AMD AM2 mobo replacement, or?

[heffe2001]

I'm looking at replacing my current Mobo in my Unraid box (an aBit An-M2HD that I had lying around when I built my box), and I'd like to re-use the proc/memory/etc from the existing system (the existing board only has 4 SATA ports on the mobo, 1 1x PCIE & 1 16x PCIE, and I currently have it full up on the onboard ports, and on the 2 port SATA card I have in the PCIE 1x slot). 

 

What I'm looking for are good reccomendations for a replacement board, would prefer something with 6+ ports on-board, AM2 socket, and at least 2 1x & 1 16x PCIE slots. 

 

My current config is:

 

Antec 300 case

COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro 550 RS-550-ACAA-A1 550W (3 12v rails, should have gone with one fat 12v)

aBit AN-M2HD

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Orleans 2.0GHz 512KB L2 Cache

2gb Crucial Ballastix DDR2

Parity - 640gb WDC WD6400AAKS

Data Sata    640gb WDC WD6400AAKS, WD3200BEVT 320g, WD2500BEVS 250g, ST3500630A (w/Sata bridge)

Data PATA  2x Maxtor 6B300R0's, and a ST3802110A on Cache

 

I have 2 more WD Sata 320's I'd like to put in the box, but I'm pretty much out of room at the moment (not to mention that the case I picked up is full up except for the 3 5.25" bays at the top).  I had originally planned on just replacing all the drives 320g or smaller with 640+gb drives (whatever was on sale at the time that was 640+).  Would I be better off replacing the existing board for one with more ports or consolidating smaller drives onto larger drives (and dropping a 4 port card on the 16x existing slot).

[ilovejedd]

Do you have a free PCI slot? If you're not overly concerned with speed, you can get this SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port SATA Controller for $95. Although if I were you, I'd also start swapping out smaller hard drives for larger ones. Of course, that depends on your budget and space requirements.

 

I added up capacities for your data drives and it comes to 2.31TB. Funds permitting, I'd drop the 320GB and 250GB SATA drives and replace with 2 HDDs of at least 1TB in size. Doing so would give you 3.38TB space.

 

Parity SATA

1TB

 

Data SATA (2.78TB)

1TB

2x 640GB WD

500GB Seagate

 

Data PATA (0.6TB)

2x 300GB Maxtor

 

[heffe2001]

That was my thinking at the beginning, drop the smaller drives and go with larger.  I'd guess for what I'm doing on my server, the PCI 8 port card would probably work fine, as it's basically just DVD storage going to my Sage server & the extenders in the house (we at most would have 3 streams going at any time on the machine, standard DVD full-sized rips, had a handful of bluray re-encodes down to 720p, so nothing majorly bandwidth intensive).  If I were to drop in 2 1tb's, I'd probably remove the other PATA drives as well, as I'd like to have a sata-only box at some point (I have the drives to swap those out for SATA now, I have 2 more 320 Satas in my Sage server for video recording, and could just as easily record to the 300's in place of those).  I really wish I could find a board with PCIX slots that I could use for those 8 port cards, to get faster speed out of them, but it's only video after all, no writing to it unless I'm ripping a new DVD to it..

 

[WeeboTech]

Although you can fit 8 SATA ports on that Supermicro card, it may be a bottleneck in the future being on the PCI Bus.

 

At the current pricing these days you can get a PCIe 4X card for the same amount, alleviating the bottleneck and allowing you to re-use it on a new machine in the future.

 

As stated previously, upgrading the smaller drives to larger ones would provide an immediate increase and biggest bang for the buck.

 

I like the Seagate 7200RPM/32MB cache for parity (it's speedy).

The WD Green drives are great DVD storage drives.

Cool, Quiet and they do show a measurable drop in power utilization (at least in my tests).

 

The WD drives support Power Up In standy via software, which allows the drive to stay spun down until activated by the kernel during boot up. This alleviates the big power draw.

 

The Seagates support Power up in standby via a jumper.

 

[heffe2001]

I think what I'm going to do in the short-term is get one of the Adaptec 4 ports PCIE-4x cards, and 1 1tb drive (that's about all I can swing this payday I think without the wife getting too antsy ), drop the 1tb in for parity (I'll have to see what I can get one of the Seagates for right now, might have to settle for a wd).  That would solve my port-problem pretty well, and allow me to pull those 2 smaller SATA's out (they are 2.5" laptop drives, just a couple I had laying around from upgraded laptops).  I've still got around 600gb free at the moment, and would have a tad more than that after doing the switching.

 

THen I could drop another 1tb in there in a couple weeks (as I'm sure I'll have it filled, I'm only about halfway through my DVD collection as it is) to expand the system a bit.  The only other thing I think I'll need is a 5-in-3 chassis for the case I'm using (only 6 3.5" bays in the front, which are full, with the 2 2.5's sitting in the top).  I hope to eventually have it filled with 1tb drives (with a 1.5tb as parity soon as they drop a bit in price, might be a while though ).

 

 

[ilovejedd]

I really wish I could find a board with PCIX slots that I could use for those 8 port cards, to get faster speed out of them, but it's only video after all, no writing to it unless I'm ripping a new DVD to it..

 

There are but those are mostly server motherboards, hence, I doubt you'll find a lot of (if any) unRAID users using the same board. There's also the likelihood that you might need ECC and/or buffered RAM which would add even more to the expense.

 

The Seagate 7200.11 1TB is $140 from Newegg. The WD Caviar Black actually costs more ($160 last I checked). For parity, I would avoid the WD Green drives.

[heffe2001]

My current torrent box is a re-purposed, Dual Xeon 2.8 server 2003-based machine (with about 2gb of ECC memory), just no PCIX slots.  Saying it's overkill for what it's doing now would be an understatement (I DO also use a program called Show Analyzer on it for marking commercials for skipping on my PVR system, but those operations rarely use any CPU on that box).  It'd probably make for a nice unraid + other applications box, just no sata and no pcix kind of kills it for that.  It's also pretty power-hungry compared to what I'm using now.

 

For the time being, I think putting in a 1tb & the Adaptec controller will probably be the best move, and swap out the other drives for 1tb's as my array gets filled.

 

I had also played with the idea of getting a lower-power CPU, but not sure how much I'd save going from the 65w to say a 45w (except that the 45 is a x2 proc, although that won't help the unraid part of the machine from what I'm reading).  The current machine as it is with all the drives powered down runs around 64w, about 93w with all 8 drives spun up, and spikes at about 145ish when the drives initially spin up...

 

[ilovejedd]

My current torrent box is a re-purposed, Dual Xeon 2.8 server 2003-based machine (with about 2gb of ECC memory), just no PCIX slots.  Saying it's overkill for what it's doing now would be an understatement (I DO also use a program called Show Analyzer on it for marking commercials for skipping on my PVR system, but those operations rarely use any CPU on that box).  It'd probably make for a nice unraid + other applications box, just no sata and no pcix kind of kills it for that.  It's also pretty power-hungry compared to what I'm using now.

 

For the time being, I think putting in a 1tb & the Adaptec controller will probably be the best move, and swap out the other drives for 1tb's as my array gets filled.

 

I had also played with the idea of getting a lower-power CPU, but not sure how much I'd save going from the 65w to say a 45w (except that the 45 is a x2 proc, although that won't help the unraid part of the machine from what I'm reading).   The current machine as it is with all the drives powered down runs around 64w, about 93w with all 8 drives spun up, and spikes at about 145ish when the drives initially spin up...

 

Are those Xeon's single-, dual- or quad-core? *sigh* If only we could virtualize unRAID. I've got Show Analyzer, too, even paid for the full version, but I've come to prefer comskip. On my PVR PC with a relatively lowly Core 2 Duo E7200 @ 2.53GHz, comskip takes about all of 5 minutes (probably even less, I never timed it) to finish marking commercials on a 1 hour HD broadcast using just 1 core. Yes, your torrent box is being severely under-utilized. Now if you start converting all those recordings using x264... 

 

The one thing I can say about my PC is it only uses ~70W idle, ~105W load and 134W max on boot. I think that's relatively decent for a PC with a discrete graphics card (the anemic but Blu-ray capable HD 3450), 2 optical drives, and 4 750GB HDD's.

[WeeboTech]

I really wish I could find a board with PCIX slots that I could use for those 8 port cards, to get faster speed out of them, but it's only video after all, no writing to it unless I'm ripping a new DVD to it..

 

I might have something available in the near future.

I'll be retiring a X5DAL-TG2 soon  2 2.4ghz LV Xeons (30W each) w 2GB of ram.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/E7505/X5DAL-TG2.cfm

I'm sure it will work headless. I believe the bios is geared to write output via the serial port if you set it to.

 

Then again, I'm sure you'll want a more modern board.

 

For the time being, I think putting in a 1tb & the Adaptec controller will probably be the best move, and swap out the other drives for 1tb's as my array gets filled.

 

I think that's the best bet.

[heffe2001]

Single core, hyperthreaded Xeon's.  Works great for what I'm doing (I was actually running it as my Sage server for a while, but needed PCIE for 2 HD tuners I bought so I switched up to a AMD x2 4600+ on the Asus board I mentioned above, worked great with about 8 total tuners (some network, some local), running Sage, SA, SOME compression, and transcoding to the MVP's I had at the time.  Only thing that brought it down really was trying to transcode HD streams down to the MVP's.  The 4600 BARELY has enough horsepower to do it now, but it'll probably get my 6000+ Black x2 soon as I upgrade the mobo in my main desktop to take a quad-core (and I never play games on it anymore, all my main rig does now is rip DVD's & re-encode blurays, although it does it VERY well).  I could even get by with turning my main desktop into a un-raid box with come creative parts-moving (case would be great for it, a Antec 900, 200mm fan in the top, and right now 5 120mm's in it, but the 2 front fans would come out, and 3 5-in-3's would fit it perfectly).  If this case goes on sale again I'm definitely going to pick another one up .

 

If you're running Comskip, what HTPC software are you using?

 

I'll probably end up doing yet another machine-move soon, and use my dual xeon as a DC for a local domain, and make a lower power torrent box to try to save a bit of power..

 

 

[ilovejedd]

GB-PVR. I'm planning on getting a couple of Popcorn Hours for the TV's around the house but right now, my funds are kinda tied to buying a whole bunch of storage.

[heffe2001]

Well, I pulled the 250gb 2.5" drive earlier, and replaced it with a 320gb 3.5" 7200, and the array is currently rebuilding.  Everything looks ok, so hopefully I can pull those 2.5" drives out tonight and then when the new drives come in, I'll have an easier time of it (the 2.5" drives are slower drives, so hopefully it'll be faster next time).