A 45drives.com storage server can be customized in ways not shown on the web site (see previous message). This will require a conversation with an account manager. If you introduce yourself as a prospective purchaser of a custom Storinator, they will work with you to quote a price for the particular configuration you want. Not sure if mentioning my name will help. :-) I have had a number of calls and e-mails with the Storinator Project Manager, Stephen MacNeil. As you might expect of someone in his position, he's very easy to talk to. He'll almost certainly assign you to an account manager. Mine was Allan Hillier. Together Allan and I navigated through some unusual problems successfully. Some background: My original first-generation Storinator was built with nine 5-way SATA port expanders. This gave a motherboard with at least nine SATA ports the ability to connect to forty-five individual drives. Not surprisingly, the performance of that first-generation system left a lot to be desired. About a year after I bought my Storinator, they announced a second-generation design based on Rocket 750 host adapters, each of which could connect to 24 SATA drives. I ordered a kit to upgrade my Storinator. Unfortunately it was a very complicated process -- especially the routing of a LOT of wiring in the payload storage bay. To compound that problem, a home renovation project deadline arrived before I was done. My Storinator had to go into storage -- supposedly climate controlled -- before I could get it running again. When I got it back, nothing worked. I wrote to Stephen MacNeil and he offered to repair it at the factory for what I thought was a fair price. When they got it, they found what they called "rust" on the motherboard. So much for "climate controlled" storage. In addition to the other charges, I now had to replace the motherboard, CPU, and memory. (Given a choice, I really preferred an AMD-powered motherboard to the Intel-powered motherboard from 45drives.com's web site. As you probably know, Intel server CPUs have hardware security vulnerabilities that cannot be mitigated without severe performance degradation. AMD CPUs have similar vulnerabilities, but to a much lower degree.) I found what I wanted at Newegg.com, but because Newegg Canada and Newegg USA are two totally separate companies and do not share accounting systems, Newegg USA had to ship the parts to my home in Illinois. I had to privately re-ship them to 45drives.com in Canada. A UPS clerk messed up and coded the order in such a way that Canadian customs was alerted. It took over ten days to convince UPS that American parts shipped to Canada to make warranty repairs on an American-owned server were not subject to Canadian customs. The custom motherboard parts I chose were: SuperMicro makes excellent motherboards, and the H11SSL-I-B is no exception. It's an ATX board packed with lots of features. It accepts the second-generation 7002 EPYC server CPU. The 7232 model with 8 cores and 16 threads may be out of production already, so you may need to select another model. Note that the 7232 is the least capable of the 7002 (Rome) series. A storage server doesn't need CPU power. It needs disk I/O power provided by the SATA host adapters. 45drives.com base model servers come with 8GB of memory. Because I was planning to use the ZFS filesystem, and because ECC DDR4 2666 memory is rather cheap these days, I bought 32GB. Later I discovered that the H11SSL-I-B motherboard prefers to balance at least four parts across its eight memory slots, so I may be purchasing 32GB more memory. When the parts finally arrived in Sydney, Novia Scotia, their rebuild got underway. About two weeks later they announced it was ready to ship my Storinator back to Illinois. Would it surprise anyone that FedEx, like UPS before it, screwed up and got American customs involved? It took me another week to pry it loose from FedEx. The shipping box was in remarkably good shape, especially considering the same one was used to ship to and from Canada. When I removed the top cover over the front motherboard compartment, I was surprised to see all three PCIe-16 slots were filled by LSI 9305 SATA host adapters. I called Allan Hillier about this because I had planned to install a Gigabyte Geforce GT 1030 video card. The motherboard has a VGA video port, and I no longer had a VGA monitor. Allan told me they had to replace my two Rocket 750 host adapters with the three LSI boards because no CentOS 8 drivers were available for the Rocket 750. Another unexpected expense. Fortunately, our local Micro Center had a 21-inch Lenovo monitor with both HDMI and VGA inputs on sale for about $70. While I was there, I also picked up a refurbished Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse for about $15. More about that later. With almost all the hardware in hand, the next step was to install the CentOS 8 operating system. I'll cover that in the next chapter(s). --Doc Savage Fairview Heights, IL
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