ohlwiler Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Sorry, I must have misunderstood. Enjoy your server, I think you are the first I've heard of with a full complement of 3T drives. Quote Link to comment
toby9999 Posted August 4, 2011 Author Share Posted August 4, 2011 Sorry, I must have misunderstood. Enjoy your server, I think you are the first I've heard of with a full complement of 3T drives. No problem And you were quite right in what you said, you just didn't know the full history of my build. Unraid is great, I'm enjoying my array immensely so far and I hope others can learn from my build as they venture into the great uncharted mega-TB realm Quote Link to comment
boof Posted August 4, 2011 Share Posted August 4, 2011 Yep, that's about right ... I've seen it drop as low as 15MBps. But that's only when hammering 20 drives at the same time of course. Thanks - I was interested to know how much of a real world performance penalty the expander imposes in your particular configuration. All very interesting stuff - thanks for the all the responses. Quote Link to comment
toby9999 Posted August 4, 2011 Author Share Posted August 4, 2011 Yep, that's about right ... I've seen it drop as low as 15MBps. But that's only when hammering 20 drives at the same time of course. Thanks - I was interested to know how much of a real world performance penalty the expander imposes in your particular configuration. All very interesting stuff - thanks for the all the responses. You're most welcome my friend - it's a learning journey for all of us. Quote Link to comment
toby9999 Posted February 17, 2012 Author Share Posted February 17, 2012 Update 18 Feb 2012: I didn't have much of a chance to use my rig between August and December as I was travelling for business most of the time, but once things got quiet over xmas, I got to work on tidying up my media collection and using the storage array 24/7. 1) We had a cooler summer this xmas compared to previous years, but there were still a few very hot days. My place still doesn't have air con, but the highest temps I recorded on any of my drives were 41 celcius, with most days more like 30-35. So nothing approaching 50, thank goodness. 2) I still haven't measured the power consumption, but it must be low as I'm only using a couple of drives at a time, with the others sleeping. 3) I was naively putting up with writing speeds of 9.5MB/s (with parity), so I changed my mind about implementing a cache drive. Because I was just a bit nervous about the cache drive not being raided, even though it's only a temporary storage location, I bought a cheapy raid-1 sata3 card (around $30 aussie dollars), and problem solved, now I have a protected raid-1 cache drive. BUT ... even with the cache drive I only achieved around 11MB/s write speeds. Something just wasn't right. My first thought - "omg, there's an enormous bottleneck with the HP SAS Expander! I have to re-design everything!!" Luckily the answer was much simpler ... turned out to be a dodgy cat 5e cable to my router/switch and instead of getting 1Gbps, I was only getting around 100Mbps network speeds. Replaced the bad cable, and now I'm writing at (a) 58MBps without the cache drive and (b) 85-110Mbps with the cache drive. I'm very happy with those numbers. 4) Thanks to these forums I've discovered Plex - finally a media solution that actually works across all my devices. I'm running the windows version of the media server, but I plan on implementing Plex (and couch potato etc) directly on the unraid server (making use of the faster cpu and additional ram I built in). 5) Upgraded to 5b14 - very solid, haven't seen a single problem so far. Also upgraded to a 32GB Kingston usb flash (was using a 8GB) - just wanted more space just in case the future add-ons required more. Cheers Toby Quote Link to comment
bman Posted March 13, 2012 Share Posted March 13, 2012 Thanks for this thread, and for the updates! I am following this with much interest as I have just about filled my first UnRAID system with 2TB drives all around. I am debating whether to start the next server immediately with 3TB drives, or to upgrade my current server with 3TB drives, which would also mean dumping 4.7 for a beta version... and that scares me a little. Have you considered (or tried) using 4TB drives at all? I know pricing is way out there still, but it won't be long before they become a viable option (xmas, mayhaps?) Quote Link to comment
starcat Posted January 28, 2014 Share Posted January 28, 2014 Hi toby, any update on your build? Is all running fine, any upgrades so far? Thanks and cheers. Quote Link to comment
starcat Posted January 29, 2014 Share Posted January 29, 2014 Is the HP SAS Port Expander PCIe (468406-B21) actually a 3 or 6 Gbps expander card? Is it easily firmware upgradeable (any need for that at all)? Quote Link to comment
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