heffe2001

Why o why did you have to post this . Looks like my home entertainment budget is going in the hole again, lol.

I was looking at getting a couple ST31000340NS drives (mentioned in the good deals section), but the description on the page says it's a SAS drive, although it is a regular SATA interface on it.

Anybody know for sure if the Adaptec 1430SA's are SAS compatible? I'm thinking of ordering a few SAS 1tb drives, but need to make sure it'll work on the 1430sa.

I've been having an issue where on a cold-start, one drive won't spin up, but a reset right after detection, they all spin up fine. I think I'm going to replace my existing power supply with a Corsair VX450, as their calculator says it should be good for my hardware, with up to 15 drives. The supply I have now doesn't do any sort of load-balancing between the rails (like the corsair's do), so I figure just replace it and I'll be good for a while (and Newegg has a 15.00 MIR on it right now). if you use the calculator on Corsair's website they will probably say this power supply is enough. The website says specifically - >> Planned Expansion (on the off-chance that I might need more than 9 drives): Not sure you need all those parts. You could go with 5in3s in a good case and not have any outside wiring. So if you were to double check your power supply and needs, then consider the 5in3's and a new case, you could fit it all in one place.

The room the machine is currently in is approx. 78 right now, and the temps are pretty stable. The only part I would change on the 900 for using it with unraid would be the clear side-panel, the top was changed like it is so they could fit the big fan up there. The machines do at least match in style, lol.

Not sure if this is covered elsewhere or not, but if you're overwriting an existing file (from a parity backed disk), and have a cache drive, what is Unraid's behavior? From what it LOOKS like on my system, it's actually overwriting the existing file on the storage drives (which is what I would expect), but I just wanted to ask to be sure.

Didn't catch that part at first. Don't you mean daily parity checks, lol? (For one reason or another, I've done one about every day this week, it's a great way to push the drives to see the max-temps, lol).

Are you leaving the side-fan out, or closing off the hole there for forced airflow somewhere else? Right now mine's just open-air, and I have an antec 120mm as an intake on the top 3 3.5 bays (and I'm ordering another for the lower 3). My temps are around 30-31 idle (except the bottom most drive, a 500g PATA which runs about 34-35 idle). On a parity check, temps stabalize around 35 across the board, except the 500g gets to around 37. I found it interesting that the 2 640g WD's will actually stabalize 4 or 5 degrees lower once the other drives have gone to sleep during the parity check (once it's read the 300-320g drives, those power down and all that is left are the 500 & 640's). Decent temps I think, but bet it'd be even better in my 900 case (it's currently got like 4 120's, and the honkin huge 200mm in the top)..

Buy it on Ebay from Buy.com, and get it cheaper (I got mine in last week, and installed it last night, works great, and comes with the LP and regular brackets). http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-Adaptec-1430SA-4-Port-Serial-ATA-RAID-Controller_W0QQitemZ170265645853QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item170265645853&_trkparms=72%3A1210|39%3A1|66%3A2|65%3A12|240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

It also appears to spin up much faster than my PATA 80g .

The one I have is a CFA632-YFB-KU. http://www.crystalfontz.com/product/CFA632-YFB-KU.html

I was thinking of using a 320 2.5" as a cache drive, plenty fast for that, and low power/heat .

Yeah, I didn't until last week . Now if I could just find a rail/enclosure system that lets you adapt a 2.5" drive to a 3.5" slot that would work in my trayless box, I'd be set...

Where's the I already have a Crystalfontz LCD?

Front pic, not great quality, but shows the hotswap bays... The system: aBit AN-M2HD motherboard (Socket AM2) http://www.uabit.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=48&page=1&model=383 AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Orleans 2.0GHz 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Single-Core Processor http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103637 2gb Crucial Ballastix DDR2 667 + 1g Unknown DDR2 Antec 300 case http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042 (got it for 47 shipped a month or so ago from 'egg) Adaptec 1430SA 4xSata PCI-e http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103058&Tpk=adaptec%201430sa Rosewill RC-216 PCI-e Sata/PATA controller http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132014 Rosewill RC-208 PCI Dual PATA Controller http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132005 Kingwin KF-4000-BK 4 slot, trayless 4 in 3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990004&Tpk=Kingwin%20kf-4000-bk Cooler Master Real Power Pro 550w http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171025 To get enough 4-pin molex connectors without using a ton of 4 pin splitters, I got 2 Sata to dual molex adapters http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/4mooufrsapoc.html

Just re-arranged my drives, and installed the Adaptec card, and cleaned up the cabling a little bit. Looks much better than it did, that's for sure. I may end up using the 300 case for my dual Xeon (which might get re-purposed yet, just not 100% sure, lol) and replace it with a Antec 900 (although those Centurion cases are much cheaper, and look to have the same bay-setup, just without the 200+mm fan in the top). If I do that I'm definitely going to get a more suitable power supply (although this appears to be running fine, I had an odd problem on bootup after re-arranging where the 500g Pata didn't show up until I did restart after power-on, could be power related?).

I'm using this same case at the moment, although I wish I had done a bit more research (I'd have gotten another 900 case, since the lower 6 bays are 5.25 in it, where the 300 is 3.5" down there). I've currently got the lower 6 bays full, and a 4-in-3 in the top bays (with only 2 drives at the moment). I need to change out my power supply, as it's a tri-rail, with 19a on each (and rail 3 isn't used at all with my configuration). I'm going to try to neaten up my wiring in the box as soon as the sata to molex adapters come in (I have plenty of SATA plugs on my power supply, but only 4 PATA, so using the 4/3 rack I have is problematic at best since it only uses molex plugs, and 3 of those are being used currently by my PATA drives...).

I definitely like the mechanism and how the drives go in, just wish they went a different way of hooking up the cables. Right now I only have power to 2 bays since I only had one 4 pin molex splitter at the house. Hopefully the sata to female molex cables I ordered won't take terribly long to come in (I am thinking of rearranging my drive positions and putting my 640s in the cage and connected to the adaptec). Also rethinking my choice of cases I am currently using (antec 300) so I can go with 3 of these stackers.. (Or get an antec 1200 and get 4 ).

Is anybody out there using one of these? I got mine in yesterday, and so far the only complaint I have are the 'special' cables needed to make the LED's work (plugs into a standard 4 plug power, and goes out as a SATA power & a small connector that plugs into the backplane for power & activity). My supply only has a limited amount of 4 pin power, so I've ordered a few Sata power to 4 pin molex cables for the other connectors, it's just going to make tidying up the cables a bit more of a chore (I definitely need to do that, my case is a MESS inside). Now I just need to get my Adaptec car installed and see if it speeds up the access over the Rosewill PCIE sata board I'm using for 2 drives now...

Might have to pull the trigger on one or 2 of these tomorrow..

The card I'm using may add 3 or 4 seconds to boot, but I do leave mine on all the time, so it's not a big deal (for me at least).

I've got that particular drive running a long test at the moment, and I do also notice the drives that are showing the most ECC corrected errors ARE Seagates, the only other drive showing any ECC errors is one of my 300g WD's, but it shows around 6400 or so, instead of the massive numbers both seagates show.. Eases my mind at any rate, although I still want to replace anything less than 640g in my system with at least a 640, or 1tb...

I did that right after installing the b2 build, it's just for whatever reason the drive kept kicking back and showing that no tests were running, although looking at it's log now it appears it actually was running the short tests, just not showing the results.

Looks like with the new beta, the smart tests through unmenu aren't working (except on the cache drive for whatever reason). I've tried to do a short & long test, and neither go through.. Must have been some temporary glitch, it's running a long test now.

I've been playing with the unmenu drive management page, and I've noticed high numbers on my Smart Statistics on a couple drives in my system. I have a 500g PATA in my system that I originally pulled from a WD external USB enclosure, and it's getting the following numbers: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 110 095 006 Pre-fail Always - 53456328 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 093 093 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 580 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 081 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 164049987 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 4029 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 98 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 068 038 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 32 (Lifetime Min/Max 31/32) 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 032 062 000 Old_age Always - 32 (0 21 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 055 051 000 Old_age Always - 161501831 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 202 TA_Increase_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged I noticed that Hardware ECC, Seek error & raw read error rates are quite high, but there have been no sector re-allocation. Should I be particularly worried about this drive? I also noticed that my 2 other PATA drives are also getting high numbers there as well (as is my cache drive, lol). I am definitely planning on moving the PATA's out of the box, but I and just a bit concerned about the error rates on the drives (they are all high-hour drives, and I'm sure could use replacing, just didn't want to do it quite yet, lol). Of all 4, there has only been one drive that had any re-allocated sectors (just one). I'm also wondering if the errors on the 500g above could be from overheating in the external chassis that it was in previously.