Matt Foley

A month old, but it still has the SAS connectors on the back plane all the way to the side so it may have been old stock. I believe the 120mm fan wall was designed for the 4224 and they indicated it would fit the 4220 (maybe with out sufficient testing.)

The way I have it installed, picture one is looking at the fan wall from the hard drives. Pictures two and four are looking at the fan wall from the mother board side. Picture 3 is looking at the side of the outside of the chassis at the location where the fan wall is installed. I used the same color paint edits in all 4 pictures to show what coincides with what. Black- Trim down the fan wall for the chassis lid rail indent (indicated by the green arrow in 2) and across for the chassis lid rail top rail Blue- Drilled hole in side of chassis to match tapped holes in fan wall. Two screws, one on each side. Was doing this at 1 in the morning and more concerned with containing the metal filings from drilling then where the holes were actually going. Will likely re-drill at some point to get the fan wall exactly vertical, but for now it is close enough to not want to deal with it for a while. Red- Drilled hole into side of fan wall to match indent from tapped hole in chassis side. (drilled into the folded side of the fan wall that can not be seen in picture 1) Green- Already present slots in fan wall that match indent from tapped hole in chassis directly below tapped hole in chassis for which I drilled red holes

I'll see what I can do with out pulling the fan board back out.

So in order to make this work properly in my 4220 I had to: 1) Trim the upper corners of the fanplate so no contact is made with rail tracks on the chassis 2) Drill holes on either side of the fan plate to match up with the upper set of case holes that protrude into the case (the lower set of case holes are already accommodated by slots cut into the fan plate.) 3) Drill holes in the case to match the upper set of holes on the fan plate, so now the fan plate is actually attached to the case via screws. With these modifications, the fan plate is now solid and I can put the cover on.

Twin blades, are you sure? With only a couple of disks you may turn them off, however you need them if you fully populated the 4224. I don't know about the 4224, but the 4220 stock plate fans have blade shaped fins oriented in the counter direction to the fan blades (stationary part of the fan housing.) Makes it look like there or two sets of counter rotating blades.

Fan plate is here. As far as I can tell the plate "snaps" in. The predrilled screw holes in the plate in no way match up with the predrilled screw holes in my 4220 chassis (although I just ordered and received my 4220 recently from newegg, it still has the SAS connectors all the way to the side instead of towards the middle like newer ones. The fanplate has the SAS cable holes towards the middle as can be seen in the first post of this thread.) There are some slots cut into the plate the line up with indents caused by screw holes on either side of the chassis. The plate slide nicely over these and the rotates an "snaps" into the top. On the bottom it is butting up against the motherboard tray. Edit to add: There is an issue with the fanplate (or at least the way I have it installed.) It is slightly bowing the sides of the 4220, making it impossible to get the lid on.

AFC1212DE-PWM'S just got delivered. Hopefully, the fan plate will show up tomorrow (most things that ship from California tend to get here in 3 days) and I can get it all installed and tested.

No email or tracking number, but I just went and checked my order status and mine shipped today as well.

I have been using Acronis True Image for several years and never heard of Macrium Reflect. Was getting ready to upgrade my Acronis licenses again when I read the previous post and started researching reflect. After researching the product I am now a convert.

The better option around this is to get and use screen. With screen, you start the session, launch your process(es), detach the session and then you can log off of your telnet session. Then telnet in later and re-attach your session to pick up where you left off. You can also have multiple subsessions that you can page between. I'm not familiar with 'screen'. I just took a peek at the manpage ... WAY too long to read at 2:30am. Not sure why this would be any better than using IPMI to access the console. Maybe after I read the manpage I'll see some additional benefits. JoeL gives a good overview of how to install screen and the basics you need to make it effective in the following post: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2817.msg24827#msg24827

On mine you can configure the the IPMI IP to use DHCP or be static. If it is using DHCP it can float around, mine did when I had it set up for DHCP.

The better option around this is to get and use screen. With screen, you start the session, launch your process(es), detach the session and then you can log off of your telnet session. Then telnet in later and re-attach your session to pick up where you left off. You can also have multiple subsessions that you can page between.

IPMI on your board (I have the same) does work over the regular LAN port. It will have a different IP address then the one unRAID is using (two IP's on the single port.) I have also not found it to be completely reliable for accessing the system when down, sometimes it works and sometimes not. I am guessing this reliability is improved when using the dedicated port. Sorry, I have no answer for you on Mac use.

I bought some of each. Contradictory to what others have experienced, the EARS drives have performed better for me. They also run cooler. I ordered a total of 6 EARS drives and 4 EADS drives. I have had to RMA 2 of the EARS drives and none of the EADS. But from reading the reviews on various sites, the RMA rate is about the same for both.

I haven't actually started using my unRAID server for anything but preclearing yet so not the best qualified for answering the first two questions (though I suspect the answer to be no or maybe 2GB as unRAID uses the memory for a virtual disk) and no if you are using the server only for unRAID. If you are using it for other tasks as well then yes and yes.) To answer the quoted portion of 3, stock the Norco is too loud to be at all considered ambient noise. If you go with the Supermicro X8SIL-F, you can get the (or construct) the 120mm fan plate and buy some highflow PWM fans (like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835706028) and speed control them based on harddrive temperature using a script (see http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5548.0.) I confirmed yesterday that the X8SIL-F is capable of changed fans speed using this methodology.

I have been playing around with this script a little bit on a Supermicro X8SIL-F-O. The fan speeds can be set through pwm2, but it would seem that the implementation has a fail safe built in. If I try to drop the fan speed too low (100 is fine, but 50 or 0 are not), pwm2_enable goes from 1 to 4 (which is apparently automatic) and the fan speed kicks back up. I don't think this will be too big of a deal, but was curious whether I am missing something and there is a way around this. Edit: It seems this is only a problem if there is a fan plugged into the first fan header. The other 4 don't exhibit this behavior. So likely a built in fail safe for the CPU fan.

That and the other stacks sitting directly on the carpet.

Should be as easy as going to the directory where you put screen and typing screen. Should look like it clears the screen and then just a regular command prompt. From there all the Ctrl-a commands should work. If you detach (Ctrl-a d) then to get back to the screen session you had, you just type "screen -r" from the command prompt.

That is why you use screen. You can have multiple instance in the same session, page between them, and detach so you can log off and then log back on later and re-attach the screen session.

Over the network is fine. Whether you do it over the network or locally you should use screen to run them (or any long script) to avoid disconnect complications.

My build hit a snag. Bad 2TB WD EARS drive. Not DOA and took a while to start misbehaving. Ran it through a bunch of tests and it definitely isn't right. RMA's it and running the other 5 drives through 2 more preclear cycles.

Yeah, I have the case in the guest room with the door closed until the fanplate comes. My father-in-law is coming Halloween weekend, so I am hoping that the fanplate doesn't come until November. Trying to sleep with that thing in the room should discourage future visits.

Hope you have a room to put the case in that nobody uses. With stock fans it is not at all background noise. Good luck with your build.

Frequent, no. Every year or two. But when I put in an order it is pretty big. In this case I was rebuilding my Sage server as well, so almost 2 full systems worth of components. The fanplate is available for pre-order supposedly shipping October 20th. They have it listed for $1 but with shipping it was something like $16.50 for me. http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=258

One week too late. Bought a 4220 at newegg last week.