Hi,

 

I am planning on moving my current drives off of my windows box to a small unraid machine.  Power consumption and physical dimensions are definetly a factor.  Currently the drives are NTFS formatted in a drive multiplier.  I am hoping after getting the new machine up and running to move them over one at a time and buy an additional drive for parity while using the card that came with the SATA multiplier.

 

I currently have:

 

3x  Samsung Spinpoint 750GB

AMS Venus T5 w/ 1xPCI-E Sil 3132 controller (2xESATA ports)

 

I am intending on buying

1x Samsung Spinpoint 1TB (750s seems to have disappeared now)

Intel e5200

Intel DG45FC

2x2GB PC6400

Apex MI-008

 

 

I realize both the ram (4GB instead of 1GB) and processor (dual core instead of single) are quite excessive however I am hoping with probably a few pots of coffee and sleepless nights I may be able to get ftpd/httpd running alongside the UnRaid installation.  I read into some people's efforts on getting VMWare server running and although that seems quite interesting I am not sure if I will go that route.  Mainly I am looking at Unraid for the ability to power down drives that are not in use for extensive periods of time and each data drive having its independant file system.

 

With the gigabit lan and pci-e card even though the multiplier I am hoping to achieve somewhere around 20MB/sec writes and 60MB/sec reads.  Not sure if that will be possible or not but that is my goal.

 

Can anyone see anything horribly wrong with my intended hardware config?

In regards to the motherboard and LAN controller I don't know if it's supported.

* Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem using the Intel® 82567LF Gigabit Ethernet Controll *

 

Regarding 20MB/s Writes, I doubt you will get that on a parity protected drive. I get from 8-12MB/s depending on current usage.

Reads will be much higher, but I've not gotten that high in my network.

If you put in a cache drive, you can reach a much higher write speed.

Then the data will be moved to the parity protected drives over night.

 

I like that AMS T5, I've been thinking of getting one to play with, but I have enough lil boxes all over the place.

 

 

Here's my itx rig if you have any interest

http://www.cotrone.com/rob/archives/2008/05/chenbro_es34069.html

 

It's not as cheap, nor quite as powerful as what you are building, but it's adequate.

It's small, cool and with the mobile processor pulls about 40w when everything has spun down.

I bought my processor used on eBay for a steal of a deal.

No eSATA, but I jury rigged one of the ports to the back so I have an external SATA port (not port multiplied yet).

 

If you order the unit with the card reader, then you can put an SD card right in the front without a USB Key.

 

I'll look into the NIC a little more.  That will be the fulcrum of this idea as there really wont be any slots available for me to slap in another.

 

Although many moons ago I was intending on purchasing a little drobo for personal use, many things turned me off.  After finding out about unraid (ironically while googling there was a post on here for comparison)  I was planning on building a little unraid box prior to the summer but other ventures took precedence so I am re-evaluating it now.

 

I have 2 drives (300gb samsungs) set aside to use as the cache drive however I am hoping to see if it'll run with the basic version first before upgrading.  As far as I can tell the 300gb drives should be a suitable size and hopefully speed for use as cache drives.  I intend to set them up as a raid 1 via the controller (not within the OS) even though it'll somewhat defeat the energy savings and set the mover script to only run once a day.. maybe... I've been thinking a lot more than doing.

 

The AMS T5 I purchased as I believed at the time that the chipset was supported by unraid and its slackware base kernel.  I think this is still true although I would have to dig for that.  The stock fans are horrendous.  I supposed if you left one drive bay empty you could use it as a desk-vac.  I replaced them within a day of purchasing it with some nexus 80mm fans mounted using the same holes but on the outside of the unit.

 

Although I like the end result of your setup, I would prefer to stay away from the mobile end as this gives me a bit more flexibility in case anything goes wrong or I wish to upgrade/downgrade the processor with another system in the future.

 

For the default installation I would imagine I would still need the USB key for the GUID or whatever the serial-like number is that UnRaid verifies against.

I intend to set them up as a raid 1 via the controller (not within the OS) even though it'll somewhat defeat the energy savings and set the mover script to only run once a day.. maybe... I've been thinking a lot more than doing.

 

I don't think the raid1 on the controller will work, I think you have to run the controller in JBOD mode. From what I remember reading, the raid modes on those controllers are really a pseudo software raid. I.E. The raid does not work unless you have the drivers.

unRAID will access the SIL3132 controller, but I'm not sure about the drives configured with RAID.

Still, it's worth a try.

 

 

For the default installation I would imagine I would still need the USB key for the GUID or whatever the serial-like number is that UnRaid verifies against.

 

This is true.

After much debate, it didn't seem wise for me to have a faster setup for my NAS then my desktop even though power consumption/dimensions are a factor.  For the meantime the E5200/ram are being placed in a P5Q in my desktop/media centre while the unraid box will be configured as follows, hopefully, providing there are no hardware conflicts/issues:

 

Asrock 939DualSATA2 (ULi M1695/ULi M1567 and Realtek RTL8201CL  I'll be looking into the compatibility)

Opteron 165 (1MB L2/core 1.8ghz)

2x1024 PC3200

X800XL AIW (for now) AGP

 

3x  Samsung Spinpoint 750GB

AMS Venus T5 w/ 1xPCI-E Sil 3132 controller (2xESATA ports)

 

And I'm not going to buy any drives right away as a copy of Vista chewed a hole in the wallet for now.  The data juggling will be a hassle I am sure but hopefully I dont lose anything.

 

The PCI-16x slot will still be free so I may try to find a decent supported gigabit ethernet card once I get it up and running (waiting on the courrier).  Anyways, if/when I run into any hardware issues I'll be sure to poke your guys' brains.

 

Thanks.

Please treat this as a potential red herring but my last unRAID board was an Asrock. It worked 75% of the time and crashed the other 25%. No amount of effort could find the problem. This was an older board but purchased from new. Personally i would never buy an Asrock board again and certainly not use one in unRAID.

 

Again this is supposition based on a completely different board.

Hrm...  thanks for the heads up.

 

I hope to be able to test the setup before moving all my data if I can scrounge up (borrow perhaps) some old sata drives.  I believe I have had my current board for 3 years or so.  The only complaint I have is during hot weather the chipset litterally cooks and eventually would cause locksups.  A small fan and lowering the HTT multiplier(no noticeable loss in performance) helped out there.

 

As it has been through the ringer (overclocked for many years, high temperatures) its possible a component or two may be a bit stressed but I'll see how it goes.  I am fond of the fact that providing the hardware is compatible with unraid, its fairly independant.  So if the motherboard does die it seems like I wont have to reinstall anything, however I'ld have to be careful about the drives being assigned in the correct order.  Hopefully that wont be so much of an issue for me as I intend to disable all of the onboard controllers and just use the single pci-e one.