melechmet

Does anyone know if there is a rack mount kit for the Centurion 590?

Bump: Any updates? Looking for 1. Cheap (no more than 120 bucks) 2. PCI-e 4. SATAII x 4 internal ports. 8x would be awesome, but all of those are RAIDed and hence may be problematic for the OS. thanks!!!!

Does anyone know when WD is releasing their RE2 line in the TB range? I don't think a caviar is a safe investment personally, but the RE2's are possibly the best drives I've ever known. So far 55 drives installed for various project, from different lots and stores, no DOAs! Some were installed 3 years ago. I'm very impressed. I'm looking for either this drive or the new cool running 1TB Sammy to come out.

For the users of XBMC and Myth front end, do those applications do auto indexing/movie database lookup (e.g., via IMDB)? I'm looking to move to Linux on the client side soon and this is one of my concerns. With the My Movies plugin in MCE, it all more or less self populates (we're talking 10 Terabytes of movies here on two servers, one of which is Unraid), is there a Linux front end that does this comparably?

Cant wait for the sammy 1 gig-ers to come out. November?

bump

True. But there is nothing to stop, however, anyone designing a completely passive cage with cables (power + SATA say) lined up and secure, direct from the MB/PS. Thats what I'd like to have, a cage with easy slot/rail access per drive but no intermediary electronics and my own (far better) fans.Maybe the cables will be a little custom, or maybe theyll take a passive secured adapter to make them more solid. But thats it as I see it. Dont know if I'll ever see it though. Plus there is a good argument to be made about additional points of failure, air flow obstruction and additional heat generation (and possibly the use of the worst fans on the market).

As I see it, the only advantage closed units have is they consolidate the power cables a bit. Otherwise, they add to throughput overhead a little, and create a lot of heat that can be better vented with well placed case fans.

Cyg, I would not do it. I own a variation of this, a rebrand from Chieftec and others (Model BP-SATA2131). I've had them over a year now, and the fans are not only noisy, near useless, but are giving out as well! The ventilation is just horrible. I've read one guy reversed the direction of his fans to some positive effect but the gains are just not worth messing with it. I was also thinking of replacing the fans with better/quieter ones, but these are not standard 80mm fans.. they are 15 or 20mm thick... whereas the standard 80mm case fans are 25mm. There are some on the market that are this thin but they are expensive (20 bucks per) and do not have the half the power of the originals. So again I repeat, don't do it or worse case: return it. Optimally, I'd like to replace these with just an open slotted mobile rack and use case power/SATA directly to each drive. I can use a bunch of quiet/cheap fans hung on a cross bar for much better ventilation. Problem is- I cant find any open mobile racks on the market. If anyone knows an open/slide/slot rack that suites 3 in to 2 (or 6 in to 4) please post it.

Is there a way to add a time and/or byte counter to mv or cp transfer in progress? I vaguely remember something like this done on Solaris, but it may have been some sort of add-on shell command, not found in GNU.

this is an excellent rack server, I use a rebranded version of the very one. I do wish they made it out of aluminum, since the steel is so heavy when fully populated.

Well, I removed the second boot device from the menu it should have defaulted into USB boot, perhaps that odd "FFD forced mode" is the issue. But yes this is what obviously happened. There is also the annoying raid trying to mount disks on bootup, and no way to turn that off. Still it's a nice board, I will be paying attention at the BIOS updates, as they come from Asus.

There is something funky wrong with the BIOS (ver. 1202 3/28/07) or my MB. It either forgets the config (with flash being the 1st drive, first boot drive) altogether now and again or it resets to default (which you cant set) if booted without the flash drive... (I've been doing fan silencing testing, so I've been booting w/o unraid/flash a few times. I guess I'll test it some more.

Thank you both for chiming it! I seem to be working now, w/ 10 disks so far in AHCI mode (two more coming on Wednesday), and the flash in forced FDD mode, which is to say the least a strange option. So far the sync is more than 3x faster than my old PCI based build (11Kb/s vs. 36Kb/s), major improvement to say the least. Some people have gotten even better results 58 or 59Kb/s, I wonder if they just had fewer disks or perhaps I still made some misconfigs in the BIOS, then again there are so many factors... cables, mobile racks, etc.

Well this is my new build: Asus P5B-E MB 1GB Corsair value Ram 512MB Sandisk Cruzer Micro F.D. Seasonic Super 460 Silencer (my old old PS) 4x Chieftec 3-in-2 SATA mobile racks (from old system) Old rack mount case (Eagle Tech ET-RM4080-BK) Positive locking SATAII cables all around. 3x 2 SATA port Syba PCI-e controller cards I'm planning to run 6 SATA connections of the MB, and and additional 6 SATA ports off the PCI-e cards, leaving 2 on board SATA/eSATA "raid" ports for future expansion (to 14 drives). I will not be using any PATA connections. I've just built it and am having a hard time booting the flash, I've managed to boot with a lot of errors in forced FDD mode. This board seems to be popular, can someone please post the necessary BIOS configs? Do I run everything in AHCI or in "IDE" mode? flash in HD mode or Forced Floppy mode? USB setting generally.

Thanks!

bump!

Tom, and anyone who has attempted this..., I've recently bought a new Asus MB and a bunch of PCI-e cards. The question (and I apologize if it's been asked before in some fashion) is, barring backing up 11 x 400GB drives onto DVD-Rs, I'd like to swap the existing MB and PCI cards (OS ver. 2 recommended HW) for the new set *w/o incurring any data loss*. I'm running 4.0 currently. What are the pitfalls in doing this? Is it comparable to the 3.0 to 4.0 migration where the drives are specifically assigned? Is it even possible/recommended? Thanks.

thanks!

Here is a preliminary list of contenders, if you are using one please let us know: PCI-e SATA SoNNeT TSATAII-E4P PCI Express SATA II Controller Card Koutech IO-PESA201 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card RAID 0,1,0+1 JBOD - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816104004 SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI Express SATA II Controller Card - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124027 SIIG SC-SAE012-S2 PCI Express x1 SATA II Controller Card - OEM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815150095 StarTech PEXSATA22 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card RAID 0/1 - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815158036 SABRENT ST-PX2T 1-lane 2.5Gbps PCI Express SATA II 4 Ports Controller Card RAID 0/1 - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816220005 Adaptec 2240900-R PCI Express 4-lane 2.5 Gb/s SATA RAID 1430SA Kit RAID 0/1/10 JBOD - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103058 NORCO-4627 PCI Express SATA II Controller Card RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD - Retail http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816133004&ATT=16-133-004&CMP=AFC-Smarterdeals

Could someone recommend a good quality and cheap! 12-20" latching SATA cable?

Hi can someone help me w/ rfstool (ver. 0.14). I'd like to mount it under XP, I understand it that this is possible, what command do I need to issue to see it in explorer or minimally see my file structure? Any otehr useful commands besides "autodetect", "info" would be highly appericated. Here is what I got so far: C:\rfs>rfstool autodetect Drive 1, Partition 0 is a ReiserFS Partition Size: 400088424960 Bytes (381554.06 MB) ERROR The device is not ready., unable to get drive geometry from this drive ERROR The device is not ready., unable to get drive geometry from this drive C:\rfs>rfstool info ----- Info on \\.\PhysicalDrive1 ------ Drive uses XP-style DISK_GEOMETRY_EX: Cylinders = 48641 MediaType = 12 TracksPerCylinder = 255 SectorsPerTrack = 63 BytesPerSector = 512 DiskSize = 400088457216 Got DRIVE_LAYOUT_INFORMATION_EX PartitionCount = 4 PartitionStyle = 0 (MBR) Signature = 0x8c77257d --- PARTITION 0 --- PartitionStart = 32256 PartitionLength = 400088424960 (381554.06 MB) PartitionType = 131 Read 512 bytes at offset 97792 Is ReiserFS partition type 2 (73496552 46327245 0000xxxx)

Well if you have existing working equipment then, really, there are only two reasons to upgrade : 1. functionality or 2. performance. The former is a few releases away, and the jury still out on the latter.

RobJ, very niice!!! Did you try the addonics multiplier with it? Would you know if there are any performance penalty (throughput/letancy etc) that a port multiplier would introduce?

Thanks, we've been communicating on that thread! I n this one I'd just like to identify usable PCI-e SATA boards.