yannis

Depending on where you live in the world, you could run your server for nothing. A solar panel charging a battery (or bank of), and run the server off that via an inverter. You'd have to do the maths to see what the payback period is. This isn't really an option for those of us who live in the UK as it's always cold and wet Personally, I leave my server on 24/7 as the heat it generates isn't truly wasted - it helps keep my house warm On a slightly more serious note but not to be recommended if there are small kids around, is that my server is tucked away under a desk in my study so I leave the sides off. That way the case fans don't come on. It's mainly because it runs quieter like that but I guess it saves a small amount of electricity.

Thanks for that. For my future reference, how can you tell that the motherboard and card will be fine? I tried Google but couldn't find that info anywhere. Was there a clue in the syslog?

@garycase. Thanks - I take it you are in market for a hardly used 3TB drive Ok so syslog attached (from a clean power down and re-start as the server had been running continuously for many months). Motherboard is an Asus M4A78L-M LE but with a Netgear GA311 Ethernet adaptor. There is also a generic SATA II 2 port PCI Express card. All I can find in the limited documentation is that it seems to use a Silicon Image SiL 3132 controller. Current Unraid version is 4.7 but I understand that I would need to change this to 5. something. Hope that helps. syslog.txt

Ah OK. I thought there might be a really simple way to check. I can't lay my hands on the manuals for the motherboard and add on card so I'll have to dig around inside the case and get back.

I'm toying with the idea of upgrading my unraid server to 3tb drives and the first thing I came across in the Wiki is this "Note that your disk controller must also support drives larger than 2.2TB. (many do, some do not)". So my question is, how can I tell if my disc controller will support these drives? (Please bear in mind that you are talking to a 59 year old carpenter with only just enough savvy to build an unraid server, and not a 20 something computer wizard). Many thanks

For info about the Zantec cases, and this may also apply to many others with both top and rear vents. I played around with temperature probes and fan contollers quite a bit and I found that, if you run just a rear fan as an exhaust, then most of the air is drawn in through the top vents (hardly anything through the front or bottom) and you get very little circulation through the case. Likewise, if you use just a top fan, most of the air is drawn in through the rear vents and you get very little internal cooling. Initially, I used just a rear fan and taped up all the vents in the top of the case. That worked well and drew most of the incoming air through the front (over the HDDs) and the bottom giving much better cooling of all the internals. The downside was that I lost the passive cooling effect of warm air simply escaping through the top vents and the fan needed to run more often. My final strategy was to use both a rear and a single top fan connected together to one channel of my fan controller. So, I still get passive cooling and at "idle" none of the case fans run at all. When I'm streaming or otherwise using the server and the temperature rises, both fans come on (slowly at first) and draw air in through the front (over the HDDS) and the base.

I'm using an HS2 and I've added a third hot swap bay giving 9 hot swap in total. As has been said, not the highest drive density but then hdd cooling is not an issue. I added one of these http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/casefanaccessories/kaze-server and have each drive cage fan controlled by putting a temperature probe in the back of each one. Most of the time, the fans are idle. Be aware that the second drive cage in the HS2 does not come with a fan (but if you buy a third, it does).