smino

I was going for the premium as well, but it was going to take too long to get it, and the price hear was 60$ more. I put the 60$ on an 8 port Supermicro PCIe card. Now I just need to get unraid to detect it. What kind of drive temperatures and performance are you getting? If you can put two segate 1.5TB drives on the drive expert, and set that for either your cache or parity drive. Test the performance difference. the 1.5 TB seagate drives are just as fast as the 10K veloraptor drives 300GB drives. Less heat , noise, and more space, cheaper price too. That is my next step next month. I will use my cache drive as my download drive.

Interesting...how can unraid use external usb drives? Any performance metrics on it?

I do not believe it is in the immediate plans, but many of us are looking forward to it. Network Teaming or etherchannel is what it is called. Of course you will also need a compatible switch and pc on the other end.

Did I mention my drive temperatures are the coldest I have ever seen them between 29-32C. The fans are so quiet my wife said we could even put the server under the office table. But, once I am done testing, it is going back to the closet out of site and mind of kids playing! grin.

I connected two drives to it, one on each port. The card see the drives in the bios. I went to the devices page to see if I could find either drive by serial number, and it did not show up. I left my card in so we can do quick tests in the future. I also look forward to seeing this card work. I might just build a stand alone linux version when I get a chance, and add the drivers. Has anyone else bought this card? Pretty impressive. It even has spin up groups to keep the watts down. I do not want to use my second lic for dev testing. I believe these were the two drives I had connected: I am not at home to verify. ata-ST3750640AS_5QD046F9 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD0CZSP Do you see them in the logs? Once this card works, I could easily go to 24 drives (25 physical drives using raid 0 on drive expert, of course my case can only take 20 drives right now, unless I modify the case to take a stack of 5 drives above the ps/cpu. But that is another topic.

This is why I was looking into this a while ago. Hardware RAID0 or RAID1. The Drive Expert does make a significant difference on my rig, setup as raid0. See my post in the motherboard forum for the asus P5Q Deluxe.

I do not see the drives with 4.5 Beta 4 either. Here is the syslog: Now I have not registered the dev version, even though I have a spare lic. left.

Is 4.5 Beta stable enough for prod?

Right out of the box the card see all 8 drives properly, but Unraid does not see the drives. Back to PCI cards for now... Using Unraid Version 4.4.2. Same result with 4.5 Beta3 Linux 2.6.28.4

I decided to be cheap and build my own. All it takes is a drill, a metal saw, a peice of metal stiff enough to hold the drives up.

Check out my thread here on the case and pieces I used. I made my own 5-3 holders and save myself 4x60$ + shipping for the cheapest 5-3 I could find in Canadian/Australian Dollars.

Awesome, Thanks. Do you know if BubbaRaid has it incorporated? sysstat?

I just bought the Asus P5Q Deluxe. The only problem I ran into was using a PCI video card. As soon as I switched over to a pcie card, everything worked fine. Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) - 2 x SATA 3Gb/s setup in Raid0, and it worked very well in unRaid. I never seen unRaid and bubbaRaid boot so fast, not even on my other dual core system (Intel E6850/4GB), same speed roughly. I will have to look into why that is later. I tested transfer speeds with and without parity, stability. Gear: Asus P5Q Deluxe (Left everything default, except removed floppy) (Will have to test again changing the AHCI vs IDE) Intel CPU E8400 Kingston Value Ram 8GB (planning for future) Antec 1200 Case 12 bay case for 190$ Canadian (it even comes with manual variable fan speeds for all 6 fans.) (I will post a review on it at the end of the post. Lots of fans and cooling!) I also just borrowed a kill-a-watt. Will test! Tested using a clean unRaid latest beta4 Disk status Model / Serial No. Temperature Size Free Reads Writes Errors parity Not installed disk1 ata-DriveXpert_HDD0_CP-5723_Port_0_1_0_F * 781,422,736 749,322,752 436 189,567 0 disk2 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD03EHT 38°C 732,574,552 501,380,680 502 46,835 0 Notice the temperature is not properly read from the Disk1 Drive-Xpert. Not certain if the drives spun down or not...will confirm at a later point. There is a significant performance gain between disk 1 and disk2. Disk 1 two seagate 400GB (older gen SATA2 drives 7200.8 ) Model:ST3400832AS Disk 2 one 750GB Seagate Sata2 drive(7200.10 newer gen) Model:ST3750640AS Transfer speeds from xp pro sp3 gige (Cat6 direct connected to same switch) The transfer of two files 15 and 16GB in size (No parity drive) Disk1(DriveXpert Raid0) 42-55MB (mostly 49) MB/s Disk2 31-47 (mostly 38) MB/s Update as of 21 April: Using Drive Expert for Cache with two 500GB Seagate 7200.12 Drives saw a performance increase. Transfer to the cache drive now hover around 65-71 (mostly 69) MB/s. How sweet it is! Also I am changing my parity drive to a Seagate 1.5 TB 7200.11, but the drive itself is not the bottle neck, my two pci 4 port Promise cards are the bottleneck. Only getting 14MB/s on parity right now. I have a Supermicro AOC card ready to go, when unRaid 4.5 Beta5 comes out, I will test it. I did not see any performance difference between AHCI and IDE drive, although switching between the two modes requires you to re-setup your devices in unRaid. Also, it does not seem that the motherboard can boot headless. Keyboardless is no problem. MD5 Checksum of first file to both drives is perfect, no corruption: ORIG: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a Dsk1: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a dsk2: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a After this transfer test I will use the Disk1 for Parity. Test speed of parity and transfer: Parity Drive Rebuild: between 43 to 58MB/sec (Average around 54MB/s) The transfer of two files 15 and 16GB in size (With parity drive) Disk2 12-18 (mostly 15) MB/s It seems the drive Expert Raid zero has little effect for a parity drive. Best to use it as a cache drive. MD5 Checksum checks out. dsk2: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a Syslog is attached as a zip file. Kill-A-Watt power usage: Motherboard,8GB RAM, GPU, CPU only, no hard drives: Not available... Full Slavo with Drives: 450Watts for a few seconds at boot, then it hovers around 207-235 watts after the boot with all drives powered up. During file transfers with parity and cache drive up, remaining drives idle 118Watts. Too bad sar/iostat are not built in. I would love to see performance over time. LIMEtechnology Server name: Tower Comments: Media server unRAID Server Pro Main | Users | Shares | Settings | Devices version: 4.4.2 (Production version is running 4.4.2, not beta) Disk status Model / Serial No. Temperature Size Free Reads Writes Errors parity ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1VGNP 27°C 976,762,552 - 26 0 0 disk1 ata-ST31000340AS_5QJ036TR 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0 disk2 ata-ST31000640AS_3QJ00AJF 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0 disk3 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD046F9 29°C 732,574,552 - 30 0 0 disk4 ata-ST3750330AS_9QK0Q3JY 27°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0 disk5 ata-ST3400832AS_3NF0T88Q 25°C 390,711,352 - 32 0 0 disk6 ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1KE5W 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0 disk7 ata-ST31000340AS_5QJ0ZSRQ 26°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0 disk8 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD04LCF 30°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0 disk9 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD0CZSP 30°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0 disk10 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD4RPF3 31°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0 disk11 ata-ST3400832AS_3NF11LFN 26°C 390,711,352 Clearing - - - disk12 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD03EHT 28°C 732,574,552 Clearing - - - cache ata-Maxtor_6B200M0_B413F2CH 25°C 195,360,952 - 30 0 0 I have never seen the drives so cool. consider that I am using home built 5drives into 3 (5.25 inch bays) x 4. The case is amazingly quiet, with all fans on low. With the temperatures so low, I have disabled some of the fans, and the temperatures have not changed. I have 3 spare SATAII cables and two IDE cables. I am currently not using the drive expert drives. No reason really. The transfer speed is decent. I will replace by 200GB Cache drive with a 1.5TB Seagate drive(just as fast at the 10K raptors for less money and more storage). I might even buy two and setup Drive expert on it. Here are pictures of the case and the setup. Notice the Case comes with 3 120mm fans in the front, a 200mm fan on top of the case, and two 120mm fans at the back. You can add a forth fan in front of the drives in the front of the case, and another one on the side panel. But it is not needed. I did have to assemble the 4th fan cage for the front. All parts come with the case, but Ihad to buy one 120mm fan. See photos. Here are pictures of the 5 drives in 3 5.25inch bays I made. Not perfect, but it works. Jig Saw and drill is all that is needed. [/img]

Look for a post in the Motherboard section about "ASUS P5Q Deluxe (A+!)" I decided to post my results in its own thread to now hijack yours...

Yes, it is insane. How much are you willing to pay for it? There are a few other options, not as fast as the iodrive. I posted the links in one of the hardware/motherboard forums. I need to change jobs so I can afford one of those puppies!

I just bought the Asus P5Q Deluxe. The only problem I ran into was using a PCI video card. As soon as I switched over to a pcie card, everything worked fine. Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) - 2 x SATA 3Gb/s setup un raid zero showed up fine in unRaid. I just built the system last night. I never seen unRaid boot so fast, not even on my other dual core system, same speed roughly. I will have to look into why that is. Hmm... I will test transfer speeds with and without parity, stability. I'll post my logs as well. Asus P5Q Deluxe (Left everything default, except removed floppy) Intel CPU E8400 Kingston Value Ram 8GB (planning for future) Antec 1200 Case 12 bay case for 190$ Canadian (I will post a review on it later. Lots of fans and cooling!) I also just borrowed a kill-a-watt. Will test!@ Cheers for now.

Awesome! Thanks. I will probably by the deluxe version. The Premium version is a little pricey for 4 more sata and 2 more nics.

I think I found an expensive alternative: If I ever have 1500$ to spare... So for the ubber rich who want the ultimate performance, use this as both Cache and Parity! Prices will come down in a few years. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this. ACARD is reasonable price for video editing! ACARD ANS-9010 150MB/s write (245$ plus ddr2 cheap ram 40$ for 4GB and up) Problem is sata2 can only go so fast! 510MB/s in raid0. But limited to 64 GB of space. http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=308&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=11 Very cool price for 1TB of insane speed on the PCIe slot! 4GB version coming soon. OCZ 1to4TB SSD PCIE card 400-500MB/s Write sustained speeds. 1500$ to 2000$ http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/05/oczs-z-drive-puts-1tb-of-blazing-ssd-capacity-in-your-pcie-slot/ Photofast:256MB-1TB 700MB/s Write sustained: http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/26/photofast-intros-256gb-to-1tb-g-monster-pcie-ssd?icid=sphere_blogsmith_inpage_engadget 1,500,000 hours compared to 1.2 M for Enterprise class Drives (although they are exposed to heat and spinnning…)

AWESOME! I have been looking for something like that. I wonder if it will fit in the LIAN LI PC-P80 or 70 cases with the fans mounted in the swivel door. Or the ANTEC 1200.

If it keeps track of those stats and you can compare bandwidth coming through the Network cards versus writing on the SATA drives, that is awesome. I do this manually now. It would be a good tool to benchmark an unraid server build / certify certain motherboards, controllers, drives. Throw in there drive temperatures. Then all you need is some kind of script which would be the same for everyone to run. In the end, we would see which setup has the best bang for money. All this to say I would like to see it in there, with ssh!

Yeah 400$ is getting up there. I am also trying to build this in a way that can be reproduced by friends and family. They tend to copy me on most things... Although I think the LIan -Li case is sexy, and I love the fans in the front to cool off the drives, I think I am leaning towards the 4020 right now.

What do you guys think of the Lian Li case? I really like the fans in the front and back of the case for great are flow. It has 12 5.25 inch bays in the front and 3 3.5 inch bays top rear. Maximum drives using 3to5 inserts 23 drives with lots of airflow. http://www.lian-li.com.tw/v2/en/product/product06.php?pr_index=212&cl_index=1&sc_index=25&ss_index=61&g=f I am having a hard time deciding between this and the Norco 4020(20 drives hot swap) and the LIan Li cube (30 drives++not hot swap). I suspect the Lian Li Pc-A77 is the best option for being able to read the hard drive serial numbers on the front of them when they fail. My current case allows this, and I love it. It saves me much time when I am tinkering and accidentally hookl a sata cable or power cable lightly. I want a min of 16 drives, max of 20, I prefer to have fans in front of the drives to push air in as well as pull air out the top and back. I am worried that the Norco case will be annoying when trying to read serial numbers, and overall cooling it does not seem 100% perfect. Price wise the Lian Li case is also a little cheaper, until you add the needed "5 into 3" 5.25 inch slot converters at 30$ each. Now the Norco does have the backplane advantage for both power supply and SAS or SATA connectors...depending which one you get. The other case : Lian Li PC-B71 It has a built in 7 Drive raid cage hot swap (power runs included) 3 more drives top rear for 10 sata drives out of the box. Then you have 5x5.25 inch trays left..

OK, Thanks. I will swap that cable first.

I will see if I can find the motherboard layout somewhere. I think the ASUS p5Q Premium would be an awesome board then if this is the case with 10 SATA drives to start... I'll post it if I can find it.

Can you help me identify which drives are on ata4? I think I will shut it down and remove on pci sata 2 card for now. Cheers...