Tim On Computer Science

After a ten+ year hiatus, I built another (inexpensive) AMD Server machine. That first AMD machine cost less than $400. I didn’t quite match that cost, but I got pretty close.

The CPU and the RAM were $20 off each. I got unlucky on the CDROM drive and paid an extra $5 compared to the price 3 days later.

For the motherboard, I followed some bad advice, and paid extra for a board that had video out. The problem: the AMD FX CPU does not have built-in graphics. So I ended up needing a PCIe video card anyway. If I had noticed the bad advice in time, I would have purchased this Sata6 motherboard instead. Live, learn, and do your own double-checking.

Some facts on the CPU: it is currently #38 on PassMark [9,128] cpubenchmark.net. It is also the #1 AMD CPU on that list right now. Intel’s 3770K 3.5GHz is #27 and scores [9,596] and costs $310. The 4770K 3.5GHz is #17 and scores [10,154] and costs $350.

All product links are from the actual vendor.

I finally got around to building a highly reliable storage system. Currently, that requires two disk drives and ZFS. And ZFS, in turn, requires something other than Linux. I ended up with FreeNAS. With mirror (RAID 1), ZFS will “self heal” the other mirror on bad reads. With a normal RAID 1, when you lose a drive, the act of rebuilding the array could reveal a read error on the surviving disk. If that happens – blam – you’ve lost the entire RAID. Here is a pretty good article on the analysis as per RAID 5.

The new FreeNAS image requires 2GB of space for the OS image. It turns out that most of the 2GB SD Cards I have are about 40KB short of 2,000,000,000 bytes required. So I ended up putting the image on an 8GB card. Later, I found out that my 4GB HP USB Flash Drive works as well.

A word of caution about the USB drives and SD Cards – it has been hit-and-miss on whether the system will boot. Make sure you have lots of options available.

As usual, prices include taxes and shipping, and reflect discounts. All product links are from the actual vendor.

2018/Feb – The update to FreeNas 11 was kind of painful, and it was mostly my fault. One of the volumes had gotten to 95% full, and the FreeNas 11 import was using 120GB+ more space, which would not fit, so the import failed. Once it had enough free space, the “Save config from 8.3 then Upload config into 11.1” process worked fine. Also, before saving the 8.3 config, the minidlna plugin got removed (it is no longer supported in 11.1).

2018/Mar – Switched the case to the Rosewill RSV-L4500.