So, if you're wondering where I've been and why I haven't updated GMUI for 20 days now (you're not wondering; don't worry), this would be why. I "upgraded" my computer and server.

And holy crap was it a challenge.

Here is the end result!

And the server:

Here was my previous server box:

Why I did it

I wanted to have a more portable, quiet, and small PC to use as my main workstation. I also wanted to expand my server to have more drives to handle more of my data (in RAID). So now I have a total of 9 drives in the server, of 10.5TB! (7TB of theoretical usable disk because of two RAID 1's)

I also wanted to have a beefier server. One that could handle serving my JIRA, GitServer, VM's, PC backups, storage space, and anything else I want to throw at it. An i3 in an ITX case wouldn't of worked.

Was it worth it?

Time will tell. I am planning on releasing some videos and maybe blogs on everything I did so I can share the points where I ran into some problems. And man, I ran into a ton of issues with this one.

This project came up when I noticed I was running out of space on the server, and I realized that I am serving websites and my own PC data on the same drive, which isn't any good. I was also paranoid about losing any disks, so I have redundant OS drives, redundant PC data drives, redundant website & movie server data drives, and finally a 4TB spare drive to copy over critical files every day as a secondary backup. I also have a UPS behind the server as well. On top of that, I use OneDrive for microsoft stuff, and dropbox for my own files. I also use iTunes match for my music library sync.

I think in the long run it will be worth it, but I think I am also going to recommend to most people to just use cloud services that can do all of this nowadays. I put over $500 into parts for the server upgrade alone, so you could definitely pay much less using cloud services to handle everything for you. However, after 2-3 years I may be getting my money's worth… What do you think about it?

Pitfalls

The server actually wasn't too bad. Followed all the recommended steps to do it, and backed up each disk to the 4TB before doing anything. Installed the RAID card, then put the drives on the raid card and assigned them to arrays. Let it run all the updating it needed to do.

The new PC, on the other hand was a bit of a nightmare. I've migrated my PC for the 3rd time now, which may have been why the drivers have gotten too messed up that the audio and network drivers would not function correctly half the time. I have a gigabyte motherboard that has some BIOS settings that are a bit more confusing than my MSI ATX board and AsRock board, believe it or not. There was no way to rollback the drivers and start fresh, so I ended up swapping the OS to my smaller SSD to do a fresh Win10 install to copy back after.

But to do that, I had to convert the drive to wipe out all the partitions and convert the drive to GPT, install it, and go through all of the settings and installations over again (except for the software I could handle through Chocolatey), and then copy data over manually for some apps, then copy the disk back over. Ugh.

Conclusion

This blog is just summarizing what I went through, but in reality it took a couple weeks to do all of this, which is a learning experience for me, but not the most fun imo. I just want to build software. So… maybe cloud services don't sound so bad now huh? Either way, I took a lot of pictures, video, and notes to cover the process and to give recommendations if someone else is thinking about doing something like I did.

Do you use your own hardware for your server? Would you prefer cloud-based solutions?