The Investment

Due to the recent complete failure of my server, I’ve decided to plot of some of the purchases I need to make in order to secure my storage space a little more (and to make my server able to take over the world a little bit more, thereby helping along my plans for world domination). Amaretto, the name of my server, hasn’t had a proper upgrade in quite a while, and is in need of some new parts in order to ensure its well-being.

Due to the massive costs associated with building a server, I’ve built the server in small pieces rather than just dropping all the money at once. The system started off as a 500GB hard drive and a $15 case. I slowly added more hard drives (3 more), then upgraded the case twice (first to a Cosmos 1000, and then to a Norco RPC-4020) to deal with my expanding storage needs. Now, my motherboard has hit its limit in terms of SATA drive slots, so it’s time to start looking at larger hard drives and a RAID card.

On the recommendation of a number of trustworthy sources, I decided to go for a 3Ware RAID card which will handle an additional 4 drives and will get me properly started on my new RAID. The choice if hard drives is still up for grabs, though.

Because I will be using the drives in a hardware RAID, I will be buying RAID edition drives, which cost significantly more. Although I would normally go for a Seagate drive, they currently offer the worst warranty on all drives: a measley 3 years. On top of that, they are also the second-most expensive. Instead, I’m leaning towards the Samsung F1 RAID drive. Not only is it the cheapest, but it also has a whopping 7 year warranty. The user reviews were also promising and nobody had any serious problems with them.

All of that will set me back about a grand, so it will have to wait until I have paychecks coming in. Next purchase is a new motherboard and CPU, but I’ll talk about that another time.