advice on hardware list that I already have?

[a5ian300zx]

Hi all,

 

I built the below initiall to have as a HTPC and NAS, but i have changed my mind and would like it just as a 6/7bay NAS for my HDI Dune Prime 3. at the moment i have 6 drives samsung F4 and one SSD.

 

case: Lian Li PC-Q08B (case) + additional sound proofing and replacement fans

Scan.co.uk: Lian Li PC-Q08B, Black, Small Tower Chassis

Motherboard: Asus E35M1-I DELUXE (Hudson chipset with onboard 6310 GPU / Wifi/ passive cooled)

Scan.co.uk: Asus E35M1-I DELUXE AMD Hudson M1 Integrated AMD Zacate 18W Mini ITX Motherboard

RAM: 4GB G.Skill DDR3 ECO Series PC3-10666 1.35v

G.Skill 4GB DDR3 ECO Series PC3-10666 1333MHz CL7 Dual Channel Memory Upgrade Kit

PSU: Seasonsonic X460 (fanless psu and fully modular)

Scan.co.uk: Seasonic SS-460FL 460W Fanless Power Supply (PSU)

HDD: Samsung 2TBx6 in Raid5

Scan.co.uk: Samsung HD204UI 2TB Spinpoint F4 Hard Drive SATA II 3Gb/s

OS HDD: Crucial 64gb SSD

Scan.co.uk: Crucial RealSSD M4 64GB - Solid State Drive - CT064M4SSD2

Raid: Areca 1220 8 port Raid controller

Scan.co.uk: Areca ARC-1220 8 Port PCI-E SATA II RAID 6 Controller - see specs

 

I would like to know how to best connect the hardware i have, running it most effectively.

 

shall i connect the 6 samsung drives to the areca 1220 card and another samsung parity drive (which i will get) to the motherboard along with the SSD? does the unraid install on the SSD? does the parity drive have to be a certain size?

 

also I would like to map the path for the unraid server to my Windows 7 PC so i can transfers data across is this possible? if so what are the transfer speeds like? 

 

any help much appreciated.

[Johnm]

Looking at your shopping list.

 

I'll give you some honest advice.

I would would actually suggest a different OS, while this is an unRAID forum and pretty much unraid oriented, you already have a nice low power yet efficient "hardware raid" build.

 

Assuming that your nic card is stable under heavy load, with your hardware, I would install win2008r2 or WHS2011 on the SSD (2011 will take a minor hack because the drive is under 160gig).

build a raid 5 or 6 on the Areca and use that for your storage.

 

that would get you much better performance then unraid can offer. you would consume slightly more electricity. but, because you are limited to 6-8 drives in your build (due to raid array limit), it should still be fairly electricity friendly. it would not be a huge differance in consumption.

 

I have a very similar build using a supermicro Atom based motherboard and an Areca ARC-1222 w/ 8x samsung F4 2TB drives in a Nexus Prominent 9 running Win 2008r2 and it is very nice.

 

that said,

if you still want to go with unRAID, check the forums to see if that motherboard is solid or problematic.

assuming it is good, the best solution would be to use the areca card without a hardware raid.

Place all the 2TB drives on the areca.

place the ssd on the motherboard to use as a cache drive. you might also get better performance if one 2TB is on the motherboard (the parity drive).

unraid itself runs in RAM and boots off of a flash drive.

 

 

 

[a5ian300zx]

thanks for the feedback, I will just do as you suggested. makes sense.

 

UNraid in the future when my need for storage grows.

 

thanks

 

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