Hey everyone,

 

In an attempt to get some better parity performance, I would like to attach my parity drive directly to the motherboard instead of through the normal drive cages as any other drive would be mounted.  I'm curious if anyone here has attempted to mount a 3.5in drive inside the enclosere next to the motherboard, and how that worked out?

 

Thanks,

Ogi

Hey everyone,

 

In an attempt to get some better parity performance, I would like to attach my parity drive directly to the motherboard instead of through the normal drive cages as any other drive would be mounted.  I'm curious if anyone here has attempted to mount a 3.5in drive inside the enclosere next to the motherboard, and how that worked out?

 

Thanks,

Ogi

 

That's not going to make any difference.    If you think a motherboard port may be faster than whatever card you're using, just wire the hot-swap slot the parity drive is in to the motherboard.

 

... as a matter of interest, WHAT is "wrong" with your parity performance now?

Hey everyone,

 

In an attempt to get some better parity performance, I would like to attach my parity drive directly to the motherboard instead of through the normal drive cages as any other drive would be mounted.  I'm curious if anyone here has attempted to mount a 3.5in drive inside the enclosere next to the motherboard, and how that worked out?

 

Thanks,

Ogi

 

 

That's not going to make any difference.    If you think a motherboard port may be faster than whatever card you're using, just wire the hot-swap slot the parity drive is in to the motherboard.

 

On the wiki page it clearly states that getting the parity drive off of the raid controller that drives the rest of the data drives is a method of improving parity performance.

 

See here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Improving_unRAID_Performance#Move_Parity_Drive_Off_PCI_Bus

 

 

  If you are NOT using a SAS to SAS multi-drive cable from your controllers to your back-planes, it would be easy to just move a SATA cable from your add-on controllers down to your mother-board.

 

  But, if you are using a newer card that has the SAS multi drive connector, you also likely have high enough transfer rates on that card that moving the drive to your mother board connector may make little difference, if also on a somewhat newer hardware MB CPU combination.

 

  My biggest concern would be getting proper airflow and cooling on the parity drive if it were to be relocated inside the case.  Just to make sure there is not a misunderstanding, the SAS back-plane is NOT a limiting factor by the way.  It is not like a port multiplier like some people seem to think.

  If you are NOT using a SAS to SAS multi-drive cable from your controllers to your back-planes, it would be easy to just move a SATA cable from your add-on controllers down to your mother-board.

 

  But, if you are using a newer card that has the SAS multi drive connector, you also likely have high enough transfer rates on that card that moving the drive to your mother board connector may make little difference, if also on a somewhat newer hardware MB CPU combination.

 

The Norco 4224 uses the SAS to SAS multi-drive cables connecting the backplanes.  The only way that I can easily connect a hard drive directly into the motherboard is to have it not have it attached to any of the back-planes, meaning I have to mount it inside the case somewhere in close proximity to the motherboard.

  I updated my post after you answered..  Cooling aside, (see my updated post)

 

  I think I would do some tests to see if it was worth moving the drive.

 

  You could temporarily hook your parity drive to one of the motherboard SATA ports, and start a non-correcting parity check and see what speed it runs at and check it about each 5 minutes for 30 minutes.  If you do the same test with the parity drive in the tray through the SA backplane, then you will see how much it will improve performance, or not...

  I updated my post after you answered..  Cooling aside, (see my updated post)

 

  I think I would do some tests to see if it was worth moving the drive.

 

  You could temporarily hook your parity drive to one of the motherboard SATA ports, and start a non-correcting parity check and see what speed it runs at and check it about each 5 minutes for 30 minutes.  If you do the same test with the parity drive in the tray through the SA backplane, then you will see how much it will improve performance, or not...

 

Not a bad idea.  My current parity check speeds are ~80-90MB/s, but I've been really wanting to get in the 120MB/s range.  I have so much data that if I can speed up the parity check speeds by 35%, that would be really really nice.

My point was that WHERE the drive is located isn't going to change the speeds.    As I noted, "If you think a motherboard port may be faster than whatever card you're using, just wire the hot-swap slot the parity drive is in to the motherboard."

 

Since the case is designed for multi-drive cables, just get a reverse breakout cable => you can then connect 4 drives to the motherboard SATA ports ... so as long as you put your parity drive in one of those 4 slots you don't need to do any relocation.

 

It's not a bad idea, however, to simply set the drive in a temporary spot and connect it directly to a motherboard port, and then run a parity check => to confirm that this is indeed going to help the speed before you buy the cable.    Note that while a motherboard SATA port may provide some benefit with writes, it is NOT likely to impact the parity check time, as this depends on ALL of the drives.

 

This is the type of cable you need:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133033

  The speeds you are getting look pretty good to me, depending on your hardware.  You might find out after testing, that to speed things up as much as you would like, you may need to update your CPU and/or motherboard...  and/or make some other changes.

 

 

My point was that WHERE the drive is located isn't going to change the speeds.    As I noted, "If you think a motherboard port may be faster than whatever card you're using, just wire the hot-swap slot the parity drive is in to the motherboard."

 

Since the case is designed for multi-drive cables, just get a reverse breakout cable => you can then connect 4 drives to the motherboard SATA ports ... so as long as you put your parity drive in one of those 4 slots you don't need to do any relocation.

 

It's not a bad idea, however, to simply set the drive in a temporary spot and connect it directly to a motherboard port, and then run a parity check => to confirm that this is indeed going to help the speed before you buy the cable.    Note that while a motherboard SATA port may provide some benefit with writes, it is NOT likely to impact the parity check time, as this depends on ALL of the drives.

 

I am very well aware that the physical location of the drive will have no effect on the speed.  It is just not practical to have a parity drive that plugs directly into the motherboard sit in a hard drive trey with the rest of the drives.  The problem with a reverse breakout cable is that it takes all the drives of the back-plane off of the RAID card.  That's not what I want to do.  I want to take strictly *1* drive out of the SAS, and without HEAVY modification, that cannot be done while sitting in the normal drive cages and plugged into the back-plane.

  The speeds you are getting look pretty good to me, depending on your hardware.  You might find out after testing, that to speed things up as much as you would like, you may need to update your CPU and/or motherboard...  and/or make some other changes.

 

I'm using a Ivy Bridge Xeon CPU and a SuperMicro X9CSM-F (?) motherboard, so I'm not really willing to spend more on hardware.  Whether my current speeds are "good" or not, it doesn't really matter, if there is a substantial improvement that can be had through just changing a mounting point on a hard drive and having that one hard drive connected into another port, then that is very much worthwhile.

  It sounds like you should have a decent capability already.  Yes I agree, any improvement by just switching components and/or cables around would be worth while.  It is always nice to get the very most out of an existing hardware configuration.  It never hurts to try a different configuration to see the performance.  I do that quite a bit myself.

 

  Let us know how the testing ends up, it would be nice to see what differences there might be with the parity drive on the MB port.

 

 

Is your quoted 80-90MB/s with vanilla unRAID, i.e. no plugins?  If not, it's worth testing again without the plugins present.

 

 

Is your quoted 80-90MB/s with vanilla unRAID, i.e. no plugins?  If not, it's worth testing again without the plugins present.

 

It is with plugins, and I could test without plugins, but honestly that won't tell me anything, as I want those plugins to run.  Even if one of my plugins is slowing things up, if I can regain some of that speed loss through a different HW configuration of the same exact equipment.

 

People, I'm not looking to troubleshoot parity check speeds, I'm wondering if anyone has mounted a 3.5in drive inside a norco 4224 (or similar) case, and if so, how they did it.

  I have the Norco 4116, and in looking at pictures of both the 4116 and the 4224, they look like the same chassis behind the drive bays.

 

  If I was going to mount an internal drive, and if my power supply was not too long...  I would place it mounted standing on a side using the slotted raised mounts intended for redundant power supply frames.  I would monitor the temp a bit during a parity check to make sure it had enough air flow, but it looks like the cooling should be good in that location too.  That location should also make it easy for screws to not be in the way on the bottom of the case.  :-)

  Another option if your motherboard is not too large, would be to make a small adapter plate with thin sheet metal, and mount the drive to it using the bottom mounting holes on the drive.  Then mount the adapter plate with the drive attached to the available motherboard mounting posts.

 

  While I have NOT done this with Norco cases, I have done both methods of mounting on other cases to add more hard drives than were ever intended to work inside various tower cases.  With a little extra care and sometimes adding fans, it always worked out nicely, even though it looked a bit odd...

 

  With all the room in the 4224 it should work very well, including cooling.

  Another option if your motherboard is not too large, would be to make a small adapter plate with thin sheet metal, and mount the drive to it using the bottom mounting holes on the drive.  Then mount the adapter plate with the drive attached to the available motherboard mounting posts.

 

  While I have NOT done this with Norco cases, I have done both methods of mounting on other cases to add more hard drives than were ever intended to work inside various tower cases.  With a little extra care and sometimes adding fans, it always worked out nicely, even though it looked a bit odd...

 

  With all the room in the 4224 it should work very well, including cooling.

 

If I can get the hard drive to sit with the large surface facing up-down, then I won't worry about cooling, as the air will slow right over the top of it... I agree there should be enough space, i guess if I determine that to be worthwhile (i show a faster parity check speed with the parity drive attached directly to the motherboard), then I'll start trying to fab a method of securing the drive to the bottom of chases.

The problem with a reverse breakout cable is that it takes all the drives of the back-plane off of the RAID card.  That's not what I want to do.  I want to take strictly *1* drive out of the SAS, and without HEAVY modification, that cannot be done while sitting in the normal drive cages and plugged into the back-plane.

 

I understand.  However, if you want to take advantage of hopefully faster speeds on the motherboard ports, it would seem like you might want to also do this for your cache drive and perhaps a couple of your data drives.  A breakout cable doesn't take "... all the drives of the back-plane off of the RAID card."  ==> it only moves the 4 drives that are tied to the specific connector you connect the breakout cable to.    In fact, if you decide to take advantage of the RAID 1 btrfs cache pool in v5 final, you'll probably want two drives connected to the motherboard for this purpose.

 

Seems like if the motherboard ports are faster, you may as well take advantage of them where you can -- and it's simple to do this for 4 drives.   

 

As I noted, however, I don't expect it to make any appreciable difference in parity check speeds.  Perhaps a better test would be to connect your cache drive to a motherboard port and see if copies to/from it have improved speeds ... this will let you know if the port itself is faster, without regard to its impact on parity checks.

 

If you do find that he onboard SATA port works to your advantage. are you opposed to drilling holes in the side (or bottom) of the 4224 case to install some type of bracket?

 

John

 

If you do find that he onboard SATA port works to your advantage. are you opposed to drilling holes in the side (or bottom) of the 4224 case to install some type of bracket?

 

John

 

Hi John, while I'm not opposed to it, the case already has so many holes that I would think I could try and make use of the existing ones.  We shall see soon enough I suppose.

That's one thing I do like about the 4220.  It has 3 spots on top of the drive cages where you can mount 2.5" drives.  I have 3x 128GB SSDs there now that I use for my datastores (ESXi as the host for unRAID).  However, I think I am going to run out of space quickly and may need to do something like what you are looking to do...side mount a few more SSDs.  As you can imagine, airflow will definitely not be a problem with the SSDs so I can really stick them anywhere I want. 

 

John

 

That's one thing I do like about the 4220.  It has 3 spots on top of the drive cages where you can mount 2.5" drives.  I have 3x 128GB SSDs there now that I use for my datastores (ESXi as the host for unRAID).  However, I think I am going to run out of space quickly and may need to do something like what you are looking to do...side mount a few more SSDs.  As you can imagine, airflow will definitely not be a problem with the SSDs so I can really stick them anywhere I want. 

 

John

 

2.5in drives aren't a problem, as I have those devices that go in the back of the case and you can slide a 2.5in drive into.  As I'm using few enough cards, they (will) work well enough for when I convert my setup to ESXi.  It's finding a place for a 3.5in drive that may prove to be challenging.

2.5in drives aren't a problem, as I have those devices that go in the back of the case and you can slide a 2.5in drive into.  As I'm using few enough cards, they (will) work well enough for when I convert my setup to ESXi.  It's finding a place for a 3.5in drive that may prove to be challenging.

 

Assuming you're referring to the expansion slot racks for 2.5" drives, I presume you know that you can get dual-drive racks as well:  http://www.moddiy.com/products/PCI-Expansion-Slot-to-Dual-2.5%22-IDE%7B47%7DSATA%7B47%7DSSD-Adapter-Hard-Drive-Rack-(2-x-SSD).html?gclid=CMu5n6_ApbcCFeLm7AodplwAxQ

 

With all the unused slots in the 4224, I'm sure these will hold more SSDs than you're likely to need 

 

As for the 3.5" drive, I'm at a loss as to why you don't want to simply use 4 motherboard ports to drive ONE of the breakout connectors on the drive rack.    This would give you 4 drives tied to motherboard ports -- not only satisfying your desire to use a motherboard port for parity;  but also letting you have 3 other drives of your choice on the hopefully-faster motherboard ports.    ... all with NO modifications to the case