WeeboTech

Cross post from another thread. I'm only adding it because some of the performance tests and recommended devices. FWIW, I got my two N54L's running today with ESX and unRAID. I found I had to use the -z switch to make the RDM files/links to the .vmdk. Once I did that it worked with lsi sas then switched over the pvscsi without issue. I did find some interesting tidbits with the N54L and speed. I have a Startech PEXESAT322I PCI-Express x1 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0Gb/s) 2 Int/2 Ext SATA Controller Card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816129101 This card supports SATA III. I had the sandisk external raid unit set up with 2 3TB Seagate 7200 RPM drives. Native unRAID did a read test clocked at 230 MB/s under ESX unRAID did 170MB/s with the LSI SAS controller and 230 MB/s with the PVSCSI controller. Just something to think about. I did a whole assortment of speed tests with the N54L. I found the Startech controller to be good for single drives, but a SIL3132 to be good for multiple drives on a PMP device. I'm also using the Addonics ADSA3GPX1-2E PCI Express eSATA and SATA II 2 Port eSATA II RAID Controller http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816318005 I found this to handle the PMP smoother. It seems the silicon image drivers multiplex drive access smoother then the Startech ASMEDIA ASM1061. While the startech handles single drive speed the fastest, the PMP speed of multiple drives at the same time was abysmal. SIL3132 DD read tests of 4GB on all drives brought it down to about 33MB/s for all drives at the same time. Actually that's not too shabby. Single drive speed was about 120MB/s never really higher no matter what model of drive I used. ASMEDIA ASM1061 DD read tests of 4GB on all drives brought it down to about 10-20MB/s on various tests for all drives at the same time. Single drive speed maxed at 170MB/s for the newer seagate 1TB platter drives (3TB and 2TB). with a Samsung PM 840 PRO I was getting 350-420MB/s read tests. The interesting point about the SIL3132 is that for a single drive, you get max speed, for 2 drives, you get half speed, for the drives you get 1/3rd, then down to 1/4th. Seems appropriate. With the ASMEDIA ASM1061, I saw big blocks of data being serviced for one drive.. then move on to the next drive, then onto the next, and so on. I've yet to do an analysis of how it affects parity generation or checking. I still see myself using the ASMEDIA ASM1061 for the top two drives which are going to be dedicated to ESX. Samsung PM 840 PRO 256GB for ESX data store and a Seagate 2TB 7200 RPM for it's backup. I may change this if I find the Samsung to be so reliable that the spinner is unnecessary.

I like these SANS DIGITAL TR4UTBPN 4Bay USB 3.0 / eSATA Hardware RAID 5 Tower RAID Enclosure (no eSATA card bundled) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111149 I'm sure there could be better ones. In my case I like having and internal power supply. (no blocks, just standard PC style power cord). The option of plugging a drive in without trays. The ability to use Port multplier with JBOD or hardware raid, concat,1,0,5,or 10. I have one in RAID10 mode and another in jbod mode. Although I not tested PMP capability in JBOD mode under unRAID, the drives did show up individually in JBOD mode under ESX 5.1 (but let me double check and verfiy that again). In my Micro server I had two controllers. 1 startech, and one SIL3132. I did test the PMP capability using the eSATA port on the back of the server and ESX nor unRAID saw all drives in JBOD mode. It could require a load of the modified bios. An original unmodified machine did not have PMP capability of the eSATA port (yet). In any case you could take smaller drives, RAID10 or RAID5 them and use that as a vmfs DATASTOR for esx.

I can confirm this ram works in the N54L. Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT102464BA1339 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148466 There were posts about it, i bought it, it worked. I have two machines with it. As far as, will be be useful? Well you have to determine how busy the machine is. With the right kernel tunings, the large ram and buffer cache come into play and you can move small files to the machine at very high speed. Granted you have to retune the kernel a bit, but I was getting high transfer speeds on small writes for a burst. Good when moving lots of MP3 files or torrents. You also can consider how cheap ram is these days vs what could come around the corner next year. 4GB is enough for an unRAID server, anything more is cache enhancement. I'm running ESX 5 on my machine. If you plan to run ESXI, go for the most you can afford. When I'm not running ESX and just unRAID, my unRAID usage is very fast. FWIW, I use these in the top bay. ICY DOCK MB971SP-B DuoSwap 5.25" Hot-Swap Drive Caddy for 2.5" and 3.5" SATA HD/SSD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994143 SYBA SY-MRA55006 5.25" Dual Bay Mobile Rack for both 2.5" and 3.25" SATA HDD, Plus 2 USB 3.0 Port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998184 The ICY DOCK is well made, but I do not like how the drive is exposed a bit when you put a drive in. The SYBA has a door that closes. It's not as sturdy, but looks nicer then the edge of a drive showing. So you can fit a 3.5" drive and a 2.5" SSD in the top bay. You will need a Molex to SATA power cable. You will need an SATA cable from motherboard to top bay and an eSATA to SATA cable to route from the back. Frankly, I decided to go with another controller instead. StarTech PEXESAT322I PCI-Express x1 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0Gb/s) 2 Int/2 Ext SATA Controller Card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816129101 I plan to use two controllers and put each drive and each eSATA unit on it's own card. But for now I have one drive on the motherboard and the other drive on this controller. On one of the other machines I'm using a SYBA-SIL3124 PCIe controller which gives me 2 internal and 2 external ports. newegg doesn't have it anymore. I had to score it off eBay. Power-over-eSATA II + Internal SATA II 4-port PCI-e Controller Card with Low Profile Bracket http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=844&currentPage=0

I'm using this with the double twin in my N40L. It is a tight fit in mine but I got it to work. Thanks it! Thanks!

Two months older news now, than when I tried telling you ... Have you tried plugging the SansDigital into the MicroServer's eSATA port? [surprise!! ] Probably will, but performance (parity check, etc.) might be yucky. Even there, you will be limited to about 120 MB/s total bandwidth with the PM enclosure. The SiI3132 has a bogus transfer rate limit of ~120 MB/s (even though it is PCIe x1 v1, and should be able to get 180-200 MB/s). I forgot.. I've been so buried in life after Sandy recovery.

How do you have them attached? I was thinking of using the SANS DIGITAL external eSATA/USB units to attach more drives along with SIL3132 controllers that do PMP. I have an Adaptec 1430SA in mine and the extra drives (apart from the 6x 3.5") are: 2x 2.5" (internal) 1x 3.5" (external eSATA with its own PSU) With all these drives attached (6x 3.5" + 2x 2.5"), the Microserver PSU is maxed out. Note that you can apparently use a port multiplier on the eSATA port: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4727-successfully-enabled-port-multiplier-on-esata/ WOW that is excellent news. I'll have to test if unRAID can support the PMP capability. At the very least a SIL3132 or SIL3134 with eSATA should do nicely. I would end up with about 13 drives. 5 internal, 4 port SANS Digital box. I doubt I'll do it, but I'm looking at options since I lost my 20 drive beast and I'm not sure I want to build such a big server anymore. Good reading there at that link, plus the hard forum link. Thanks for posting.

How do you have them attached? I was thinking of using the SANS DIGITAL external eSATA/USB units to attach more drives along with SIL3132 controllers that do PMP.

I remember reading in one of the threads related to the microserver that someone was using a mesh blanking plate. Can anyone provide a link to a product that will work with the nexus double twin? I'm going back and forth with the idea of 2 3.5 drives in the top bay or 1 3.5 & 1 2.5. I'm using these two products for now. SYBA SY-MRA55006 5.25" Dual Bay Mobile Rack for both 2.5" and 3.25" SATA HDD, Plus 2 USB 3.0 Port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998184 ICY DOCK MB971SP-B DuoSwap 5.25" Hot-Swap Drive Caddy for 2.5" and 3.5" SATA HD/SSD http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994143

I would love a better bios, just bought an N54L recently.

on my N54L with RC8a and without the tweeked kernel model name : AMD Turion(tm) II Neo N54L Dual-Core Processor real 0m44.619s user 0m44.300s sys 0m0.110s root@unRAID:/tmp# grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo cpu MHz : 2200.000 cpu MHz : 800.000 root@unRAID:/tmp# grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo cpu MHz : 800.000 cpu MHz : 800.000 root@unRAID:/tmp# grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo cpu MHz : 800.000 cpu MHz : 2200.000 When I get a chance I'll install the tweaked kernel and retest.

For further discussion sysctl vm.highmem_is_dirtyable=1 seems to have a positive effect w write speed http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=25431.msg221288

I did, it didn't cost all that much to add 2 more eSATA ports. I purchased another card from syba that has 4 ports, 2 internal, 2 external. This way the top 2 drives have full speed without installing a hacked bios. I'm not sure if it's esxi compatible yet, but I'll work on it in the future. It's a SIL3124, in addition to the SIL3132 card. I may try to score an ARC-1200 for the internal drives since I know it's compatible and I have to extract data from an Areca array anyway.

I have not 'yet' but plan to. Sometimes I max out the machine just so I don't have to do it later on. There are many times in the past I did not max things out and it became hard to find parts. With the newer CPU and extra ram I plan to have ESXi a slackware dev environment and an XP instance for utorrent. (either that or put it on my laptop). FWIW I'm getting excellent read speeds with the newer Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM drives. They have consistantly outperformed my expectations by leaps and bounds. At least for the preclearing step. I'll be posting benchmarks as I test the two drive setups for parity speeds and write speeds. This should be an interesting comparison. What are the speed differences from 5400 rpm parity to 7200 rpm parity. Any suggested benchmarking I should do? I was planning to put 4 drives in the array. Testing with a 5400 RPM parity drive, then a 7200 RPM parity drive.

1366x768. It's made for VGA, HDMI and MHL, Battery or USB Power. Audio input too.

For those interested, I just purchased a N54L. I'm able to see 16GB of ram with the following chips. Crucial 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT102464BA1339 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148466 I get 4392.57 bogomips I also installed this unit up top so I could swap drives in an out fast. SYBA SY-MRA55006 5.25" Dual Bay Mobile Rack for both 2.5" and 3.25" SATA HDD, Plus 2 USB 3.0 Port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817998184 I'm using an addonics SIL3132 card for external eSATA access to a Sans Digital PM Unit. I plan to swap it out with a SYBA SD-PEX40031 so I can use the internal SATA ports for the upper two bays. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124038&Tpk=SD-PEX40031 We'll see how it goes. In the mean time I am preclearing 4 drives simultaneously. They seem to be running at max speed. Two of the drives are 3TB 7200 RPM Seagates - ST3000DM001 I was getting 170MB/s on the first 1TB of the drive, now I'm at 155MB/s. For the Hitachi 3TB 5400 RPM drives HDS5C3030ALA630, I started at 130MB/s and I'm at 115MB/s after the first 1TB. Nifty lil machine. The monitor I have is the GeChic 2501. It has all sorts of cool features. GeChic On-Lap 2501M 15.6” LCD Monitor with built-in battery. It supports HDMI, MHL and VGA output. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0V10H35673 Since my new apartment is much smaller then the old one, I have to get creative about how many monitors and how long they will be connected. This puppy is battery and/or usb powered with a VGA adapter MHL and HDMI adapter. I'm using a DELL Bluetooth keyboard until everything is stable and I no longer need to access the console.

Just got the N54L in the other day. Thanks for the tips on the 6 drive upgrade. Will have to check it out. I decided to go with all 3TB drives. 7200RPM parity, 7200RPM disk 1, 5400 RPM Disk 2,3. Will be interesting to see the speed variances when comparing models.

One job may be having more priority then the other. Although you would think the kernel would schedule them evenly, any form of buffering could impact that. Look at the syslog to see if any of the drives are reporting issues, that would definitely slow it down. There are other situations that could affect it, Current use of machine, how the controllers are mapped and where they are in regards to the bus. Some SATA ports on the motherboard have a high bandwidth. Some PCIe slots are behind other types of controllers. It's hard to estimate what it should be without knowing the server's configuration and how the motherboard maps the slots and controllers.

I would much rather prefer to have unRAID check that the GUID is connected rather forcing it to be mounted on /boot. This way if it does have format issues, you can still leave it connected while your machine runs. Possibly booting from the cache or a partition on the cache drive.

can you access via IP i.e. \\192.168.1.2\ (or whatever the tower/unraid IP is)

20 drives in a CM Stacker 810.. but if you do some kind of rigging, you can fit about 3-4 drives internally on the floor of the case. I bet something like this could fit in the bottom of the case if nothing blocked the the hieght.. i.e. empty motherboard slots at the bottom. http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-HDDRACK5-5-Bay-Organizing/dp/B001LF40KE or even http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993002

Yes. I have the CM Stacker 810 with 4 Supermicro 5x3's. It fits however I had to remove the top usb/switch interface and I had to really jam one of the 5x3's into the front. I dunno if I'll ever get them out again. <grin>. I did not have to bend any tabs since there are none in that case. Also, if you do not put in a second power supply you can retrofit a few extra drives at the bottom of the case near the bottom PSU area (if you put the PSU on top).

I like the idea of links and pics

This should probably be in the Wiki with a link back to this thread for discussion.

Excellent review PeterB, very informative and a really handsome rig too!

Those are nice. I like them with what looks like a replacable 80MM fan. I know the 5in3's supposedly ran a lil hit with 7200 RPM drives. I bet these would run better. I use the trayless/fanless open models. 9 in a CM590. With 3 120MM fans for exhaust. The design works OK as long as all 9 slots are populated. I would assume the same with this too. Otherwise the airflow will take the path of least resistance.