On 20 December 2017 at 23:21, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
OK, with the link you found on ebuyer https://www.ebuyer.com/770312-lenovo-thinkserver-ts150-70lv-pentium-g4400-3-... and I think the same machine here https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/p/1182461/lenovo-thinkserver-ts150-intel-pen...
and a PDF here https://www.serversdirect.co.uk/PDFs/70LV003EEA_2_3400225_Original.pdf?v=7
yes, similar machine. I believe the one I actually have is discontinued: Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 4GB Xeon E3-1225 v3 3.2GHz Tower Server. So a Xeon not pentium and came with 4GB ram. Chassis looks exactly like mine from the outside, wouldn't surprise me if it is the same tower.
Ebuyer has the "Official" disks, but they cost £Megabucks, so I am disinclined to use them. https://www.ebuyer.com/792385-lenovo-2tb-sata-6gb-s-3-5-hard-drive-4xb0g8875...
Did you use Lenovo or IBM disks, or generic ones?
I went for WD Red Nas 4tb drives. Seem pretty durable. Had a 3 or 4 yr warranty on them too. When one of them failed 3 yrs into its use, I simply asked for an advanced RMA which meant they shipped a new drive (free including postage from EU) ready for replacement before I sent the faulty one to a UK service centre (so I only paid Uk postage for this drive). Registration interface for WD drives is pretty good, and customer services were really good too.
Comments make mention of a drive holder/drive caddy that is not supplied with the machine. Does yours require these?
Physically there's space for 5 drives in mine, but some of them are adapted a bit, so the DVD drive space is one of them, you screw the drive into the back of that slot instead of a DVD drive. They're not 5 equal slots, more like a desktop machine adapting the spaces to accommodate the drives wherever they fit. But of course they did supply the screws and plastic rails, and some are easier than other to slot in. Enough SATA ports for all the drives in the motherboard itself.
Regarding the RAID10, I agree with everyone about backups. OS backups handled by duplicity nightly and data via rsync to offline drives manually. This setup was meant for read/write speed over gigabit ethernet and uptime. Wouldn't go back to anything else, but then again if it was for just media playback and a few file/mail/apache/etc servers it could definitely be an overkill. If you're used to a desktop machine and want durability, flexibility and expandability.. why not??