Pictures of Jeff's Computers

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11/3/2023  Video1 RAID5 array upgrade from 12TB to 20TB drives.  Server2 RAID5 array upgrade from 10TB to 12TB drives.

8/20/2023 Server2 RAID5 array upgrade from 12TB to 20TB drives.

2/22/2023 Video1 storage array upgrade from 8TB to 12TB drives.

12/11/2022 More  20TB and 16TB hard drive upgrades were completed.

9/5/2022 More  12TB and 16TB hard drive upgrades were completed, along with some 8TB and 10TB drive moves.

12/19/2020 Some additional 12TB and 16TB hard drive upgrades were completed.

3/20/2020 The final hardware upgrade was completed for the Sandbox server and Server2 was upgraded to a 12 core Ryzen 9 3900X CPU.
 

12/30/2019 Hardware upgrades have been completed on Video1, the Mezzmo server.  It also got new Highpoint 2840A RAID controllers and a Samsung 970 NVMe SSD.  The hardware is a mirror of Server2 except for a 3700X vs. 3800X Ryzen processor and 32GB vs. 64GB of memory.  Video1 won't be running virtualization.

10/24/2019 Hardware and software upgrades have been completed on Server2.  The new Highpoint 2840A RAID controllers are achieving over 9.5Gb/s of throughput across the ports on a card and across the PCIe 3.0 backplane.  

10/5/2019 Additional drive upgrades have been completed.  Also with windows 2008 R2 going end of support in January 2020 and AMD releasing their newest Ryzen hardware line I've begin upgrading the main servers.  Sever1 now has the latest ASUS 570 motherboard and a Ryzen 7 3700X processor. 

1/31/2018 Another 6TB to 12TB upgrade completed as well as a 4TB to 6TB upgrade.  Additionally the video1 server was upgraded from Windows 7 x64 to Windows 10.

12/15/2017  A 6TB to 12TB array upgrade was completed. 

1/11/2017  A 4TB to 10TB array upgrade was completed on Server2.  The total storage is now over .5PB.

11/5/2016  A 4TB to 10TB array upgrade was completed on the video server.

Here's a picture of the RAID OCE expansion for the new 10TB drives.  A 26TB to 68TB expansion.

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6/17/2016 Another 4TB to 8TB array upgrade is completed.

6/1/2016  A 4TB to 8TB and 3Tb to 4TB array upgrades have been completed.

5/8/2016  The drywall work and remodeling of the computer area is now complete.

4/20/2016 Recently completed 4TB and 6TB upgrades have increased overall storage capacity.

12/7/2014 The 3TB to 4TB upgrades are now complete for the two Norco 4224 chassis'. 

10/3/2014 The 3TB to 4TB RAID array drive upgrades continue and the new 36TB storage array is added to the Video1 server.

8/10/2014  The RAID controllers in Video1 were upgraded.  The 3 - 8 port Highpoint 2720 controllers were replaced with a 24 port single slot Highpoint 2760A card and then a 2711 was added to move the new external storage array from Server 2 to Video1.   Long term the single port Highpoint 2711 will be replaced with a 2722, which will allow 2 external 12 slot storage arrays to be connected to Video1.  Here are some before and after pictures.

5/13/2014 Another array in Server2 is upgraded to 4TB drives.  The 3TB drives will be reused in the future storage array expansion chassis.

4//30/2014  A new external 12 slot storage array is completed.  A Highpoint EJ340 16 port SAS expander is added to a Norco DS-12D storage chassis.

                            Before                                                                                                    After

3/4/2014 Additional storage has been added by migrating some 3TB drives to 4TB drives. 

August 7, 2013

The computers have been migrated to their new home and everything survived the move without any damage. 

May 4, 2013:  Some storage has been added recently. 

The current server specs are:

 Server1 is a unique server that runs VMworkstation with a number of virtual machines:

With all VMs running the Windows 2008 R2 host uses around 9GB of real memory and the CPU runs less than 10%.

February 16, 2012  The main server was moved to a Norco RPC-2212 case for extra storage.  The Norco RPC-2208 was then used as the new home for  the Sandbox test server.  The Norco RPC-3216 case was converted into a 16 slot storage array off the backup server.  This gives the backup server 40 total slots, 24 in the main case and 16 in the expansion chassis. 

December 19, 2012  The main server has been rebuild into a 2RU Norco RPC-2208 case.  The additional 2RU of rack space will be used for a storage expansion unit for the backup server.

January 15, 2012 - The 3216 Sandbox computer is now in the rack and will be valuable for testing future upgrades. 

January 7, 2012 - Both 4224s and the 450T now in the rack.  This completes this round of builds, except for putting the 3216 in the rack as a sandbox computer for testing.

Here's a couple of local file transfer test screen shots.  The maximum performance on the new video server was beyond 560Mb/s or 4.48Gb/s.

January 6, 2012 - The 4224 video server construction completes.

January 2, 2012 - Construction on the new video server 4224 begins.  The first step was to replace the 80mm mid-plane fan tray with a 120mm fan tray.

December 31, 2011 - The 4224 backup server gets installed in the rack.  The next phase is to upgrade the 3126 video server to a 4224 case.

November 2011 - This is the new backup server which is based upon a Norco 4224 case.  It has an FX-8210 8 core processer with 3 Highpoint 2720 controllers.  The arrays are 8 x 3TB, 8 x 2TB and 4 x 2TB.

July 2011 - This was the original computer build.  The top server is backup server which had a Norco 450TH case and 8 x 1.5T drives.  The middle server is the main server with a NORCO 450TH case and 8 x 1.5TB drives.  The bottom server is the video server which had 16 x 2T drives in a Norco 3216 case. The video server also had 2 Agility II 60GB SSD drives.

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