Having problems with 2nd hard drive.

[oshunluvr]

... my wife hates the whirring of the fans ...

Me too, which is why I went with an Atom vs. a "full" CPU. It has a fan, but a very small and quiet one and the case has the same. In my situation, I put it behind my desk in my office. My water-cooled desktop is louder than the server.

Re. hard drives: I can heartily recommend the WD "Red" series for a server. My last HD purchase was a 2TB model. Cool and quiet.

[charles052]

Did you use RAID?

[oshunluvr]

I used to. mdadm raid is simple-simon, but now I strictly use btrfs. Even easier than raid and many more features.

My server has 2x1TB + 2x2TB drives combined using btrfs into two file systems of 4GB and 1.8GB each. Love it...