tucansam

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Everything posted by tucansam

  1. I had one (1) a few months ago. Last parity check found 47 errors. I am going to bring the system down tonight and run memtest, after I get SMART reports on all drives. How worried should I be? Is this an "OMG!" number of errors?
  2. I have posted this on several other forums, but the signal-to-noise ratio here is much higher than any other forum I read, so I figured I'd give you guys a project I have a wired lan segment downstairs, and a wired lan segment upstairs. I need to bridge both connections, and I need to do it wirelessly. I can't run CAT6, the POE adapters I have now are horrible, and I don't have coax so I can't use that. I have an old cheap Linksys running dd-wrt that will bridge to an existing access point, and it works, but its slow (b/g). I'd like to do AC speeds. N is a minimum, AC is ideal. I tried a pair of Ubiquity Unifi APs, and they do not have this functionality from what I have learned. Too bad, they are hands down the best APs I have ever used, and make all consumer-grade stuff look like a kid's LEGOs set. I've read that dd-wrt's implementation of what I want to do is buggy and requires frequent resets. As you can imagine, this bridged network needs to stay up 99.999% of the time. I've looked at a point-to-point wireless setup. Ubiquity's Nanos would work but are too slow. Actual tower-grade professional point-to-point stuff in the 60 and 80GHz range is awesome but extremely expensive, and I can't have 15 watt satellite dishes in two rooms pointing at each other in my house I presently serve all my wireless clients in the house with a Ubiquity Unifi AP in the N range. Its awesome. I have 99% signal in 75% of the house, and 70% signal everywhere else. I blast it with all kinds of traffic and it never skips a beat. I need to keep the AP functionality. I do not need routers. I've considered a pair of Netgear Nighthawks, one acting as an AP/bridge and the other as a bridge endpoint. Never used them before and have no idea how mature the dd-wrt build is on this, and at >$400 for the pair, I can't afford to find out. I've considered lesser (Linksys, Asus, Buffalo, other Netgear, Trendnet) AC routers/bridges in the same config, same concerns about dd-wrt. I've considered a single AC AP with a "wireless extender" (something meant to allow a TV or other wired device wifi access, but with the ability to be plugged into a switch to serve multiple clients) but reviews of said devices are very hit-or-miss in terms of reliability (daily or weekly reboots needed etc). Frankly, the Ubiquity product I have been using has me spoiled, I set it up a year ago and haven't touched it since. I don't want something that I need to reset once a week; the POE adapter I am using now already needs that, and is very slow on this house's wiring. I may just pull the trigger on an AC wireless extender and roll the dice; if it bridges with my Ubiquity, then I at least have 300mbps speed until I buy an AC Unifi AP. I'd have to cross my fingers that I end up as one of the reviewers that loves it, vs one that reboots it once a day. Any comments or suggestions welcome.
  3. I feel for the owners of these boards. I was a systems integration test engineer for several years for a major telecom company, a lifetime ago. After reading multiple threads on multiple forums, I can simply conclude that these boards are not ready for prime-time, and were not ready when they were rolled out. For every post I read about a board running fine, there are five posts about the boards not running (poorly or at all). There is no way this is a bad batch from the mfg plant, or user error, or someone with esoteric hardware revealing some super rare hidden bug that Asrock couldn't have tested for and predicted. Sounds like these boards were pushed out ahead of proper testing protocol. Or their testing protocol needs an overhaul.
  4. Interestingly, I have the next MB down in that series now, and was looking at the one you have for a six-core system to utilize a Phenom X6 I have now. And yeah our setups sound similar, I have a 9-bay Coolermaster I am filling with iStar 5-in-3s. The only drives that would hang off the x1 card would be data drives, and then they would be the last two I ever get, as I can run 14 drives (parity, cache, and 12 data) off the x16 slot with the Supermicro card. Sounds like it would work just fine. Thanks!
  5. My current MB has 6 SATA on board, a PCI Express x1 slot, and a, x16 slot. If I put a Supermicro 8-port in the x16, I'll only need two more SATA ports. How much of a bottleneck will the x1 slot be for a 2-port SATA card?
  6. That Asus motherboard supports ECC? Is it CPU dependent? I have an Athlon X2 that I'd like to use in an ECC-based server if possible....
  7. When downloading it says the md5: (NOT matched - download may be corrupted or download URL no longer valid.) And then won't install. Any updates to this package or another place to get it without having to compile it myself?
  8. Hahahaha. I agree, just something seems, well, not quite right about it! Ha.
  9. I have been using one iStarUSA 5-in-3 for about two years in a Coolermaster Centurion 590. I removed the fan and back plastic trim before I even mounted it in the case. I have five 120mm fans (SilenX yellows and reds with the little temperature probe) and a Silverstone 120mm on the CPU heatsink (super low power Athlon X2). The system is virtually silent from a foot away, and all of the fans are drawing air out of the case. I sealed up every mfg hole, screw hole, fancy vent, etc., in the case except where the fans are mounted. 100% of air being drawn out by the fans is coming in from the front of the 5-in-3 enclosure, and I've never had a disk go above 34C, on a warm summer day, during a parity check. Most of my disks run between 28-30C when they are in use. There is enough suction to easily hold a 8.5x11 sheet of paper flush against the front of the drive enclosure. I am using 5900rpm disks and a 3.5" 7200rpm cache disk mounted on a PCI-slot drive adapter, directly above the power supply fan, which is of course also drawing air out (still can't understand why anyone would mount a power supply so the fan is not drawing out internal case air). I will be adding a second iStar 5-in-3 shortly, and will remove the fan from the rear also. All of the case fans are running at their lowest RPM setting. If I ever run into temp problems with a second (and eventually third) 5-in-3, I will either up the RPMs or switch to higher output fans. Dust does collect. The front of the drive bay enclosure gets vacuumed every time the floors do (weekly), and once a year the case side panel gets popped off and the internals get blasted with air and vacuumed. This setup has been 100% stable and 100% cool (literally speaking). I am curious to see what happens with a second 5-in-3 installed.
  10. Running 5.0.5 on my test server. Wow, that was terribly, terribly simple. This whole time I've been paranoid about upgrading. I think that was about as painless as can be. Thanks.
  11. Well I just got 90-112MB/s sustained reads and 30-40MBs sustained writes without a parity disk, so I think I'll build a legit system around this baby.
  12. Currently on 5.0-rc5 Its working well for me, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Any glaring reasons for me to upgrade to a newer release? I have largely ignored the newest version (6?) but I figure I better start learning before I fall so far behind I have no idea what the new features are (and if I need them or not) Most important for me is that simplefeatures work, that's about it.
  13. Worst case scenario is five or six devices all simultaneously accessing (eventually) via 802.11ac speeds, with one or two via wired gig-e. So I'd like to be ready for that.
  14. M5A78L-M. I'll have to see if there is a BIOS update. My Documents redirects for every Windows system in the house and a media server to numerous devices. I'd like the gigabit NIC to be the bottleneck of this system so desktop interactivity and media playback aren't affected.
  15. http://www.directron.com/bpnde350ssblk.html Got one of these now and love it, going to order a second, and eventually a third. My tower is going from floor-standing to laying on its side so I can hide it in my cabinet. In this configuration, the drives would be running upside down. No idea if this is a problem or not, but I'd rather not find out. Anyone know if the iStar units can be mounted "upside down" (in a floor-standing setup)? Without taking my sever out of service and trying it myself, I have no idea. IE do the screw holes line up with standard PC case pre-drilled drive mount holes if the 5-bay chassis is installed upside down. Thanks.
  16. I need to add an 8-port SATA controller (and eventually two) to my server, and it looks like I need to upgrade my MB to do so. Might as well spend the money and get a true server-class board with ECC support. Lots of options out there. I don't do anything on unraid except unraid, no need for transcoding, SAB, etc,. or a high end CPU. Couple of PCIe x8/16 slots would be nice. ECC support is a must. Onboard SATA, well, if I'm going to run a pair of controllers, is there any benefit to using onboard? Might as well use the breakout cables and clean the inside up to promote airflow. Any suggestions on the current gold standard (budget gold standard, lol) in server-class motherboards? Thanks.
  17. The only things listed in the BIOS boot order are CDROM, SATA, and Removable. I've got removable selected, and it still needs me to press F8. System time was wrong... Maybe it is the CMOS battery. Good call.
  18. Well this seems to have recently cropped up. I have an ASUS MB and, when I first got it, I really had to play with the BIOS settings to get it to boot from USB with SATA drives plugged in. It worked for a while (automatically) but now its stopped working. When I reboot my server, I have to plug in a kb/monitor and press F8, then select the USB device. I'm done trying to figure out why this isn't working, or which BIOS settings combo I had to get right. First question: if I use a SATA card, like the popular Supermicro, will the BIOS still want to boot from a SATA disk on that controller? I know every BIOS is different, I just mean as a matter of default, will most PC BIOSes want to boot from SATA? Second question: can anyone recommend a good MB (intel or AMD, I don't care) that will boot from USB *everytime* without user input, no matter what is plugged into onboard SATA or PCI controllers? Third question since I'm here, my MB has PCIEx1 slots (two) and an x16 slot. If I get a pair of Supermicro SATA controllers, am I going to lose speed plugging them into the x1 slots? Thanks.
  19. What kind of drive temps are you seeing with the stock fans?
  20. What Noctua fans do you recommend? Better airflow or better static pressure?
  21. I know the answer is "not very important." I have an ASUS C60M1-I, 1.0GHz dualcore, six SATA. Super low power, and seems like it would be the perfect unraid server board (before all the new Atoms started coming out) for someone who just want the server to, well, serve (that's me, I don't run apps on my unraid system). There has been some availability issues with it, even when it was in production, so maybe that explains why more folks didn't adopt it? I have only set mine up as a backup server at the moment, and I'm waiting on some new parts so I can't test it. Plus I ran it without a cache drive, so writes were painfully slow at the time. But I am thinking about using it in another build, with a cache drive, to save some cash vs buying new hardware. Wondering if anyone here uses it, what performance you get, etc? I would think it would be perfect for me, but I'll be connecting it essentially directly to my main workstation, and I'd like to be able to saturate the gig interface. Wondering if this lower-end MB would be able to do that.
  22. The only case I am comparing this one to is the UNAS case. Maybe I should start a "vs" thread, but I am liking the Silverstone less and less based on this thread. May have to start taking a serious look at the UNAS case instead. I love modding cases, but I don't feel right supporting a product that is fundamentally flawed, when I can vote with my wallet instead. Too bad as all of the Silverstone stuff I've had in the past has been top notch. Still following this thread with interest as I sort out which case to buy....
  23. On my current server I have all fans drawing air out. i have sealed the entire case except for the drive cage. Thus all air brought into the case is drawn over the disks. Temps are under 30 degrees C idle and never get above 36 degrees C during a parity check. Curious if anyone has tried flipping the side fans on the Silverstone case so that they draw air out. Sealing up the case so that air only flows across the disks would be interesting.
  24. A (weird) question. What is the total height of the case with the rubber feet installed? Without?
  25. Still following this thread with interest, as I squirrel money into the "mamma don't know" account for a couple new builds! One thing I have gleamed from this discussion, is that stock fans suck, and stock temps suck. So add a few new fans to the price of the case. Oh well. Looking at the aforementioned Noctuas as $20/ea on the egg. What other fans have you fellas used with success Quiet is good, cooler drive temps is better. Thanks.