New Server Part 2

Recovery & Build Phases

Building a PC is rarely a straight line; for me, it’s been a series of “one step forward, two steps back.” Driven by a mix of caffeine-fueled excitement and a touch of disorganized chaos, I’ve seated this motherboard three times now—and I’m still not quite done.

The first attempt was a classic mistake: I secured the board only to realize the I/O shield was still sitting on the table. After a brief struggle with those stubborn metal tabs, I finally coaxed it into place.

The second time I pulled the board, it was a matter of stability. I’d finally dug into the accessories box and realized I was missing a crucial standoff to support the corner of the board. But the real heart-attack moment came from the USB 3.0 front I/O connector. Every time I unplugged it, the plastic header housing pulled clean off the motherboard, leaving the pins exposed. By some miracle, I haven’t bent a single pin yet.

Round three was undone by my own perfectionism. I seated the board, looked at the cable management, and simply wasn’t thrilled. Right now, the build sits idle as I wait for the mail.

I’m taking a “safety first” approach for the final install. Once the Super 88 electrical tape and Kapton tape arrive, I’m going to flatten the cables and pin them down. My goal is to protect the wiring from solder spikes and heat, ensuring there’s zero risk of a short or board failure.

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While waiting for the tape to arrive, I’ve completely overhauled my storage architecture. I’ve decided to move away from OS redundancy in favor of specialized performance pools.

The Drive Lineup:

  • OS Drive (512GB SSD): Scavenged from another machine, this will host Proxmox, my ISO library, and container templates.
  • Performance Pool (NVMe): A dedicated ZFS pool reserved strictly for VMs, Containers, and Cache.
  • Mass Storage (HDD): Two 16TB drives and one 4TB drives are on the way from Amazon. 20TB usable pool of storage.

The Data Migration Plan:

  1. Initialize a new 16TB ZFS pool.
  2. Transfer data from the current 4TB drive to the new 16TB pool.
  3. Format the 4TB drive and marry it to a second 4TB drive for a secondary pool, or investigate joining them into the main data pool.
  4. I will connect a spare 2TB holding the VM configs and logical drives ready to import.

The hardware might be putting up a fight, but the vision for the ultimate home lab is finally coming together.