Johnm

A bit of an old topic. Has anyone else tried using this board? I found one of these in my spare parts bin with 16 gigs of ram and Q9550 on it. With 8 on board sata (even if only the 6 primary work) and 2x SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards and shove this in my second 4224. Use the pile of 1 & 1.5 TB drives i have collecting dust. This would save me a huge hunk of change by recycling old stuff. It would not be the greenest unraid server. Possibly overkill CPU and RAM wise considering this is a back up of back ups.... cant ever have enough data redundancy when its important. I guess I could downgrade the CPU and ram with other junk laying about to something more reasonable. my thought was to put a second license on this board and use it just for back ups of my primary unraid box. have it boot once a week (bios clock or WOL packet) and run a script to back up my main unRAID and then power off once completed. What inforomation would be helpful? The GIGABYTE SATA2 chip controller is a Jmicron JMB363. It looks like that would work with unRAID. if not, I can get a monoprice card if needed. i would probably get an Intel gigabit NIC card for it. That should perform better then the Realtek Card . **** I Should mention that the default setting for 'Save a copy of BIOS to HDD' is Disabled. I assume this eliminates the HPA issue.

Nice, I was really up in the air between this case, one other 12 bay, and the norco 4224. This would have been a more expensive build, But it has the advantage a tower. plus the wife factor... another tower would go unnoticed, the rack sort of sticks out. In the end i went with the 4224 due to cost factors. I do not envy your tab mashing fun. My plan was to drill the rivets, take it apart and use some 2x4's and clamps to try and cleanly bend them all at once. if that failed... a hammer with board on each side to protect it. then new pop rivets.

nice lab You might want to take the mobo off the antistatic bag. thats actually pretty bad for the board. the cardboard box itself should be good.

Ok, Our temps are about the same. if anything mine cooled down a little from the other day now that i pulled the seagates from the server. I was seeing a steady 22-23 on all the samsungs and 27-31 on the WD's I agree with you on the samungs. Those were my favorite LP drives. I have 3 raid arrays filled with the F4 2TB's and 2 with the older F2 1.5's I just ordered a small pile of F4's for spares for the raid arrays if i need them a year or two from now. I was just about to fill the last 2 arrays with more F4's when they dropped the news. I have not tryed the new hitachi's yet. I hear nothing but good news. I might go right for the 3TB models to replace the 1.5's. I think i am at the end of my 2TB drive purchases. Unless there is some super $60 sale this month at the egg. I was hoping for slightly better network speeds, I have not yet bought my pro licence I just went through filling up the 3 drive free version and preclearing all my drives. then lots of learning, testing, Rebuilding, etc. I'm pretty happy with this build and unraid is almost living up to my needs. I just hope the Cache drive gives me a speed boost. I might try that small SSD i have and upgrade to bigger one if I like it. I'll probabably buy my licences this week. I just wish I could test it out in full production before I had to buy the pro. It cant be slower then WHS. UGH! I tend to agree with you on the Xeon is overkill, But if the server is going to be 24x7, I might run VM's on it and retire an older Q9550. so this box would replace 2 boxes. part of my going greener plan. The temporary supermicro board I'm running is a mini-ITX Atom board. Honestly, if unRAID supported SAS expanders, I would just get a cheap Intel (LSI) SAS card and the Intel (LSI) expander. then i could run 24+ drives off of a 1 slot atom board. that would be pretty nice on my electric bill and enough Horse Power for vanilla unraid. I feel your pain on bad drives. I have gone through that with every vendor so far. it is not just WD. I had to send back 10 seagates in December. I'm done with them after that.

Nice build! Your build is the same as the the one I am working on. I am still undecided on the route to go for the CPU/RAM. I was looking at the exact same setup, then i questioned if i wanted to do the Xeon instead of the I3. I'm leaning towards the I3 for unRaid for now. I ordered everything except the mobo/cpu/ram. For now I am using the SuperMicro MBD-X7SPA-HF-O Mini-ITX with 1 of the 2 SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 SAS cards i ordered I'm limited to 14 drives for now. For now, I still have "some" room to grow before I need to make that upgrade, this gives me time to shop the sales. I can totally feel your pain as you're doing this. you're not alone this week. I am also killing off one of my WHS servers. This was a media server with pooled Drives just for testing WHS's DE. it was only in use for about 3 months. (I'm definitely going to keep one WHS for PC backups.) I am trying to get a bit greener and stop using raid arrays for video stream and long term storage. spinning 16 drives 24x7 is just not a great idea in the home. I am hoping that unRaid solves this for me, i am also planing on a second Unraid for a back-up of the important data off this one. Fortunately most of the data on my WHS was still on a Raid6 array on a 2008r2 box. I only need about 3-5TB off the WHS (and 12TB-ish off the raid) before I can reclaim the hardware. Hopefully i can also scrub the data off the raid after this build proves stable. My stupid WHS keeps dropping its own shares while copying files over. I am about mount a non-pooled drive into it and move the data off that way, then put the drive into the unraid box. How are your drive temps? I got the exact same fans. during preclears, my samsungs are hovering about 23-27, my WD ears got to about 30-34 and my seagate 5900 RPM's shot up to 46 before I shut down the preclear on them. that's a bit to hot for me. I am going to try moving them to an outer bay and try again later. I'm also going to try the stock mid fans again. they were not that loud. for now i don't need the seagates in the pool. I also ordered 2 of these for the back fans. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186031 I wanted the PWM off the MOBO header. My thought was if the Mobo gets to hot, it will kick those up to vent. It is possible I screwed up and made a high pressure pocket in the main mobo area hurting my drive cooling. 4x 24CFM sucking in and 2 x 28 CFM's at about 1/4 speed exhausting? I'll turn these to full power and see if that helps. What kind of network speeds are you getting with that Cache drive from a desktop? I have not yet set up a cache drive. I have an old segate 1.5 TB 7200rpm or a single platter WD 300gig blue i could use. i also have a 30GB SSD but thats a bit small for my usage. Good luck with your build.

One change I did notice in my 4224 that is different from the ones others have recently received. The green ribbon cables only just come into the chassis in front of the fan plate and end. They then are on extension cables similar to normal front panel headers. They then come in through the middle holes where you would run your SAS cables. I know a few people had complained about the ribbons not plugging into some mobo headers correctly. I guess this was the fix?

try this tutorial. it was what i used http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Configuration_Tutorial Edit: if you honeslty dont have a onitor, you will have to telnet into the server from the begining. I am not sure if mac's have telnet built in or if you have to get something like Putty?

two things, 1. for those empty cases, they can be handy if you stick an old smaller drive into it. maybe a green 500gb you have in the spare parts bin. 2. Be careful with newer WD passports. some those have the drive soldered right to the usb to sata bridge. there is no sata plug in those. We busted open a 1TB model for use as a boot drive in a SFF NAS. oops..

did you go to http://tower/ in safari or firefox? did you try to ping "tower"? (without quotes) can you log into your DHCP server and see what IP was assigned to the server?

I feel your pain. that is one reason I am dumping my WHS media server. I am just hoping that unRAID is faster then the WHS was. With my 2008 servers, I can fully saturate my Gbit Nics. with WHS, I never got good throughput. maybe 30MB/s on a good day. Fortunately for me, i am just going format the WHS and save no data. i have it all duped on a raid6 array. I'll be recycling much of the WHS system for unRAID system. I am trying to do some testing this weekend with the free version. but I honestly wish there was a 30day trail on the Plus or pro to get a true feeling for the product before purchasing. My next step was going to try WHS2011 and Flexraid2, it looks like flexraid is gone. This was the step after that if i was not happy. so here we are... Honestly this is more of me playing and learning new stuff and just being the nerd I am.. in the end ill keep the solution that works the best for me.

I just got my 4224. ~drools!~ now if only UPS dropped off the rest of my order today. Instead they decided to torture me and make me wait until Monday for the SAS cables and other components i need to fire it up. I did not know the 4 middle fan were quick release! nowhere was that in the specs. that makes getting my fat paws into the back-plane area a lot easier. i was planning on mounting the fans on the inside of the fan plate for more room, if I do that i'll either loose the quick release, or end up with the cable slot for the back-plane power on the wrong side. i don't think I'll do that now if these fans are really quiet. I can confirm the egg is shipping the gen2 with no USB on the front and 4 mid fans. It looks a lot cleaner without the USB. but, it was a nice feature to have for quickly plugging in a thumb-drive or other removable media, USB DVD or thumb for OS installs or re-imaging the OS. Not so important for unRaid. Monday I'll transplant my SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-HF-O Mini ITX into it, add an MV8 card, and shove my drives into it. Right now I only have 10 drives for it, I'll have to upgrade my mother board soon enough to use all 24 bays.

I love this board! I have 2 already and just ordered an open box one from the egg 2 days ago for $108! I have no clue what i am going to do with it, but at that price i would have shot myself if i didn't get it. I have one in a CHENBRO ES34069-BK-180 and one in a mid tower with a SASLP MV8 and supermicro 3-in-5 cage. I would get a second Chenbro, but the price has gone way up. It's a nice case but the $200 price point is pushing it. Does anyone know if the 120 watt version will work with this board, 4 gigs of ram and 5 drives, 4 green 2tb's and 1 laptop 7200? I would like to keep the clean look of all matched cases. If not I'll change brands. Did you use the 120 watt or the 180 watt PS for your build?

That makes sense. Personally I was going to use beyond compare from my source server to do the copy with a binary level verify of the data. Thanks for the clarification.

LoL.. sorry that made me snicker coming from a MAC user. i always find macs to be ridiculously over priced. But, i will admit some very nice, stable hardware. On the serious side, I do not know the specs on your ram, if you have x8 chips on that ram, this board http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117226 and this Xeon http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117226 would be a rock solid server for under $400 shipped. If your ram is not compatable, you could go the I3 route and UDIMM's for about the same price if not less.

I would assume this would be possible with a VPN and rsync the data through the Internet in the secure tunnel? of course the amount of data and bandwidth speed would be a factor. I do off-site backups with my windows boxes this way. This is something I would be interested in.

Just adding to the OP's question. I assume I'll be running into this same issue this weekend. Although I'll be doing closer to 18TB. Since it is a new unraid build, should he do the copy before adding the parity drive to the pool, then add the parity drive and run a parity check after? It was under the impression he would get faster results? @delicatepc. You stated you will be formatting the HDD's, just make sure you are comfortable that your data copied over before trashing the source data. perhaps give your new server a little testing time.

Personally I am a fan of XBMC. I find that the Atom 330 with previous generation ION with XBMC is flawless. it handles everything I throw at it. They only issue is Netflix HD. Supposedly the latest adobe flash update helps with that. Since you wont be using netflix, it sounds like a non-issue. that Giada sounds like a great deal, it looks like you might even be able to boot XBMC-Live off the SD card and skip a hdd all together. you said you needed Component out, something like this might be the answer http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10235&cs_id=1023504&p_id=2508&seq=1&format=2 The apple TV was a route i considered in the past myself and skipped on. there are still a few to many bugs on the ATV2 and some issues with Jailbreaking it for noobs. plus it must have a server behind it since you can not hook any storage device to it. i would want to take it with me for extended hotel visits while traveling for work. The 720p is a bit of a downer, but not a deal breaker. The ATV1 is a better solution but a rare animal now. Personally 1 have 1 Mac-mini 2010 and 4 atoms in my house (mix of 330 and 510's) for XBMC HTPC's.