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| About this blog: Computers hate me. They really do. Every time I try to do something unusual like add new hardware, something is guaranteed to go wrong. I decided to start writing about my constant problems so that someone else might benefit from my experiences - or at least laugh at them! |
I don't recall ever seeing so many of the "critical" SMART values being higher than zero on a failed drive. This one is a brand new Western Digital RE3 1TB drive, installed in a server I've just ordered in the USA. When setting up mirroring it was obvious there was something very wrong: the logs filled with errors about timeouts, and it eventually stopped responding completely. After a reboot I was able to run smartctl to query the SMART values and determine that the drive was also admitting it had issues.
The last 3 USA servers I've commissioned have all had drive problems which required at least one replacement. I am so freaking jinxed!!!
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April Fool's!
No, really, I won a 1RU IBM xSeries 305 server (P4 2.8GHz, 256MB RAM, 40GB and 140GB IDE drives, dual gigabit ethernet) on ebay for $AUD61. I didn't have exact change so the seller very graciously accepted a $50 note and some gold coins. I offered to paypal the difference but he didn't want to hear about it.
I periodically make token bids on such auctions, never really expecting to win them, so this was a nice surprise.
Although it's in good working order I've done a few things to it...
0) Gave it a thorough clean. There was a LOT of dust inside and one of the rear blower fans had seized because of this. It was producing a fair bit of heat.
1) Replaced 4 x 40mm 10,000RPM fans (what a racket) with something a few thousand RPM slower, and much quieter. This server won't be living in a hot rack inside a warm data centre so it doesn't need extreme cooling. Cost: $70
2) Replaced the seized blower unit with a slightly larger fan that fits into an adjacent PCI slot. Quoted RRP for the official IBM part is a staggering $USD150, or roughly 4 times what I paid for the entire server! Instead, I paid $12 for the aftermarket PCI blower.
3) Replaced the hard drives with two 120GB units I have as spares (so I can set up a RAID1 mirror). Cost: $0
4) Purchased 4 x 256MB ECC RAM sticks off ebay (original IBM part, second hand). Cost: $24.95 including delivery
5) Unfortunately the CPU socket is not 775 pin, so a P4 is pretty much the best processor available for this socket type. Doesn't seem to be worth upgrading, although a 3GHz CPU that supports hyperthreading could be of use...
Total cost: $162.95
A 19" rack to properly install it in: $$$. That's for another day. :-D
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UPDATE: The RAM doesn't work in this machine, so I'm still limited to 256MB. I also installed a PCI SATA controller and two 320GB SATA drives I had as spare. Although the SATA drives are measurably faster I did it more for future compatibility reasons - if a 120GB IDE drive fails I may have problems getting a replacement quickly...
I wasn't even sure that the SATA drives would work in this machine since the BIOS only allows you to select "Hard Drive" in the boot menu, rather than the specific drive you wish to boot from. (If you mix up your boot and data drives you have to pull them out and physically swap them over. I'll still need to swap drives if the first one fails, since it won't try to boot from the second, but at least it's now just swapping a SATA connector.) Luckily FreeBSD detected the controller and drives just fine, and although the BIOS complains about a non responding PCI card and an IDE error it still boots successfully. Yay!
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