New to unraid, Server design and a few questions

[steckel]

Hello

 

I am building my first unraid server, mainly to consolidate all the fileservers in the LAN (xtreamer etrayz 2x2TB, xtreamer pro 2x2TB, QNAP 409 4x1TB and a small linux machine that runs a webserver and slimserver software) I will decomission the old machines and use their parts to build the unraid server:

 

Fractal Design ARC MIDI tower

ASUS AT5NM10T-I board

2x4GB RAM

3ware 9500s 4 Port @1GB cache in 32Bit PCI

3x2TB and 1x1TB data disks - these will connect to the 3ware

1x2TB as parity, Momentus XT 500GB (or a 60GB OCZ Vertex) as cache drive - both will connect to the onboard SATA ports .

 

I have headroom on the old fileservers to free up 1 or 2 of the big drives to initially attach to the 3ware. I will then start copying over files until the rest of the big drives and one 1TB can be moved to the unraid server.

The qnap will be reconfigured to 3x1TB JBOD and then be used as a backup for important files once I feel it is necessary to backup stuff, otherwise it will be switched off.

 

I may later replace the mainboard and controller to get more SATA ports but these are the components right now available to me.

 

Does the build sound reasonable to you ? Will the 9500s work out of  the box (the forum is not clear about this) ?

 

The 2TB drives are from different manufacturers. Does it matter which one is used as parity drive or can I assume that the bytecount is the same throughout different vendors? Is it possible to let unraid not use the complete datadisks but only 99% for the filesystem?

 

Is there an addon that sends a mail when a configurable amount of data in a share has changed so that I can switch on the backup machine to rsync data off from the array?

 

If I preclear the drives on my workstation I just drop them in the unraid box and can use them without further delay, correct ?

 

Is it possible to add the parity drive as the last drive after the array is created?

 

Best regards,

Christoph

[Johnm]

lets back the bus up.

 

the ASUS AT5NM10T-I only has 1 PCIe 4x expansion port.

the 3ware 9500s is PCI2.2. the two are not compatible...

 

The 3ware card, even if it works (i have no clue), would be a bottleneck this day and age. it would slow your system down as much 25% of the normal speed if plugged into a PCI slot.

 

You could add 4 Drives to the motherboard ports to start out with. you could then pick up a supermicro SASLP-MV8 to give you 12 drive support.

 

The 2TB drives are from different manufacturers. Does it matter which one is used as parity drive or can I assume that the bytecount is the same throughout different vendors?

it does not matter, I would use the fastest one.

Is there an addon that sends a mail when a configurable amount of data in a share has changed so that I can switch on the backup machine to rsync data off from the array?

not out of the box, but it is scriptable. There are addo-ns that add SMTP support

If I preclear the drives on my workstation I just drop them in the unraid box and can use them without further delay, correct ?

yes

Is it possible to add the parity drive as the last drive after the array is created?

Yes, it would be faster.

BUT, I would not. since you are moving your data, not copying it. you want to make sure you are protected since there is no going back if something is wrong.

 

 

[steckel]

Thanks for the reply.

I made an error when copy+pasting on my mobile phone   

In fact the mainboard is a AT5NM10-I (without the T) - it has 2 onboard SATA connections and a 32bit PCI port. The 9500s is backward compatible with the PCI port.

[Johnm]

The "T" would have made a good unraid server.

the "I" will be very limited...

 

As I said before:

The 3ware card, even if it works (i have no clue), would be a bottleneck this day and age. it would slow your system down as much 25% of the normal speed if plugged into a PCI slot.

The PCI bus speed would only support the use of 1 sata drive at a time at full speed.

If you are only copying/reading 1 drive at a time, it would work. things like parity check will take days instead of hours once the card is full.

while the parity check is running, the array would be pretty much unusable. especially for media.

 

the best way to test the card is to load up a free version of unraid and test it.

 

you could go ahead and a build a test box. just be aware of the speed issues with that hardware.

[steckel]

The 9500s works out of the box.

I just had to do a firmware upgrade on the controller, otherwise:

 

- the disks did only show up with their devicename (SN was missing) and could not be added to the array

- the machine would only boot up when USB2.0 was disabled in the BIOS

 

I had to configure each disk as a unit with a "Single" disk on the 3ware. If you chose to export the disks as JBOD, the cache module will not be used.