Older MD5010/LI - with Super C2SEE MB - Suggestions?

[David Bott]

Hello…

 

I have a MD5010/LI that was purchased sometime back.  It came with Super C2SEE Motherboard and 4 Gigs RAM.  It was a full system so it also had the 2 Adaptec 1430SE Cards and another card that has a single internal connection and external one.

 

I was thinking up of upgrading my RAM to 8 Gigs and found out it can only handle 4. 

 

So that lead me to  a few questions. 

 

1) Is the RAM really needed?  (Would it help with anything seeing it is just a file server?) 

 

2) If I was to change motherboards, which one is recommended that would work with my parts and would I gain anything with a newer board and even processor as far as the array was concerned?

 

Running…

 

Intel® Core2 Duo CPU    E7300  @ 2.66GHz

4 Gigs DDR3 1333

15 Drives with 1 external cache drive totaling 17.5TB of storage with 13TB used.

2 Adeptec 1430SE cards

 

Thank you

 

David Bott

 

[StevenD]

That motherboard, with 4GB of RAM, is still more than capable of running unRAID.  I run that same motherboard with AOC-SASLP-MV8 and I see very high parity check speeds.  <knock on wood>  I havent had an ounce of trouble with that motherboard in the two years Ive had it.

[David Bott]

That motherboard, with 4GB of RAM, is still more than capable of running unRAID.  I run that same motherboard with AOC-SASLP-MV8 and I see very high parity check speeds.  <knock on wood>  I havent had an ounce of trouble with that motherboard in the two years Ive had it.

 

 

I do agree, no issues at all.  Just was wondering if I would have any benefit really.  Thousands on thousands of files (travel photos) and the like.  Not to mention I also serve XBMC thumbs etc from it.  (One down side to XMBC is that you can not turn off the actors images and thus thousands of them by themselves.)

 

But I do agree...no issue with the board itself.

[Rajahal]

You have no reason to upgrade that I can see.  4 GBs of RAM is plenty, even today.  Certain add-ons can benefit from more RAM, but there aren't any that won't run on 4 GBs.  Don't fix what ain't broken!

 

If you want snappier performance when dealing with small files such as photos and thumbnails, consider adding an SSD as a cache drive or data drive.  If used as a cache drive, it will allow for very fast transfers, delaying the slow write to the parity protected array until the middle of the night (note: all data on the cache drive is at risk of drive failure until the write to the parity protected array is complete).  If used as a data drive, you could create a share that is relegated to the SSD (using the include/exclude options) and put all your XBMC thumbs and metadata on that share.  If there's enough room left over, you could put all your photos there as well.  Write speeds to that share will be the same as any other data disk, but read speeds will be much faster.  I employ this latter approach for all my often-used business documents and product photos.