The primary driver of the refresh was my ASUS M3A78 Pro motherboard had finally stopped working. I purchased a cheap ASRock A785GXH motherboard as a replacement off eBay. My main requirements were a PCI-e 16x and PCI-e 4x slot and DDR2 and the ASRock fit the bill perfectly at $35. The PCI-e 4x slot was for an Intel Pro PT Quad port card that I had picked up off eBay.
I’m loving the Intel quad NIC. I can access multiple VLANs without any issues and it makes life easier trying administer different servers and connect directly to resources. Anyone who plans on doing any sort of VMs or network labbing should have a card like this, it stops me from having to constantly move cables in order to do what I want.
I also purchased 2x 3 TB WD RED drives and a 4TB Hitachi drive with the intention of upgrading my storage at the same time. With the new mobo, I could look into storage options other than ext4 because I would be making a fresh start. My primary choice was ZFS but it requires ECC memory which I wasn’t using. So I went with btrfs and put all the drives (3x 3TB and 1x 4TB) into one RAID 1 array.
I think btrfs is ok, but it’s has flaws. The first is my iowait on the CPU is much higher than before adding the new drives. Since I made a bunch of changes (upgrading to 14.04, adding new drives, new mobo, and a new drive format), it’s very hard for me to pin the blame on btrfs without additional data. What is even more frustrating is that due to the randomness of the errors, it’s very hard for me to pin down under what conditions the issues stem from so I can start tracking them down. What is even more strange is the disks get pretty good read/write speed (I’m doing a disk check right now and it’s showing ~200-250 M/s in iotop and the computer is responding perfectly).
I’m also liking Ubuntu 14.04. Since I was redoing the cabling on the motherboard and setting up btrfs, I decided to wipe the 12.04 and install 14.04. Really, I didn’t notice many differences. I am disappointed that there is a bug in Ubuntu 14.04 that prevents mounting of android devices via MTP. Hopefully it gets worked out shortly, too long have I had to use a windows computer to transfer files to/from my Nexus 5 cellphone. The computer is *nix, the cellphone is *nix, yet the google android developers refuse to let them talk to each other via an open standard!