  .  $189.99
(Parts: Thermaltake TR2 RX 850W PSU)

Initially, this seemed to fix the problem. The computer booted up and ran solidly for a couple days. It was not meant to last, though, and this latest setback brought me finally to the real issue behind the Fileserver's troubles: the motherboard. This fix would require significantly more from us financially and therefore could not be pushed as a solution prematurely. Having found ourselves in a delicate financial situation, my wife and I had to accept the hard reality that the Fileserver was down for the count. We shelved the project and moved on with life.

Happily, our absence from the Fileserver was relatively short-lived. After much research I determined a course of action which I believed to be the least expensive and most reliable solution to the Fileserver's problems. Sadly, DDR2 RAM was short-lived in the PC market, meaning that the RAM I had originally purchased for the Fileserver would not be able to be reused with the new motherboard I needed to get. This also meant buying more RAM. Another hitch was the lack of satisfying selection in motherboards on the market today. Finding a board with all the right features was more difficult than I had guessed.

Having settled on the motherboard as the root of the Fileserver's issues, I researched what could have caused it to fail so spectacularly. My findings convinced me that integrated video is worth staying away from. In fact, I am all but certain that it was the failure of the integrated video on the old Fileserver motherboard which caused all of the issues we dealt with. Because of this, I determined to purchase a video card as well, to run the HTPC side of things and help avoid any future problems of this variety.

All of this hardware added together was more expensive than we could simply throw about, but much less than I had feared. When we found some wiggle room in our finances, we purchased what we needed:

2011.03.08 Fileserver Fix  .  $252.85
(Parts: Asus M4A87TD Evo, G.Skill 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM, Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 1GB)


And that's the legacy of our Fileserver so far. As of right now it is running stably and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it continues to do so for years to come.


Total Financial Investment In Owning A Fileserver Over 8 Years: $3042.78
(which translates to $381/year)