Rajahal

Nice hexen! I added a couple of my favorites as well. I'll keep working on this later (adding pics, etc.). By the way, just yesterday I updated this section of my Prototypes blog with some new cases, such as the Utgard Window (the original has been discontinued).

There's also a few new 4 x 5'25" bay cases by Gigabyte. This one is my favorite: GIGABYTE GZ-X5BPD-500 Black I think it looks pretty sharp, and it also sports a 120mm rear fan. Some of the others have 80mm rear fans. GIGABYTE GZ-P5HA3W Black GIGABYTE GZ-P5HA3W Black GIGABYTE GZ-X6BPD-500 Black (shiny!) GIGABYTE gz-KX9 Black (interesting look...but a little too weird for me) GIGABYTE GZ-X2BPD-500 Black (dig it!)

There's a few new 12 x 5.25" bay cases on the market by Xigmatech: Xigmatek Elysium Black Server Edition (non window) CCC-HSA0DS-U03 All Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Super Tower Computer Case - $220 + shipping Xigmatek Elysium Black CCC-HSA0DS-U01 All Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Super Tower Computer Case - $220 + shipping Xigmatek Elysium Silver CCC-HSA0DS-U02 Black / Silver Aluminum / Steel ATX Super Tower Computer Case - $220 + shipping Pricing is roughly half-way between the Lian Li cases and Antec cases. I still prefer the looks of the Antec 1200 to these, although the Xigmatechs appear to have lots of rubberized cable management cutouts, which is a nice feature. The built-in casters (wheels) in two of the three models are also very nice, as 20 drive servers are heavy!

Nice list! Stickied!

I recommend the Corsair 600W for your server (it happens to be on sale right now as well!). It has 40A on a single +12V rail, which is allows 34A for your green drives and leaves 6A to power the motherboard and fans (which is plenty). By the way, when shopping for power supplies there's really no point in calculating the wattage. All decent power supplies will give you an amperage rating for the 12 V rail, so just look at that. The wattage can be deceiving, best just to look at amperage and ignore the wattage. Also, as you said, all of your drives will spin up on boot, power down, during a parity check, and during a rebuild from parity. You need a PSU that can handle your server at full load. Don't skimp on your PSU!

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Your PSU has 28A to power the hard drives, motherboard, and fans. Assume 3A for the motherboard and fans. Your drives currently pull 24A (18 for the green drives, 6 for the 7200 RPM drives). If some of your green drives are Western Digital drives, then they actually use a bit less power (1.5A instead of the standard 2A). If there are no WD drives in your server, then you are currently using 27 of your 28 available amps. Adding one more of each type of drive is a total of 5A, which brings you to a total of 32A, which is definitely over the limit for your PSU. I would definitely hold off on adding any more drives until you get your replacement CX500. If you are using a lot of WD drives, then there's a good chance you can get away with adding one more green drive, but even then you might be pushing it. If you are using a cache drive, consider removing it temporarily to make space for another data drive if you need the space before you are able to get the replacement PSU.

You are correct, you have a split rail PSU with 17A on each rail. Generally one rail powers the CPU and GPU and the other powers the motherboard, fans, and HDDs. Leave 3A for the motherboard and fans. That means you have 14A to power all of your drives. Allocate 2A for each green drive and 3A for each 7200 RPM drive. I'm not sure about your Hitachi drives, are they green? If so, then you should have about 15X2A = 30A. If they are 7200 RPM then you'll have (9X3A) + (6X2A) = 39A. Either way, your PSU is definitely under-powered and you should look into upgrading it immediately. I'm surprised that your server still boots with that PSU. There are a few factors that could be at play. First, some PSU manufacturers advertise their power supplies as split rail when they are actually single rail because split rail is more attractive to gamers or people who have lots of PCI/PCIe cards. I didn't think that Seasonic was in this practice, but maybe they are. Second, the WD Greens actually use about 1.5A instead of 2A, they boast the lowest power consumption of all green drives. Even still, that only saves you 1.5A total, which doesn't account for the 13A (or larger) gap that you currently appear to have. I still recommend assuming the WD Greens pull 2A just so you have a bit of overhead. Best of luck!

Twenty drives in the external enclosures(four 4 bay and one 5 Bay--one four bay has 3 drives in it). Then I have the cache and parity drive in the 3in2 enclosure in the PC case. Hi Aaronwt, I was wondering how your running the Sans Digitals on the Unraid server? And do they become one drive added to the server or 3,4 or 5? I have 2 Sans Digital 5 drive (Raid5) and wondered how I might be able to use them with my setup. I guess I'm wondering if your using the Sata Raid cards that might have come with yours as well? And if so that would be great for me if I decide to use mine. Also are you having any bottleneck issues using these external boxes? You need to use a motherboard and/or SATA card(s) that support port multipliers via eSATA. The drives will show up as individual drives, not one big one.

Also, Seasonic has some of the best customer service on the planet. Several people on these forums have just sent them an email asking for more of the modular molex cables and Seasonic sent them for free!

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SeaSonic X Series X650 Gold You want this one. The 54A single +12V rail is more than enough for a single 7200 RPM drive and 19 green drives. It is an all-around great power supply, I use one in my DJ computer. It also happens to be on sale for $120 right now in case you don't want to wait for November.

Wow! Why enterprise drives? Hope you have a beefy PSU to power them all. Also, how do you plan on mounting the final 2 drives (as unRAID currently maxes out at 22 drives)? The Supermicro rackmount looks nice - we don't see them often here as most people opt for the less expensive Norco.

Huh, that's very odd. I've never had any trouble with those PSUs, and I've used probably 10 or more of them. You are correct that it shouldn't matter which half of the 8 pin connector you use, but of course it can't hurt to try the other half. I suppose at this point I would just return the PSU as defective and go for a different brand (such as the 400W Antec Neo Eco).

The 430W PSU absolutely should work for your set up. Perhaps you just had a loose connection? Also, did you remember to plug in the small 4 pin power plug as well as the large 20 pin one? Your motherboard requires both (not all do).

50C is way too hot for the Seagates. At those temps they will die in a matter of months. As a temporary solution, you can put an 80 or 120mm fan on top of the drives blowing up (pulling hot air from the drives and forcing it up into the case). Your side fans should then take care of the rest.

Nice! I think that's a first on these forums. What are your hardware specs, and how are your drive temps?

Possibly the Rosewill RSV-R4000?

In a multi-rail PSU generally only one rail goes to the hard drives. Another will feed the CPU, and the last two are reserved for video cards.

Wow, that's a lot of external enclosures! All eSATA? How many drives? I count 18 drive bays.

Great review! Love that massive C-clamp... The drive is inserted the wrong way!

Nope, that's a good choice if you want to run 7200 rpm drives. For an all-green server it is overkill, but it will still work just fine. For that price I would definitely go for it.

So did the 4gb ram change the numbers? Sorry, haven't gotten to that test yet. I'll get it started today. Edit: It seems I'm not able to run the test. For some reason, my 'Prototype' test server refuses to boot with 4 GB (2 x 2GB) of RAM. With 2 GB in DIMM1 it boots reliably. With anything in DIMM2 it won't boot. Possibly a defective DIMM slot, but I don't have time to fully test it right now. Sorry to disappoint Joe L.: I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe to be a small bug with preclear 1.12beta. When using it with unRAID 4.7, preclear 1.12beta defaults to sector 63. Changing the 4k alignment setting in 4.7 does cause preclear to automatically switch to sector 64, without using the -A flag. Everything seems normal when using preclear1.12beta in conjunction with unRAID 4.7. The same is not true when using preclear1.12beta in conjunction with unRAID 5.0beta10. unRAID 5.0beta10 defaults to 4k alignment. When running preclear 1.12beta with a default install of unRAID 5.0beta10, preclear still defaults to sector 63, which is a mis-match compared to unRAID's default settings. Switching 5.0beta10 to 4k unaligned and then back to 4k aligned gets preclear 1.12beta to default to sector 64. It appears as though preclear is looking for a change in the disk alignment parameter, and that if there is no change it defaults to sector 63. I suggest that what should happen is that preclear has no knowledge of unRAID's default setting, and instead checks the disk alignment setting each time to make sure that it matches.

3 TB drive preclear test results, round 2 (all drives are 3 TB Hitachi CoolSpins, all test servers running unRAID 5.0-beta10, all running preclear 1.12 beta): This time around I tested the SIL3132 SATA controller. I'm using the Monoprice controllers, but any 2 port PCIe x1 SIL3132 controller should have similar if not identical results. Drive Duration Server 6E1A 54:47:52 Thailand B1NA 53:24:05 Thailand GE5A 46:49:55 Prototype GEUA 47:30:24 Prototype AVG: 50 hours 'Thailand' is a Supermicro X7SLA-H with a built-in Atom CPU and 2 GB of DDR2 533 RAM (2 x 1GB). 'Prototype' is a ZOTAC GF6100-E-E with a Sempron 140 CPU and 2 GB of DDR2 800 RAM (1 x 2GB). Both servers were configured with a single SIL3132 card plugged into a PCIe x16 port. My first round of testing resulting in an average preclear time of 44.6 hours when using the motherboards' onboard SATA ports. The SIL3132 controllers appear to slow things down by over 6 hours, with an average of 50 hours per cycle of preclear. Average per server: Thailand: 53.5 hours Prototype: 46.5 hours Yet again, the slower core components appear to result in significantly slower preclear times, a difference of 7 hours. I think these results make it pretty clear that if you are looking for the fastest preclear times SIL3132 controllers should be avoided. However, if you aren't concerned with preclear taking a couple extra hours to complete, there's nothing wrong with using these controllers. Seeing as they are very inexpensive, they are a great way to eek out a few more SATA ports from an otherwise full motherboard. They are compatible with PCIe x1, x4, x8, and x16 slots, so they are very versatile. There are also PCI versions of the card, but I would expect these to have even worse performance due to PCI bus limitations. I also tested a new motherboard for 3 TB drive compatibility: the Biostar A880G+. Here are those results: Drive Duration Server HXBA 41:58:44 Dev EL8A 42:25:21 Dev G83A 41:36:09 Dev HZMA 42:44:09 Dev AVG: 41.5 hours 'Dev' is a Biostar A880G+ with a Sempron 140 CPU and 2 GB of DDR3 1333 RAM (1 x 2GB). Average preclear speed is exactly the same as the 'Prototype' test server, which has very similar specs. I may run a further test of the SIL3132 card attached to this board, but I'm not sure it is really necessary, since the results should be the same as the 'Prototype' results above. Preclear reports for all of the above are attached below. By the way, I took bjp999's advice and tried a different text editor. I already had notepad++ installed, so I used that and the preclear reports were formatted correctly. Not sure why Window's built in notepad no longer displays these correctly, but I suppose it is no big deal. So far I've determined that all of the following hardware are compatible with 3 TB drives and preclear 1.12 beta: Motherboards Supermicro X7SLA-H ZOTAC GF6100-E-E Biostar A880G+ SATA Controller SIL3132 The remaining items I plan to test over the next week are: Motherboards Supermicro X8SIL-F-O ECS A785GM-M7 (candidate for new 15 drive budget board) Biostar A760G M2+ SATA Controller Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 I will continue to post my results for the above hardware in this thread. Once I've finished with all of this testing I will compile all of the data and results into a single post on the GreenLeaf hardware blog. preclear_reports_round_2.zip

Welcome, and congrats on building your first server! If you are anything like the rest of us, it won't be your last Interpretting SMART reports can be somewhat involved, but Joe L. (the author of the preclear script) has created this nifty output report that makes it much easier. Each of your drives will have a report that looks like this: What this does is run a SMART report before the preclear cycle, then another one after the preclear cycle. It then subtracts the before values from the after values and shows you the difference (the bold numbers above). In this case, there were no differences, so the numbers are all zero. This is a good thing. Numbers greater than zero generally indicate some sort of mechanical problem with a drive, but they don't necessarily mean that the drive must be replaced immediately. You have to evaluate the numbers on a case-by-case basis. This is a topic that you'll learn about little bit at a time as you spend more time on these forums, don't try to digest it all at once. There are a lot of parameters involved in assessing a hard drive's health. In your case, all of your drives look perfectly healthy.