johnodon

OK...I think I came up with a good model for the drive rack. It will be made out of aluminum rails and round bar attached to brackets I plan to fashion and attach to the inside walls of the case. Unfortunately, since I plan on using round bar I won't be able to attach those the rails using screws. My plan was to use some kind of industrial adhesive (just a drop) on each end and in the middle (middle rail to separate the 2 rows of drives). I was just going to use Gorilla Glue...does anyone have a better suggestion that may be made specifically for aluminum? Also, motherboard, power supply, sata cards and 2x 2tb drives showed up yesterday. At some point I will list all of my HW and costs. I already had most of the drives, teh CPU and memory. I have such little room in the front of the case to cool the drives, I had to order 2 of these slim fans: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185139&Tpk=N82E16835185139 I'll post some pics later with the case gutted and the MB and PSU mounted. Although I know most want to see the drive rack completed. I was hoping to do that this weekend, but it is my son's 1st b-day. I think the wife may have other plans. TIA, John

Tom, I have one very minor issue that really does not need to be addressed but I figured you may want to sneak it in before the final version. My laptop's native resolution is 1920 x 1080. On the Main, Shares, Users, Settings and Utils screen, I have a scroll bar at the bottom and the lines above and below the on-screen items are off center (all the way to the left). I have the same issue on my workstation which also runs 1920 x 1080. When I dock my laptop on two different docks that have difefrent monitors with difefrent resolutions (1280 x 1024 and 1680 x 1050), everything lines up fine. So, it appears that the webgui format is off for 1920 x 1080 rez's. Again, not a big deal but thought you would want to know. John

Nah...I'm just that poor! Now I know what my buddy meant when he alwasy called kids "energy and money vampires".

That is why I am going to do it the Irish way and flip the drives upright and just plug cables in. John

General consensus is to stay away from this drive due to known data corruption issues. A firmware has since been released but a lot of members still suggest that these be avoided. I made teh mistake of buying one of these based on price and have since returned it. See this thread: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=9339.0 John

I have only recently stumbled across unRAID. You can thank the XBMC forums for that! Anyway, the idea really intrigued me..especially being able to mix and match drives. And then I had an epiphany. I remembered reading an article some time ago that showed a server case in which the drives were mounted vertically. I thought “wow…this would be a perfect solution for an unRAID box…ease of access to add/upgrade drives.”. I racked my brain and finally remembered that the article had something to do with “cheap petabyte”. So I Googled just that and found the article: “Petabyte on a Budget: How to Build Cheap Cloud Storage”. Here it is: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ One thing that I wanted to accomplish was to keep the price down. I thought the easiest way to do this was to forgo the backplanes and flip the drives so the connections are face up. This way when I need to add/upgrade a drive, all I have to do is shut her down, slide the top of the case open, hook up the drive, close her up and power on/configure. This would also allow me to avoid the cost of drive trays and such. So, I am off and running. The first thing I needed to find was an affordable 4U chassis that would accommodate my needs (namely the ability to remove all of the forward drive cages). The one I settled on was the D-416 4U Compact Stylish Rackmount Chassis. I got this from Newegg for $102.99. As you can see in the pics below, all of the drive cages are merely screwed in (no rivets): My plan is to construct my own skeletal drive cage out of angle aluminum. The inspiration for this came from this thread: http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=475428 Picture a shoebox that is open on all sides with dividers running from front to back (north to south) every 1” and a center divider running the length down the middle from east to west two make for two rows of drives. Now double that for top and bottom for stability and foam rubber on the bottom for some shock absorption. The entire cage will be bolted to the bottom of the chassis. Here is a rough top/down view: I just received the case today and started taking some measurements. If done right, I can comfortably fit 20 drives and still have 3 empty slots in the middle. Each set of 10 drives on the right and left will have a 120mm fan attached to the front of the cage. There will be about a ¼” gap between each drive for airflow. A 80mm fan will cool the 3 additional drives. This is VERY MUCH a work in progress. When I get home from work today, I am going to start construction on the cage. One thing is certain…things will be VERY tight. I hope my math skills do not fail me! ? I will keep this post updated with progress. John

Yep. Still waiting for the cables but cards are in-hand.

Thanks for the replies guys. Honestly, since I already have the drives I am going to use them. I don't have a lot of $$$ right now to invest in new drives. I'd just rather deal with teh electric bill for the time being. The wife (as far as she knows) can't directly blame me for that! Hard drive purchases she can! Thanks again, John

That is really intriguing! Would be nice if you could save $70 and pick it up. My only concern would be the 3Ware 9500 cards. They are not listed on the compatibility page. I would find someone who has tested those particualr cards before forking out the $$$. Otherwise, I think that is a damn good deal! It even has an addiitonal 8x PCI-E slot...but no where to put more drives (other than the mounts in the back of the case) John

Just trolling through the syslog... Feb 9 04:19:59 unRAID kernel: md: sync done. time=32024sec Feb 9 04:19:59 unRAID kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0 Feb 9 04:40:01 unRAID logrotate: ALERT - exited abnormally. Any concern?

Sorry...one more question. Are these cables OK to use with the AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250615109601 The part # looks right but the word "Discrete" threw me. I haven't seen it used on any other product pages. J

Here is the current list of drives that I have: 1x Hitachi Deskstar 3.5-Inch 2TB 7200RPM SATA II 32MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0S02861 8x Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y250M0 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s 1x WD Caviar Green WD20EADS - Hard drive - 2 TB - internal - 3.5" - SATA-300 - buffer: 32 MB 1x WD Caviar Green WD15EADS 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" I bought the Hitachi specifically to be the Parity drive and that will be connected directly to a SATAII port on the MB. The two WD drives and the eight Maxtor drives are all allocated to data and will be connected to 2 SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards. I plan on phasing the Maxtors out since they are small and produce a LOT of heat! (I will say this though about the Maxtors...I have had all 8 of them for 5 years running 24/7 and have never had a single issue!). Is there any rhyme or reason to the ordering of the data drives (the WD's and the maxtors) based on speed, capacity and/or future replacement? TIA for the help!!! John

Edgar, Have you actually tested the NFS shares (mounting from another system)? The most I did was create the shares to make sure teh webgui didn't dump but have not tried to access them yet. John

This is not good... please send email to [email protected]. BTW: in regards to your avatar, see attached. RE: Avatar.. No thanks RE: Issue I did a little dance around a fire and sacrificed a pig, rebooted 4 times and got it to work, but I had to do this: Assign all drives to their individual slots NOT start the array Reboot Upon reboot, they all fell into place. the 3 times I tried assigning the drives and then start the array (and then reboot), it came back muffed. If you still want me to e-mail, I can. Did you run the "New Slots" script on the "Utils" page. I did not try a reboot without using it... should have... hindsight is 20-20. I did not need to reboot after running teh "New Slots" script. When I first booted into unRAID, my disks were listed but not assigned correctly (on the Main screen). I ran the script and when I went back to the main menu, everyhting was hunky-dory.

Just updated form B3 to B4... My test system has only a parity and one data drive. I used the "New SLots" util and both drives were properly assigned. The on to my #1 test... Enabled NFS...created a share...set NFS Security to Public...applied. WebGui didn't dump out! YAY!!! Thanks for the great work Tom! John

Yes it's fixed. Double ;D I have teh same issue with enabling NFS killing the webgui. I really rely on NFS for my XBMC. It absolutely destroys smb for streaming blu-ray movies! Anxiousl;y awaiting BETA4. TY for your hard work Tom!

Only P4 and Pentium D. I'm not too worried about that though since I have a big honking HS/Fan I can slap on it. How do the chipsets look for compatibility? OK? Thanks, John

Found one more thing that I like a lot about this board...on-board USB. No more flash drive sticking out of the case. John

My buddy is rebuilding his server and offered to give me this MB. How does it fair an un unRAID board? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151005&cm_re=S5160G2NR-_-13-151-005-_-Product Brand: TYAN Mode:l S5160G2NR Supported CPU: CPU Socket Type LGA 775 CPU Type: Intel Prescott/Smithfield/Cedar Mill/Presler (Pentium 4 w/ HT or Pentium D) System Bus: 1066/800/533MHz Supported CPU Technologies: Hyper-Threading Technology Chipsets North Bridge: Intel E7230 South Bridge: Intel ICH7R Other Chipset: SMSC SCH5017 super I/O chip Memory Number of DDR2 Slots: 4 x 240Pin DDR2 Standard: DDR2 667 Maximum Memory Supported: 8GB Channel Supported: Dual Channel ECC Supported: Yes PCI Express x16: 2 PCI Slots: 4 SATA 4 x SATA 3.0Gb/s SATA RAID 0/1 Onboard Video Chipset XGI Volari Z7 16MB DDR LAN Chipset Broadcom BCM5721 LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps Second LAN Chipset Broadcom BCM5721 Second LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps Max LAN Speed Dual 10/100/1000Mbps PS/2 2 COM 1 Video Ports 1 USB 1.1/2.0 4 x USB 2.0 Onboard USB 4 x USB 2.0 Form Factor ATX Dimensions 12" x 9.6" Some main features I like: 2x PCI-E (one x16 and one x4) - This should pair nicely with 2 4x SATA II ports Dual 10/100/1000Mbps - Can unRAID be configured to use both LAN adaptors? onboard video I already have a 775 CPU and heatsink. He is giving me his ECC memory and PSU since this board requires a 24 pin + 8 pin. I plan on pairing it with 2 AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards. Any forseen problems with compatibility? TIA, John

Bus Type: 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X

Just bought one of these unRAID supported cards on Ebay for $89 with free shipping. They are brand new and include 8 SATA cables. http://cgi.ebay.com/Supermicro-AOC-SAT2-MV8-8-Port-SATA-II-Controller-Card-/250762990283?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3a62a392cb 8 left after I bought mine but I'm guessing they will have more. Newegg sells these for $104.99 and $10 shipping. DISCLAIMER: I am not the seller...AND...these are PCI-X cards (although my RocketRaid 1820a PCI-X card works just fine in a regular PCI slot). Enjoy! John