sirwired

PC Power and Cooling makes power supplies that could only be termed "legendary". They have been in the PSU business since approx. the dawn of time, and make the best PSUs out there. The drawback, of course, is the price. But a PCP&C supply does not have any BS wattage numbers, so you could be pretty sure that what you get is what is promised in the add. If your business ran on your unRAID server, a PCP&C supply is the only one I would use. (My unRAID is just a DVD server, so it just gets an Antec.) SirWired

I think your customer will really like unRAID's price and reliability. However, I would not sell it to them without a support contract with you. I say this because while I, as a computer geek, have had no major issues figuring out how things work (or posting here when they don't), things that might seem intuitive to you during, say, a drive expansion, are not going to be real pleasant for a user that doesn't really know how it works. SirWired

It looks like a login prompt to me, just with some logging messages appended to your display... Hit enter, and you should see the plain login prompt again. SirWired

The problem with some of these online calculators is that they are meant for typical PC's, or maybe gaming PC's. Our servers require pretty much nothing but gobs and gobs of 12V current that isn't limited to just supplying the mobo/CPU. That makes PSU selection a little trickier than an online calculator that just adds up the watts. The CPU's required to run most unRAID servers is barely even a rounding error compared with the 12V necessary to power the drives. It looked like the "Pro" version of Outervision one would work, but the NewEgg one is useless for our purposes, since all it spits back is a wattage number. SirWired

If it is currently set for RAID-5, you cannot perform any visibility tests until the card is set to JBOD. SirWired

Pull the board out of the system and find the biggest chip on it. It should say something like "Intel", "Realtek", "Marvell", or maybe just have a corporate logo on it. SirWired

How low of a power consumption do you have in mind? Some of the modern mainstream processors and motherboards don't suck down too terribly much, and are less expensive. SirWired

Of course, if you are using eight disks, you will already be using a fair-sized uATX or ATX case, so you might as well get yourself a cheap uATX mobo... SirWired

Given that unRAID is a NAS server, I don't see the limited bandwidth of a single 300MB/sec SATA port as being an issue, except during parity re-build. That said, I would strongly suspect that not all SATA adapter chips support these things... SirWired

Well, my new drive came in today. WD sent it 2nd day air on Monday (I requested it Saturday). There was no charge for that speedy shipping, which I thought was a nice touch. It fired up just great and actually works. It was a "recertified" drive, which I have mixed feelings about, but I suppose it is not a surprise since I got it from the factory instead of the retailer. I guess with the "recertification" it has probably been burned in, which I am guessing had not been done with the other one, since it died in about 30 seconds. SirWired

I just started up my unRAID with a FoxConn 945G7MC-KS2HV. Cost: $38 @ the 'Egg. 4 onboard SATA (ICH7) 1 PCIe x16 1 PCIe x4 2 PCI Onboard GigE (Realtek 8110SC. Seemed to work just fine w/ 4.2) It was the cheapest motherboard that would support something better than a Prescott, had on-board video, and did not have a SiS or VIA chipset. (I did not want to have to dig to figure out which SATA chip they used.) The only issue I ran into was that it did not POST out of the box. Turns out that my particular board did not have the latest BIOS, and would not recognize my Conroe-L Celeron 420. After some back-and-forth with FoxConn support (their support folks that respond to their web inquires were quick, I'll give them that) I got FoxConn to mail me a new BIOS chip (the same day, even) with the latest and greatest on it free of charge. Luckily it is socketed on this board. After that, it POST'd right up, and unRAID started without a hitch. (It turned out my drive was bad, so I couldn't actually use my new server, but that wasn't the mobo's fault.) SirWired

Grrr... After getting a motherboard that wouldn't POST without a BIOS upgrade (which had to be physically mailed to me on a chip from FoxConn), now my WD SE 16 750GB doesn't work either. I tried to bring it up in UnRAID, it got about 15 seconds through a format, and then got stuck in "Stopped: Valid Configuration" After rebooting, messing w/ BIOS settings, un-configuring and re-configuring, re-installing unRAID on the key, I still got the same message. Syslog just showed that it couldn't read some boot file off the drive. The drive was recognized just fine... model no, s/n, temp, capacity. On a lark, I burned a WD drive diagnostics CD, and it fails the most basic SMART tests... Back to WD it goes. Luckily, unlike NewEgg, WD cross-ships... BTW, limetech, the error handling could use some work... "Stopped: Valid Configuration" is not a particularly useful error message, and the drive showed up as "Green" the whole time, even though it did not, in fact, actually function. SirWired

One thing to consider is that the CoolerMaster Stacker is meant to be a case that holds a huge pile of drives. Not so much the P182, which I think is geared more towards the gamer crowd. This means that there will be a lot of airflow dedicated to cooling the CPU and PCI-e slots. But in your case, the CPU will barely be drawing anything, and you won't be having three power-sucking video cards in your slots. Instead, all of your heat will be coming from the front, and your hard disks will be putting out a lot more heat than any optical drive. SirWired

Well, I don't mean to be pedantic here, but I'd say either your SATA controller is defective or it is incompatible with your drive. Is it so generic that you cannot get tech support for it? SirWired

Well, color me surprised! I actually got Foxconn to send me out a new BIOS chip! They claim it will be going out USPS today. I opened the support call yesterday evening, had my first response before bed, and no more than a half-hour lag today between my feedback and their response! I am quite impressed. Some of the back-and-forth responses were a little unimpressive... but once we got out of the stage consisting of: "We're just going to paste a standard template in the e-mail form and hope you go away", things went much better. I think they tried to intimidate me when they stated I needed a PLCC puller and agree that if I screwed up the board, I wouldn't call it their fault. Heh. A PLCC puller is about the easiest thing they could have asked for... even if the chip was soldered down, that wouldn't have been a problem either; the lab I work in has a full solder re-work station. Unfortunately, everybody I know either doesn't have an Intel at all (much less an LGA 775), doesn't know, has a laptop, or their box is several years old. What an interesting group of friends and colleagues I have... Borrowing a $70k PCI-express bus analyzer would have been trivial, but I can't scrape up a $30 Cedar Mill or Prescott from some low-end PC... (we all have laptops as work machines) If the BIOS update doesn't work, back to NewEgg it goes, and I guess I'll spend more than $38 this time. SirWired