Upgraded old Unraid server

[Traxxus]

Out with the old, in with the new! Decided to beef it up a little from the old sempron 140 so I could try out plex for streaming to mobile devices, and VMs for some other things. Looking around, I decided not to spend money upgrading to a Phenom II, and opted to just get an i3 3220, especially since I already had DDR3 ram. Powerful enough when it's needed, but still low power when idle, which it probably will be most of the time.

 

Final upgrade specs:

I3 3220

Asus P8Z77-V (h77 would suffice for the chip I think, but it was on sale, plus I'm sure I'll have an extra k model kicking around down the road)

8 GB DDR3

I'll probably pick up a 4in3, 4 more drives will fill up the saslp card, and I can start upgrading the 2 Tb drives with whatever's out by then. Thinking about replacing the power supply in the next few months, CX430, it's about 4 years old. Probably go with the Corsair TX650 (built by seasonic).

Now at 8 drives total, just got my first 3 TB which also meant an upgrade to 5.0, so I did that today. Did the hardware upgrades a couple weeks ago, wanted to be able to troubleshoot easily. It went smooth enough once I got the users sorted and figured out how to log in from client pc's.

 

I'm pretty pleased overall, no major problems. The hardware change was a simple swap, press F1, reassign devices. Migrating to 5.0 took a bit more time but it's worth it, haven't bought a 2 Tb drive in months, and feels like a waste of money with 3 and 4 TB models out and fairly cheap. 

I think I did pretty well with the cabling for a non modular power supply and 8 Hard drives.

http://i.imgur.com/NhSQRY2.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Ir4rGds.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/VzXQcAB.jpg

 

I put the 2 4 Gb sticks of ram in the blue slots as Asus recommends. Also had an extra single 2 GB, put it in one of the black slots just cause it's better than sitting in a box on a shelf, this won't slow anything down will it? The manual does say to use either 2 or 4 for best performance...

 

 

[garycase]

Nicely done.  Did you upgrade parity to 4TB yet?

 

[mrow]

I saw you mentioned VMs. You mean running VMs inside unraid, right? Not running unraid as a VM?

 

In any case, looks like a very nice upgrade.

[dikkiedirk]

Regarding the PSU: A Seasonic M12II 650W would be nice too. Not the 620W, cause it has 2 12V rails.

[Traxxus]

Nicely done.  Did you upgrade parity to 4TB yet?

 

Not yet, still 2 TB, I did put physically move it to the hotswap cage since it'll probably be the first drive I retire if none fail. I got a 3 TB drive on the bottom where the old parity drive was (coolest spot), but it's still preclearing, only got it yesterday. I remembered to use screen this time after seeing it could take almost 2 days for the big ones. I've been putting off buying hard drives cause the last time I tried to upgrade to 5.0.4 it gave me permissions issues. Was down to <2TB free (all 2 TB drives) so was time to get moving. I have room for one more drive without buying another cage, then 4-6 more so I'll probably be sticking with 4 TB drives from here on out. 

 

I saw you mentioned VMs. You mean running VMs inside unraid, right? Not running unraid as a VM?

 

In any case, looks like a very nice upgrade.

 

Yeah. Haven't hammered out the specifics yet, got some more reading to do.

 

Regarding the PSU: A Seasonic M12II 650W would be nice too. Not the 620W, cause it has 2 12V rails.

 

Forgot about that one, I even have the 520 version in my htpc in the living room, it's a nice, well built PSU.

[garycase]

Nicely done.  Did you upgrade parity to 4TB yet?

 

Not yet, still 2 TB, I did put physically move it to the hotswap cage since it'll probably be the first drive I retire if none fail.

 

FWIW I wouldn't put the parity drive in the hotswap cage.  The four drives in the bottom cage on your RC590 run notably cooler than those in the hotswap cage, thanks to the 120mm fan the blows uniformly over them ... much better than the smaller (70-80mm depending on which unit you have) fan in the hotswap cage that's "pulling" air through the cage.  Pay attention to your drive temps during a parity check (after 2-3 hours) and you'll see the difference.

 

... since parity is involved in every write, that (and a cache drive if you have one), should be mounted where the cooling is best 

[Traxxus]

Sorry, I meant I moved it in anticipation of making the 3 TB drive the parity drive, I went ahead and switched them out now since I had the case out. It was in the bottom spot of the 4in3, now the 3 TB drive is there (red sata cable), and will be the parity drive whenever the preclear finishes in a couple days. I figure the old parity drive is statistically the most likely to fail in the future so I put it there.

[garycase]

That's perfect => the bottom cage of the RC590 is very well ventilated.  I expect the drives in that cage to easily outlast those in hotswap cages 

[RickInHouston]

"so I could try out plex for streaming to mobile devices"

 

I've been up and running unRaid for a few years, now.  Watch movies through Popcorn hour.  I want to stream my iso's to a Nexus 10 android tablet (and others).  I need the transcoding to be done either through unRaid or a stand alone pc used for transcoding only.?.

 

What is my best solution?  Beef up (new build) my unRaid since it's old tech (Intel Celeron 430 Conroe-L 1.8GHz 35W single-core) OR add a mini pc to do the transcoding gruntwork and serve the files to android tablets?

 

Thanks!  (Don't mean to hijack, I just though this was along the lines of what you were doing since you stated what I quoted as my first line in my post.  BTW, I've got that SAME BOX!