Advice on Mobo upgrade


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Here's my current setup:

 

My system with this board is:

AMD Semprom 140 (unlocking 2nd core was unsuccessful )

G-Skill 2x1gb DDR2 1066  PC2 8500

CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W PSU

 

Drives:

Parity: Hitachi 2TB 7200RPM

Data: 1x Seagate 2TB LP; 1x 1.5TB Seagate LP, 3x Maxtor 1TB

 

I'm looking to upgrade the Mobo to allow 3-4TB drives, as well as SAS connectors. (I have the NORCO 4220 case with the SAS backplane.

 

I've been browsing the boards, but want to see what would be considered the best unRaid board for easy, quick upgradeability to 4TB drives, and hopefully SAS, including the capability to easily keep adding drives.

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If you mean you're looking for a motherboard that supports your current CPU and RAM and has onboard SAS you're not going to find one.

 

What motherboard do you have now? There's a good chance you can just put some controller cards with SAS in your current board to expand.

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Do you need more CPU "horsepower" for plugins, etc. ??  A Sempron 140 has plenty of power for running UnRAID and basic plugins ... although clearly it's not a powerhouse CPU.

 

Your board has 6 SATA ports, and two available PCIe x16 slots (one runs at x4), so you could easily add a couple of 8 to 24 port add-in cards to support all the drives you might want.  A pair of 8-port cards would give you 22 drive capacity  :)

 

Before assuming your system doesn't support > 2TB drives, buy one and try it -- there's a very good chance it will work just fine.    It would certainly work on an add-in controller.

 

As for connecting your SATA ports to the 4220 backplane ... you simply need a mini-SAS to SATA reverse breakout cable ... e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215289&Tpk=mini-SAS%20to%20SATA%20breakout&IsVirtualParent=1

 

Bottom line:  You may not need to upgrade anything.  Buy a 4TB drive and check it out before deciding  :)

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Hmmm... Thanks Gary.

 

I've been out of the hardware loop for a little and wasn't sure how the new 4TB drive fit in... I may just give that a try.

 

What 8-port card would be best for this situation? Though if 4TB drives work fine, I may not have to upgrade for awhile. I would just replace all the drives with 4's, essentially bumping me from my current 6.5 TB's to 20TB's.....

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Hmmm... Thanks Gary.

 

I've been out of the hardware loop for a little and wasn't sure how the new 4TB drive fit in... I may just give that a try.

 

What 8-port card would be best for this situation? Though if 4TB drives work fine, I may not have to upgrade for awhile. I would just replace all the drives with 4's, essentially bumping me from my current 6.5 TB's to 20TB's.....

 

 

IBM M1015 is the 8 port king of the hill around here these days. I've got 3. Check eBay for a deal.

 

 

Bottom line:  You may not need to upgrade anything.  Buy a 4TB drive and check it out before deciding  :)

 

 

As luck would have it, I just posted some deals on 4TB drives on the Good Deals section of the forum.

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The M1015's and SuperMicro SASLP-MV8's seem to be the most popular 8-port cards.

 

The M1015 is an x8 card, so it would work as designed in your x16 slot; but would be throttled in the 2nd slot that only runs at x4.  The MV8's are x4 cards, so they'd work fine in either slot.

 

But since your board supports PCIe v2, you'll still get 2GB bandwidth even at x4 => so either card would work just fine supporting 8 drives.

 

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Do you need more CPU "horsepower" for plugins, etc. ??  A Sempron 140 has plenty of power for running UnRAID and basic plugins ... although clearly it's not a powerhouse CPU.

 

Your board has 6 SATA ports, and two available PCIe x16 slots (one runs at x4), so you could easily add a couple of 8 to 24 port add-in cards to support all the drives you might want.  A pair of 8-port cards would give you 22 drive capacity  :)

 

Before assuming your system doesn't support > 2TB drives, buy one and try it -- there's a very good chance it will work just fine.    It would certainly work on an add-in controller.

 

As for connecting your SATA ports to the 4220 backplane ... you simply need a mini-SAS to SATA reverse breakout cable ... e.g. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816215289&Tpk=mini-SAS%20to%20SATA%20breakout&IsVirtualParent=1

 

Bottom line:  You may not need to upgrade anything.  Buy a 4TB drive and check it out before deciding  :)

 

+1!

 

I have the Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H, which is newer, but similar, and I would be fairly confident to say you would likely have no problem running two 8-port  SAS cards, and supporting over 2TB drives (In Unraid 5+ of course).

 

Also, for argument's sake, even though it wouldn't fit in your case, you could also throw in an extra 2-port sata card (like the sil3132 or something similar), and get it up to 24 ports...

 

If you're looking for an upgrade in cpu oomph, that board looks to support a ton of faster chips as well. I have a 600e quad-core in mine, and I went from a sempron 140. The difference is night and day, and the power use is almost identical.

 

Here's the CPU support list from Gigabyte:

 

http://www.gigabyte.com/support-downloads/cpu-support-popup.aspx?pid=3138

 

A quick look on Ebay showed some used x4s selling for around $70-80 (shipped to Canada)... A quick, cheap, effective upgrade... :)

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Post a note and confirm the 4TB units work with that board -- just to confirm  :)

 

... but of course even if they don't, you could simply add an 8-port card and connect them to that => 8 4TB drives would give you a 28TB protected array  :)

 

(then you could add a 2nd 8-port card and grow the array to 60TB !!)

 

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Out of curiosity, has anyone using UnRaid (or otherwise) come across a motherboard that *didn't* support 3TB+ drives on the mobo headers (as data drives). My understanding was this was only an issue with regard to booting from one...

 

There are a lot of older boards that don't support > 2TB drives.  In fact, many don't even support 48-bit logical block addressing (and are thus limited to 128GB).

 

But probably nothing in the last 5-6 years is in that category.

 

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I had a system based on the exact same motherboard. It had an AMD Athlon II X2 8 GHz CPU. In my case, at least, the motherboard SATA ports worked fine with 4 TB (Seagate) drives.

 

I did run into a problem when using two Supermicro controller boards, detailed here (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=26391.msg230767#msg230767) but only if both cards were in use.

 

I ultimately decided to switch motherboards but the problem with the Supermicro cards continued so wound up switching to  IBM 1015 boards on the new board (an ASRock Z77 Extreme 4).

 

But to reiterate, I had no problem with Gigabyte motherboard SATA ports  with 4 TB drives, and I do not believe the problems I did have had anything to do with the Gigabyte board, but rather with the Supermicro cards and the .21 firmware, a problem which I believe has been solved here (http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=27129.0)

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VampyreGTX, I have been parting out my full size chassis HTPC (as a Raspbmc box works great).

 

Given that the unlock trick did not work... If you want to up your CPU speed and double the core count Cheaply...

 

-AMD Athlon II X2 250 Processor AM3

-Scythe Shuriken Rev.B SCSK-110 low profile cooler & fan

-Two Samsung MV-2V1G4 1GB DDR2 SDRAM Desktop Memory Module (800MHz PC2-6400)

 

If you want the CPU&Cooler you can have them for $20+shipping.  If they do not work (though they should), Ill give you the $20 back.

 

If you want the ram too... just add $10.  The only reason I could see wanting the ram too is if you want spare ddr2 set

 

...sorry... not trying to sidetrack or hijack.... but the parts either find a home (cheaply) or they go in the bin... and these may help you.

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