GaryMaster

Rajahal - I completely understand. I almost jumped on it myself - it was a great price. I just wanted to give everyone a heads'-up on the erratic performance variation I was seeing with this drive. 41% longer write times was a big deal to me.

I have grown a little disenchanted with the EARS drives. My initial synthetic benchmarks measured my 1 year old Seagate ST31500 (1.5TB 7200RPM) drives against the same system with 1TB EARS for both Parity and Data. Write Results: Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM): 17.9MB/s 1TB WDEARS: 15.7MB/s (12% Slower) Read Results: Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM): 43.0MB/s 1TB WDEARS: 42.9MB/s (<1% Slower) Fairly good results for the green drives, right? I just built another system today using a 1.5TB WDEARS as Parity and a 1.0TB WDEARS as data. As always, on the EARS drive, I set jumper 7-8 to assure alignment under UNRAID (I had huge performance drops without this on earlier builds). This time, I saw very erratic read performance on the EARS drives and both read and write performance was down - but only for the EARS. The seagate drives are the same ones I had tested in the above system. The platform is the same in both cases (i3-530 based H55 system. The above was an ASUS motherboard this below was the new Zotac Mini ITX H55). I did use the latest build of UNRAID on the new Zotac system (4.5.3): Write Results: Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM): 23.0MB/s 1.5/1.0TB WDEARS: 15.8MB/s (31% Slower) Read Results: Seagate ST31500 (7200 RPM): 42.9MB/s 1.5/1.0TB WDEARS: 35.7MB/s (17% Slower) Not satisfied with the synthetic benchmarks, I did some 5GB file copies from my workstation to the UNRAID NAS. The real world results were telling me the same thing: The EARS system took 2:48s to write the file and the Seagate system took 1:59s. 41% slower to write to the EARS system. I would have a difficult time recommending the EARS drives until I can identify the source of the performance variations I have seen from system to system. Couple this to the need to assure allignment and this drive can yeild very bad results for beginners who are unaware of some of these issues. The prices on these things have been great and the power consumption is very good, but be aware of the potential performance pitfalls before you buy.

Glad you found it useful. I didn't point it out previously, but there is a link on the first page of the roundup that references an earlier roundup they did which compared the 5400-5900 RPM drives of similar size. This may be useful for some here who are contemplating the tradeoffs between power consumption and performance for "green" drives vs the 7200 RPM variety.

Here is a recent roundup of 2TB drives. Does a good job illustrating the strengths and weaknesses on sequential performance, access time and power consumption. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/2tb-7200rpm.html

Yep! Oh, hold on... let me grab my popcorn... Wow... and you guys think I should be spending my time on more valuable activities!

You must not have autosensing ports on your ethernet adapters, so you would require a "crossover" ethernet cable. Either that or you have your machines are setup for DHCP and there was no DHCP server connected to provide an IP address. In either case, I measured comparable performance through a good gigabit switch, and it had very little impact on the performance. I am puzzled by why you are seeing these great read speeds and yet no performance increase in write speeds. Seems completely backwards to me. I am traveling this week and don't have a lot of time to analyze your information, but it looks like you are writing to your user share which should write directly to your cache drive...

Rajahal: Thanks again for doing this! Those results are simply the transfer speeds for each file size listed in kB/s... the number on the left side is the file size in kBytes and the number on the right is the transfer speed in kB/s. There are 4 tests: Writing, RE-Writing, Reading and Re-Reading. I tend to only look at the READER and WRITER reports since the re-writes and re-reads merely evaluate the effectiveness of buffering. so, as an example from your data for the WRITER report (Write speeds): 2097152 32710 4194304 21246 8388608 19342 The 8GB file wrote at a rate of 19.3MB/s (19340kB/s). This isn't really very good since I was able to get speeds of over 21MB/s from fast hard drives without a cache drive. The strange thing is that your READER report (read speeds) are off the chart: 2097152 78532 4194304 75501 8388608 80803 Here, an 8GB file transferred at over 80MB/s. That's a phenominal rate. Reading your post again, I'm wondering if you just plugged the SSD in as a data disk in your unRAID server instead of cache. If this is the case, your results make much more sense since your parity drive is still a rotating disk and would limit only the write speed. This is about 30MB/s faster than my vRaptor drives could transmit data over the wire! Network headroom does not appear to be the primary limiting factor in over-the-wire performance. Once you get your cache drive working properly for writes, I would think that they would be running near this 80MB/s rate (though write speeds for MLC SSDs are much worse than their read speeds, so it may not be quite this good).

If you're getting a sync message on your monitor then it is probably not the monitor's power supply overheating. I believe your strategy of running it with the case unmounted from the monitor (maybe even with the lid removed from the case) for the weekend is a good diagnostic to try.

The new socket 1156 H55 Zotac board would probably fit nicely in there too. I like the lian-li cases and had exhaustively searched their offerings. I really wanted an option that would support a hot swap backplane, but no luck. Ended up buying the Chenbro Mini ITX server case with 4 hot swap bays.

I believe you will find that you have everything you need with the components that you ordered, assuming you purchased a retail boxed processor (comes with fan/heatsink and thermal grease preapplied). You will need a flash drive, but I assume you have one of those laying around. Your motherboard will come with at least 2 (probably 4) SATA cables, but you only need two to connect your two drives. Those backplanes will probably not come with any SATA cables and most people will preconnect all of the ports on their bays to the available SATA ports so they don't have to tear open the case again to add the cables later. Your motherboard only has 6 ports, so you will only be able to connect one of them (and one port from the other) anyway.

That's OK, I'll let you know if I get serious about modding it - Thanks for offering. Your problem does sound like a thermal issue. Is it always all or nothing or do you see some graphical corruption before the screen goes out. I wouldn't totally rule out the onboard graphics overheating if you aren't getting good air movement out of that case, but your temps wouldn't indicate a problem. Those few who have run this fanless have another fan nearby moving air past an oversized heatsink (like a case fan or P/S fan). Neither are a real option in this case.

The only thing I don't like about the m350 case is the rectangular recess in the front of the case (apparantly for a custom logo). I wondered if MINI BOX's little PICO LCD would fit into that space. Did you ever check that out?

That's good to know. Really love that case and these processors are a rediculous bargain when it comes to processing power and efficiency. I'm really surprised newegg hasn't picked it up yet. I was also going to VESA mount one of these for a kitchen recipe kiosk. I picked up one of the 22" multitouch monitors to use for the project. What kind of CPU temps are you getting in that case? It would be nice if you could run the i3-530 completely passive. I've read of some doing this, but I think it's pushing things a bit.

Good to know. These guys have already convinced me that I should just find a fast 80-120GB drive rather than mess around with the added complexity of doing a stripe set to try to force two smaller drives to work. I'm eagerly awaiting Weebotech's results.

Thanks for trying to help, but this does not have the appearance or functionality I would want to have. As mentioned above, I ended up purchasing a new Chenbro 4 bay ITX NAS server case instead, but would still be very interested in experiences others have with the trayless 5 in 3 units. To me, the screwless installation convenience is everything a hot swap bay should be.