August 15, 200817 yr I used an old PC for my unRaid server.. had a standard 4-2-4 case, ASUS P4C-800 mobo, Intel P4 3.4Ghz CPU, 1.5Gb RAM (2x512mb DDR333 and 2x128mb DDR333).. I put in 2 2x3 SATA backplanes and Promise TX4 PCI controller.. Will be running 8 SATA drives total - 4 750Gb, 2 500Gb, 320Gb, 250Gb...... Only problem I had was finding a usable USB drive.. went thru 4 different drives. They would all boot, but wouldnt mount.. The UBS drive that worked for me was a SanDisk Micro 128mb.. I have no idea what my actual throughput is, but I can playback high bitrate 720p mkv files with no issues across gigabit and wireless n (10 feet from ap through a wall)
August 15, 200817 yr Author didnt see an edit button.... I am actually getting better performance from my unRaid server than from the HTPC.. I am able to play high bitrate 720p mkv over wireless g.. low bitrate stuff was choppy before and high bitrate unplayable.... For a $600 upgrade (my total out of pocket), Im very happy with unRaid so far!!
August 16, 200817 yr I have a P4C800 Deluxe and used it for about a month before upgrading to a P5B VM DO new system. Not sure if you have the same one. Note that there is a slightly newer P4C800-E Deluxe board. You will see my rating (look to the left of this message) of B-. B means that it worked, the "-" means that there are some specific negatives about this MB. The main problem with this motherboard is that it is PCI bottlenecked. Even the gigabit ethernet is on the PCI bus. There is no PCI-e bus. (Note that the "-E" version has the gigabit lan OFF the PCI bus - a good thing). I had some problems getting it to boot off the USB stick. I had to use the lower speed, but that wasn't a big deal. I seem to remember needing to use a smaller capacity stick (512M) - the 1G stick would not boot. These were from the same manufacturer so am assuming it has to do with the size. I formatted them the same way using the HP tool. Besides parity check performance that went under 10,000 KB/sec with ~10 drives, normal performance was never a problem for me. This is all from memory, I am a little foggy on the details - its been many months since I upgraded.
August 17, 200817 yr Author All the UBS drives I used booted, they just wouldnt mount (note that I only tried 128mb drives)... There is no PCI-E bus on board, and yes there defiently is a bottleneck in the PCI bus, parity check on 3 750 drives took just over 6 hrs!! Kinda scared to see whats gonna happen when I drop in the remaining 4 drives (they are still in my HTPC at the moment - wanted to verify the unRaid server was stable first)... So far Ive been happy with the results tho.. Im not doing anything special, just playing HD media to 1 or 2 machines at a time and there have been 0 issues with doing that.. What would be the benifit to upgrading to a different mobo?? I already have C2D cpu and 2gb DDR2 ram laying around so I would just need the mobo and heat sink
August 17, 200817 yr Six hours translates to something like 35MB/sec for parity, low but not horrible. Also, parity time scales primarily with the size of the parity drive, not the number of drives, though more drives can/may lead to bus saturation which will slow you down. Bill
August 17, 200817 yr What would be the benifit to upgrading to a different mobo?? Very little benefit. It is easy to get caught up in a desire to have faster and faster performance, and many of us have, I believe. We have had numerous discussions on how to increase the performance of our unRAID systems, and how to choose the highest performance components. But one of the oft forgotten advantages of unRAID is its ability to run on older (but not too old), and slower hand-me-down hardware. Plus, unRAID is not designed to compete in the high performance server market, but to superbly fill a lower performance but high reliability server niche. It is terrific as a backup server and light use media server, essentially a file server for important but infrequently accessed files. So long as performance is adequate for the need, why not put our performance dollars into our desktop machines, where it will do more good, and generally with much higher utilization. It's probably not needed, but I would remind everyone that having a faster parity check is completely unnecessary, since it is relatively extremely infrequent, almost always optional, and can almost always be run in off hours. I do recognize that personal satisfaction and bragging rights are a valid interest. There should probably be a few comments in the Base Build thread, to add some perspective to that recommended build. Although a high performance board with dual core processor and 4GB (!!) of memory is certainly nice, it is completely unnecessary for many prospective unRAID users. JoeL runs very satisfactorily with an older board, lots of IDE drives, and 512MB, and with what sounds like adequate media serving performance.
August 17, 200817 yr Whilst i understand and agree with your perspective the base build thread was never to do with outright performance or to do with recycling kit. Specifically it was for a small subset of potential users who wish not to read or analyse options but rather off-set this work by simply purchasing a pre-tested and approved combination of components. User in this group wouldnt realistically consider older recycled kit. However recycled kit and lower spec older kit is just as appropriate but serves to deliver a solution to a completely different and likely much larger subset of users so should probably be given its own discussion so as to not take away from the base build and/or add confusion to either discussion. Really it the difference between "should work", "probably will work", "may need some tweaking" and "buy this, configure it this way and it will work".
August 19, 200817 yr Author What would be the benifit to upgrading to a different mobo?? Very little benefit. It is easy to get caught up in a desire to have faster and faster performance, and many of us have, I believe. We have had numerous discussions on how to increase the performance of our unRAID systems, and how to choose the highest performance components. But one of the oft forgotten advantages of unRAID is its ability to run on older (but not too old), and slower hand-me-down hardware. Plus, unRAID is not designed to compete in the high performance server market, but to superbly fill a lower performance but high reliability server niche. It is terrific as a backup server and light use media server, essentially a file server for important but infrequently accessed files. So long as performance is adequate for the need, why not put our performance dollars into our desktop machines, where it will do more good, and generally with much higher utilization. It's probably not needed, but I would remind everyone that having a faster parity check is completely unnecessary, since it is relatively extremely infrequent, almost always optional, and can almost always be run in off hours. I do recognize that personal satisfaction and bragging rights are a valid interest. There should probably be a few comments in the Base Build thread, to add some perspective to that recommended build. Although a high performance board with dual core processor and 4GB (!!) of memory is certainly nice, it is completely unnecessary for many prospective unRAID users. JoeL runs very satisfactorily with an older board, lots of IDE drives, and 512MB, and with what sounds like adequate media serving performance. Thats what I figured as this is just a file server.. The PCI bottlenecks I have experienced were kinda expected, but with these bottlenecks, this box out-performs using my htpc (ASUS P5L-VM, E6600, 4gb RAM, 8600GTS 256mb, ASUS XONAR, SIl-3132 RAID 0 2x500gb HDD, 500gb HDD, 320gb HDD, 250gb HDD, LG combo BD-HDDVD - All HDD except 1 500gb and SIl-3132 are now pulled) to stream media... Accross the network, read times are good enough to stream 3 720p mkv files on the same or different drives at the same time (2 computers via wireless g, granted within 10 ft of the ap).. write times... well, it took 3 days to get approx 1.8tb onto the box These are all with in my expectitations of how this box should perform.. ok, so its a little slow to save data, but its avail when, where and how I need it and with parity protection.. and for $600 out the door including drives, im not complaining I have 1 issue, posted http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2356.0, which I think my USB device died when I went to add 2 500gb drives
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