more home server disk

I blogged almost 3 years ago about my home server upgrade. The thing has been running very reliably ever since, but I am running out of disk space again. So, time for another upgrade – disk only though this time. Notice the pattern?

* October 2004 – purchase Shuttle home server with 2x 200GB disk (200GB useable)
* May 2007 – upgrade to 2x 500GB disk (500GB useable)
* September 2009 – upgrade to MSI Wind with 2x 1TB disk (1TB useable)
* June 2012 – upgrade to 2x 2TB disk (2TB useable)

Looks like my upgrades are roughly 2.5 years apart. Interesting!

I bought one Hitachi HDS723020BLA642 (that’s model ’0f12115′, a 2TB SATA3 drive with 64MB of cache). Well, actually I ordered model ’0S02861′ which is SATA2 and only has 32MB of cache, but for some reason Amazon shipped me the faster one. Ah, well, I’m not complaining. The other drive is a Western Digital WD20EARX (that’s also 2TB SATA3 drive with 64MB of cache).

It’s worth noting that the two 1TB drives that are being replaced (WD10EADS-00L) have been rock solid over the past 2.75 years, despite a *lot* of data being written to them (nightly backups of more and more servers, which is also why I was running out of space…).

So now I have two SATA3 drives in a system that is SATA2 only. That’s too bad. On the other hand, this machine now has 10x the amount of disk space that its first incarnation had, back in 2004. Nice!