I typically spend more time playing with my little home enterprise data center over the winter when weather precludes other activities. This past winter has seen more system work than usual due to a number of factors, mostly hard drive breakage. The legacy SCSI storage subsystems are almost gone now, with only 1 remaining. They are just too finicky and difficult to maintain these days. The old PC’s represent the bottom tier of our hierarchical storage system. One of them (4 presently in rotation) gets an incremental data backup from the online NAS once every 1, 2, 3 or 4 months, so the oldest copy will always be between 3 and 4-months old. My data preservation scheme will be near perfect if I ever remember to work in an offsite 6-month tape cycle with Carolyn.
I was saving the last system needing attention for the Debian 9 release, but as usual they are taking their damn good old time with it. With spring here now, I decided to go ahead and put the RC2 release on it after getting tired of waiting. This guy has been refreshed with a new combo consisting of 2 Raid5’s for the root and data file-systems. An SSD has tmp and swap on it. The 10-year old Abit IP-35 Core2-Quad Intel machine ends up with 9 drives, 8 gigs of RAM and no SCSI in it this time around. Despite it’s age, it should nevertheless run very well as configured.
The coolest thing about this particular PC is the video subsystem, partially shown in the 1st pic above. That low-profile Nvidia card started life in an HP Pavilion 11 years ago. It was a premium upgrade for the Pavilion I ordered from HP at the time. It’s fan went bad at some point, but fortunately it got noisy before failing completely, so I was able to save the card. It’s been re-animated in the IP-35 with a cobbed-up dual fan setup as shown. The only new part needed for this build was an additional 4-port SATA controller.