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Mate, good choice of hardware and craftsmanship in the assembly, I especially like the cabling too :).

 

Hey folks, built my first unRAID server about a month ago ... just now getting around to posting some pics.

 

Here's my config:

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Antec Nine Hundred Two Case (w/ 1 extra Antec drive cage for 3 total)

SuperMicro X7SPA-HF Mini ITX Board  (IPMI rocks)

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 200-Pin DDR2 (667)

Corsair 650HX 650W Modular Power Supply

Verbatim TUFF-'N'-TINY 4GB Flash

1 x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black (parity drive)

2 x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green (WD20EARS)

2 x 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000

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If I remember correctly ...

Parity build speed ~60MB/s

Parity check speed ~75MB/s

 

Sorry, I'm a lousy photographer.

 

Such a tiny board in such a big space ...

The Verbatim TUFF-'N'-TINY is installed directly into the motherboard.  It's very tiny and barely noticeable.

I took the time to braid all of the exposed wires (e.g. case fans, front panel IO, etc.) even though they are mostly routed behind the motherboard tray.  Looks nicer that way.

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Here's a better view at the drives.  I only have 5 in there right now (8TB data + 2TB parity).  I will expand as I need more.  They're spaced out right now, so the drives stay very cool. During parity checks, the WD Black maxes out at 30 degrees, the WD Greens max out around 28 degrees, and the Hitachi drives max out at 29 degrees.  These temps are with all of the case fans running at their slowest speeds.

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A look at the backside wiring.  Not too bad ... glad it's hidden. Zip-tie anchors are a must-have.

Also bought a nice braided 12" power cable extender to help route the power behind the motherboard.  Without the extender, the power cable wasn't long enough to route behind the MB tray.

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Oooh ... pretty blue lights.  Cast this bad-boy in the next 'Fast & Furious' flick!  Ok ... seriously, I chose this case because it had nine exposed drive bays and it was fairly cheap ... not because of the blue lights.

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The case came with two drive cages ... each holds 3 drives, has a fan, a fan-speed controller, an air filter, and funky disco lights.  I bought a third drive cage from Antec.

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The case has a window ... it sure made me self-conscious about my wiring.

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I need a medium large, fairly secure NAS.  I store all of my ripped videos as well as family photos and videos, the source files for all of my software (for installs) and so forth.  I was using WHS but there file duplication sucks, they are always shuffling files and so forth.  After much study I decided UnRaid is the ticket and I have to say I am happy so far. 

 

I purchased a Norco 4020 about 6 months ago and had some back plane problems but the RMA handled it and now it works fine.  The air flow in that version of the case wasn't stellar but the nice thing about the UnRaid is that it spins down drives not in use which really helps reduce the heat load, noise and power usage, so that NORCO case will work well for the UnRaid.

 

I'll post pictures when I figure out how to do that.

 

jwc

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I decided to clean up my cables a bit so I could take some decent pictures.  Don't ask for a back shot, tho.  It's just a tuck job.  :)

 

Case:  Cooler Master Centurion 590

Power supply:  BFG 450 Watt >85% efficient

Drive enclosures:  Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B

Motherboard:  Supermicro MBD-X7SPA-H

RAM:  Kingston Valueram 2x1 gig

SATA controller:  Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Drives:

  2xHitachi HDS72202

  1xSeagate ST32000542AS

  3xSamsung HD203WI

  1xSamsung HD204UI

 

Notes:  I replaced the 92mm fans in the drive enclosures with SilenX IXP-64-14T thermistor-controlled fans.  They suck.  They can take as long as 20 seconds to start spinning which means I have as much as 20 seconds of screeching alarms from the enclosures until they get up to speed.  If you're looking for a good 92mm fan, steer clear of this model.  They're very quiet but that startup delay will set off anything configured to monitor fan speed.

 

The power cable going to the motherboard is particularly disappointing.  Why did they put the power supply mount on the bottom of the case?   ::)

 

The last 4 ports on the controller aren't connected to anything.  I didn't want to risk losing the cable, though, so I plugged it in and left the ends behind the drive rails until I fill a few more drives and need to add a third enclosure.

 

There are no fans other than the ones in the drive enclosures and the power supply.  All three are low-noise and temperature controlled.  The noise is so negligible that the sound of a drive spinning up is startlingly loud.  :)  Those fans seem to be doing their job well enough, despite their reluctance to spin up from a cold start.  In a 25C room, they're keeping the drives under 40C and the CPU under 55C.

 

Lastly, a 3" clamp makes quick work of bending down the drive tabs to allow the installation of 5-in-3 enclosures.

 

Side View:

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Enclosures:

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Motherboard:

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Front side:

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Front:

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Here is my modest little rig, first server.....currently running the free version of unraid. (thanks Tom)

 

Current setup....

 

THERMALTAKE 430 POWER SUPPLY

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Brisbane 2.6GHz

GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

PQI POWER Series 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

COOLER MASTER Centurion 590

SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB Flash Drive

(3) WD20EARS (just upgrade from a 320 parity drive, 160 data. 120 data)

 

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Here is my little unRaid set-up.  I have been running unRaid for a little over a year, and love it.  I have three SuperMicro 933t cases, with a 4th on the way.

 

 

Spectacular! Question though, I have been thinking about unRAID with larger arrays such as yours, and to be honest I wouldn't be perfectly happy with a redundancy of just 1 disk. Wouldn't something with multiple drive redundancy like raid6 be more appropriate in your scenario?

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Spectacular! Question though, I have been thinking about unRAID with larger arrays such as yours, and to be honest I wouldn't be perfectly happy with a redundancy of just 1 disk. Wouldn't something with multiple drive redundancy like raid6 be more appropriate in your scenario?

 

 

I used to run raid 6 with traditional $1800.00 raid controllers.  This limited my flexibility with upgrading drives.  I would have to upgrade entire arrays after copying all of my data off somewhere ( part of the reason I have multiple arrays ).  I have never lost more than one drive at a time, yes it did give a little more peace of mind during a rebuild after a drive failure running raid 6.  But then again with unRaid if I did experience a multi drive failure my risk is still mitigated, as only the data on the failed drives is lost.

 

In my application (digital hoarder, I am trying to get help) I just want large amounts of protected space.  I am not concerned with iops or being able to write to the array at over 300MB/s.  I do have different classes of data, with a small subset of data I really care about.  Some of this is actually copied across all three arrays, as well as on an off site server.  An example of such data is family pictures and some (in my opinion, or my wife's) really important documents.

 

With my experience, I have a very important rule I live by for data.

 

If you have data you care about it needs to be in more than one place, a single disk, raid array, or physical location does not qualify.

 

Charles.

 

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I used to run raid 6 with traditional $1800.00 raid controllers.  This limited my flexibility with upgrading drives.  I would have to upgrade entire arrays after copying all of my data off somewhere ( part of the reason I have multiple arrays ).  I have never lost more than one drive at a time, yes it did give a little more peace of mind during a rebuild after a drive failure running raid 6.  But then again with unRaid if I did experience a multi drive failure my risk is still mitigated, as only the data on the failed drives is lost.

 

In my application (digital hoarder, I am trying to get help) I just want large amounts of protected space.  I am not concerned with iops or being able to write to the array at over 300MB/s.  I do have different classes of data, with a small subset of data I really care about.  Some of this is actually copied across all three arrays, as well as on an off site server.  An example of such data is family pictures and some (in my opinion, or my wife's) really important documents.

 

With my experience, I have a very important rule I live by for data.

 

If you have data you care about it needs to be in more than one place, a single disk, raid array, or physical location does not qualify.

 

Charles.

 

I believe most people on these forums suffer from some degree of digital hoarding so if you find a good helpline do let us know ;) But yes, what you say makes sense, and with the necessary RAID controllers it's a lot more expensive than running plain unRAID.

 

You bring up a good point regarding mirroring the most important data. I'm in a similar situation where I have stuff of varying levels of importance, and just as you, pictures and docs are something I can't afford to lose. Initially I copied this stuff manually across most drives, but then my syslog just started filling up with duplicate file warnings. In the end I have a backup<disknr> folder on each disk and I rsync them as needed. This works but it could be done a lot better as it pollutes the samba shares list and involves some manual work.

 

It would be ideal if unRAID actually had capability of mirroring important root folders. That way you could simply have an extra textfield where you define across how many drives you want to mirror that particular folder and unRAID would do the rest for you. But that's a discussion for the suggestions forum :)

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"We stand on the shoulders of giants."

 

US Budget build using Asus M4A785-M. USB header adapter is the Koutech USB 2.0 Header-Pin to Dual Type-A adapter Model IO-UU220. I blocked the side air vents with a standard manila envelope containing a printout of the drive serial numbers and port assignments. All jumpered EARS except 4 & 5 which are left over WD EADS 1TB from the Hammer NAS this replaces. Next door is my Dell T105 running W2K8 (office file server). Direct access to either via KVM.

 

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Some really nice builds in here. Seeing good cable management always prompts me to make more of an effort.

 

One note though, I see several builds in the CM 590 case, which I also use. I notice that some of you have chosen to put your power supplies in "rightside up", with the intake fan facing into the case. It seems like it's more thermally efficient to face the PSU upside down, with the fan facing down at the bottom of the case. Since the CM case has an intake grill at the bottom, it seems to work quite well.

 

Did you guys have a purpose in facing the PSU that way?

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One note though, I see several builds in the CM 590 case, which I also use. I notice that some of you have chosen to put your power supplies in "rightside up", with the intake fan facing into the case.

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Did you guys have a purpose in facing the PSU that way?

 

 

This helps pull more air through the drive cages to cool the drives.

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