Got a home server to play with, Dell PowerEdge R710. The first thought is just use it to setup containers for things like database, elastic search, and embedding servers.

First problem I hit is that I don’t understand RAID. Quick talk with the seller and youtube video gave some info.

1. RAID 0: no redundancy, just split data storage over two disks. This improve speed because you can get data from two disks at the same time instead of one.
2. RAID 1: back up one disk completely on another disk. This have total redundancy, and I’m using it for OS drive now.
3. RAID 5: spread out the backup of 3 or more disk on four disk. So you have the usable space of 3 disk out of 4, or (n-1)/n, to create redundancy in case one disk fail. If you have more than one disk fail at one time, you are out of luck.
4. RAID 10: min 4 disk. Split the number of disk in two groups, group 1 is completely different from group 2, to increase speed. But the two disks on each group is completely backed up. It’s a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1.

Now I have a rough idea what RAID is, I decided to have RAID 1 for OS drive (2 disks), and RAID 5 for data drive (4 disks). Started in the utility, I found there is a one drive “missing”. And it somehow became foreign. Talked to the sales guy and decided to import. When the process hit 32%, one of the other disk (slot 5) start failing and show amber light. Now both drive slot 2 and 5 seems to be unusable. Emailed the sales and he said he will mail out two replacement drives because of the warranty. Yet have received the drives, and probably will need to contact again.

Set that aside, I decided to install Ubuntu 18.04 as the OS. Because I’m most familiar with it from machine learning, and I was hoping I could install a GPU card on it. First tried Ubuntu desktop version, but only got booted into GRUB prompt. Feels like boot drive wasn’t set up properly. Did research again, but did not find a working solution. I decided to install it again, and somehow it worked. Only I typed in my password incorrectly, and GUI is extremely slow, probably due to the dismal video card on these servers. Then flashed the Ubuntu Server version. Again had to install twice to make sure boot drive works. But then noticed it doesn’t recognize ethernet. So I used this method to fix it.

Now it have internet, I can update OS and install things. The other thing I really want to do is to move my Nvidia 1070 on here so I can do some machine learning. When I opened up the case though, I realized there is not going to be enough space to fit my 3 fan, 2 slot GPU card in it. In addition it doesn’t have a PCI 16 slot. I researched once again, and found some alternatives.

1. Solder/cut open the PCI 8 slot and fit the card in.
2. Get a PCI 16x raiser, but it only fit a 1 slot GPU like a Quadro 80.

Either way though, I would have to solder the power source onto the on-board power unit. 3 left as power, and 3 right as ground. I don’t own a soldering iron, so I’m putting it off. Another option is to wedge in some connectors into the power slot and loop the wire onto the wedge. I haven’t decided on either option, just because I’m not super comfortable doing these modifications yet. So for now I’m probably going to be sticking with training models on my desktop computer.