60TB, Cool, Quiet, Living Room Friendly


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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  :D

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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.

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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.

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  • 6 months later...

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

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  • 4 weeks later...

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?)

 

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  • 1 year later...

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