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March 25, 2005

DIY Raid First major upgrade...

Well I got all the parts for my next 2TB upgrade and installed them last night. I have got to say that the installation of a removeable disk cage, disks and a RAID card was WAY easier than the whole box itself. Here is the blow by blow...

1:30pm opened the case (after unplugging everything of course). I have an anti-static wrist strap but didn't bother to get it. I was sitting on my rubber work-out mats in the work-out room which work great as anti-static mats. The SuperMicro case has already 7 removeable drive bays in the bottom of the tower. The top is three open 5.25 bays and one CDROM. If you count from 1-4 from top to bottom of the 5.25 slots, the CDRom was in 3. The SuperMicro case I have for 5 new drives fits in 3 5.25 slots, so I have to move the CD rom up or down to fit in the new drive cage. Removing the space savers is a dream in this case because they only need screws on the side of the case that opens, the other side is a plug rail thing. Removed the plugs, disconnected the CDROM, removed it.

1:40pm tried to fit in the new Drive Case (Supermicro (Beige) 5 Bay Hot-Swapable SATA HDD Enclosure, MODEL CSE-M35T-1). The downside of the cool one sided screws is that the case has rails that the 5.25 inch bays slide on. These rails stick in about 1/4 inch on each side. The Drive Case doesn't have slots for rails and requires the full case opening for the full three bay height. After a little inspection, it was clear that CASE MODIFICATION was needed. The rails had been simply stamped out and bent down from the overall case. I tried bending them back flat, but the metal was too strong and there was not enough room for leverage or to really swing a hammer. (did I just sayswing a hammer in case?)

1:54pm Thinking how to remove the rails without too much pain. Can't see how to remove the subcase they are in from the overall case.

2:00pm. Hammer failed (not enough clearance). Pliars bending down the rail failed (metal too strong, not enough leverage). How bout metal shears to just cut the rail off? Ah, that is the ticket. But I didn't have any metal shears, so I get out some wire cutters. Not really alot of leverage, but they work in 1/4 inch increments.

2:25pm 25 minutes later and three whacked knuckles later, the rails are gone and there is plenty of room for the new Drive CAse. There is alot quite a bit of blood in the case (oops). . A little spit and elbow grease got the blood off the case and a couple band-aids stopped the flow from the knuckles. A dead weight hammer gets the drive case to fit into the new hole. Screws bend the case back together. Re-installed the CDrom in bay 4. All looks peachy.

3:00 leave the project for a workout
8:30 started up again. Put in all the drives. New Egg shipps OEM drives just in the anti-static envelope. This s great because for RAID you don't need all the other crud that you get with Retail drives. I already got a set of SATA cables with the RAID controller AND with the Drive Case! Way too many extras. I have bags and bags of drive screws too. The SuperMicro removable drive bays are a dream to install and the backplane takes the drives like a snap. Easy sleazy.

9:00 start installing the 3Ware. Of course I didn't bother to read the directions. If I had I would have read the part about attaching the sata cables to the card before installing it, but doing it after was not that bad. I had to unplug the game port card from the motherboard because that cable wend across the PCI slot I was going to use for the 3Ware, but the cable had enough room to go over the card so no problem. It took a little wiggling to get the card into the slot as it can work in PCI or PCI Express, so there is an extra set of connectors hanging out.

9:25 card is in, installed all cables. Had to look at the card manual to remember which was 0, 1, 2, etc. and connect them to the right drives in the Drive case. There was not enough room in the case after the card was in to see the labels on the connectors. Power supply had plenty of power for Drive case. Plugged that in. The 3Ware had lots of warnings about installing a backup power supply onto the card (just trying to upsell me), but I didn't do that and they warn you 100 ways from sunday.

9:45 plugged in power, crossed my fingers and rebooted. During boot I get a "do you want to install 3Ware Bios" for about 5 seconds then the computer boots. Just fine into Windows. But no 3Ware. it went by too fast. Re-boot and go into install Bios. Simple set-up the BIOS comes off the card I guess. Didn't need the CDROM. Choose Raid 5. The BIOS started to initialize the drives (write zero to every register), but I stopped that since it would have taken hours.

9:50pm rebooted, goes straight into windows. In Storage manager, there is a 1.54TB drive. Wow, cool! I say format it into Drive F and mount NTFS. Starts formatting and off to bed.

7:00am Drive is formatted, initialized and healthy. I start copying music and stuff there. Runs like bob's your uncle. No problem.

This upgrade was WAY easier than I had though. The physical part was harder actually getting the drive case into the tower, but the software part was a snap. the 3Ware even supports 64bit XP so when I install that i will be able to keep it. The real test comes when I have any kind of failure. Maybe I will pull a drive just for kicks. Well, now I have over 3TB of active RAID. Now I gotta fill it up....

Posted by Martin at March 25, 2005 10:13 AM

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