TS Terabyte Server

The Terabyte Server, which Jamie also called Teraserver, was the home server he built in early 2004. He announced it at the end of a post about putting gigabit networking in the house: “The next Geek Fest will be the installation of over a terabyte of disk in the home server.”

The build post gives three reasons: the music collection, five years of digital photos, and the third, which he called the most important: “it seems that it’s relatively easy now and I wanted to try it. (This is where I was wrong.)”

The plan was a 3ware Escalade 8506-8 RAID card and six Western Digital 200GB SATA drives. Four numbered “minor hiccups” followed. The card did not fit his motherboard, so he bought an Asus PU-DL server board, 1GB of ECC RAM and two 2.4 GHz Xeons. The Xeons did not clear the drive bays of his Antec case, so he bought a SuperMicro SC742T-550 chassis. The power connectors then came up six inches short, and the first extension cable he ordered was not a straight-through. With the right one, “the server roared (literally! 4 fans and 7 hard drives!) to life.” It held 1.4 terabytes of disk, about one terabyte usable. His verdict: “a terabyte isn’t reasonable yet for the average home user.”

Then came the music. By June 26, 2004 he had ripped and tagged nearly 1,000 CDs, then ripped, split and tagged his records too, and he called the project complete.

It also hosted thingelstad.com. Jamie rebuilt it over a weekend in January 2005, which took the site down, and filled all eight ports on the card: a RAID1 mirror for the system, about 800GB of RAID5, and a hot spare. The carrier only held seven drives, so the eighth was mounted in the case. Then it went back to the laundry room. “Man is this thing loud!”

By December 2007 he could buy one terabyte on a single disk at the Apple Store. He looked back on the build, which “cost a little over $3,000 and was painful,” and on the new drive: “Surely a lot easier than building a horrific box with 8 SATA drives. Ugh!”