phea

November 30, 2021

On 12/25/2020 at 8:55 AM, Brockol33 said:

@phea Thanks for sharing and this looks so clean! I'm starting my first build this week too and its very similar to yours Define 7 XL, i5 10th gen etc. I'm wiring everything up and its just been pure chaos with my stock sata cables etc. Can you share the parts, tools, etc and how you made your custom cables? Seeing them in your build is inspiring me to give it a shot and clean all this cable mess up. Thanks in advance and the build seriously looks soo good.

No special tools, I took the right angle connecter from power sata adapters. It splices into existing cables. I do recommend a flat head to push down on the wire to get good contact. I found the sata cables on amazon for cheap

Also, i took recommendation not to group the SATA cables so closely and instead left them looser. I did get an error in the array but it was able to resolve it self.

9 minutes ago, Agamemnon said:

Beautiful clean build.

Do you know how much power the whole system is drawing?

Idle with (no HDD's spinning), windows vm and a handful of dockers running. 27watts.

Parity check (all HDD's spinning) 162watts.

October 8, 2020

5 hours ago, BillX said:

Super clean look. I also wonder the same question. Plus, is it safe?

From a non-technical standpoint, I can report that so far so good. Regarding if it is safe or not, I would have to defer to any electrical engineers. Here was my mindset going into the build

- Use a 12v single rail PSU

- Not go crazy with power splitters (ended up removing the connectors and adding it to the original as pictured). I figured the weakest point would be at an adapter/splitter.

- Majority of the disks will be spun down idle. Utilizing this server mainly for plex and I organized the structure so that a group of media (example season 1 of a show) to be on a single disk.

- Hopefully my punchdown technique of the power connectors is adequate.

Since there seems to be a lot of concern on safety, I found some info on the wire itself.

AWM STYLE 2468 18AWG 80°C 300V

Cable specifications:

conductors gauge (AWG) 18 material bare copper cord size (strands) 41 x 0.16 jacket material 80°C, 48P, PVC color black diameter (mm) 4.4 ± 0.10

electrical properties rated voltage (V) 300 rated temperature (°C) 80 rated current (A) 7 insulator resistance (Ohm/Kft) 2.5

operating temperature (°C) -10 ~ +80 resistance at 20° C (Ohm/Km) max 23.2 spark test (Kv) 3.0/4.0 humidity rating <75%

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

I'm not convinced the issue is crosstalk, but I AM positive that you can DEFINITELY create issues by bundling cables. I suspect the issue is more the extremely poor connection at the SATA end, where any misalignment can cause issues. If the connector is being pulled by the cable instead of being allowed to float free, it can create an angle between the drive and the connector, and when the drive vibrates and moves from thermal expansion the wires don't touch the pads on the drive solidly. This can cause CRC errors, and in extreme cases cause the drive to temporarily stop responding.

It doesn't help that the cable and connector design has gone through several changes, with some cables being incompatible with some drives, notably the retention mechanism that's supposed to help alleviate the issues in my first paragraph.

TL;DR, Don't bundle cables, allow them to relax near the drives so they don't pull on the connectors.

If someone can link to a study that proves crosstalk corruption in modern SATA cables is a thing, I'm definitely willing to learn, but all I can find are studies proving data corrupting crosstalk shouldn't be possible due to balanced signalling.

Looks like a custom cable set, should be easy to refit by splitting the existing cables into smaller sections and providing each section with a dedicated PSU feed.

I didn't know about crosstalk or bundling could be an issue. I just did some quick searches and found a lot of people talking about it as you said. I'm curious to see what symptoms would occur if it happened.

For example, i'm not noticing performance degradation as my parity rebuilds are averaging 180-220 MB/sec. I would be concern if there is any data corruption.

1 hour ago, jonathanm said:

@phea Your machine is super clean, looks amazing. Please don't feel attacked by all the criticizing posts, we all really do admire a clean build.

We are trying to give you some ideas for improving the long term stability of the system, so you don't start having strange issues that can be difficult to pin down.

You obviously put a LOT of time and effort into the build, we want you to have a long and successful run with it.

Quick question, I can't see where the last 4 SATA cables are connected? The motherboard only shows 6.

I appreciate everyones comments and feedback and I take it constructively whether positive or negative. So far i'm really happy with the build and unraid has been fabulous. Thank you for recognizing that there was a lot of time and effort put into this and I also want to make sure my investment lasts.

The remaining 4 SATA cables are actually right under the 4 that you see on top. However taking a second look, you really cant see that there are 8 cables running to the side from that angle.

October 7, 2020

Hi All - wanted to share my first Unraid Build. The Define 7 fit my criteria of having enough space and being quiet. The build was very easy and enjoyable. Only caveat was having to buy additional hdd mounts (I ended up purchasing more than i needed), it comes with 6. I currently have 10 hdd in place but you could have 11 vertically. Fractal designs give you options to mount the HDD all over the place, but wiring would be a headache. If you want more than 11 HDD, I recommend going for the XL. Happy to answer any questions.

FD-C-DEF7A-01

Intel i5-10400

GIGABYTE W480 VISION W LGA 1200 Intel W480

Cache - Intel SSDPEKNW010T9X1 665P 1TB - 2x

Array - WD Gold 10tb - 10x

Seasonic FOCUS Plus 650 Gold SSR-650FX