Time for more drives, what to get?

[Mopar_Mudder]

I have had my UnRaid server up and running now for a month with out a hitch, it is doing exactly what I want it to.

 

What I have is a Asus P4T533-3 board with 3 120gig drives running on the onboard UltraDMA 100

 

I want to add a 1tb drive to the server. Well actually 2, one for storage and one for the new parity drive. The existing 120gig parity will become more storage.

 

Being I have an old board their is no Sata on it of course. What I have is 5 regular PCI ports that are open.

 

So what I am looking for is recomendations for the best PCI to Sata board to put in their, and what is the best most reliable 1tb drive out their right now? I am looking for deals but don't want a cheap drive if it is just going to be problems down the road.

[Kewjoe]

I can't comment on a PCI SATA card. but for 1TB drive, in my opinion, the Seagate 1TB is a no brainer. Simply due to the 5 year warranty and great price (12 cents a gig). I have 4 (2 in production, another 2 waiting for my unraid server to be built).

[PhilH]

I use the SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 card. It has 8 sata ports. I have one in a regular PCI slot & it works great. I have a 1tb Seagate hooked up to it as my parity drive. Here is a link to the card.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

 

Hope this helps..

 

Phil

[NAS]

I have 2 of those cards an IMHO are better than the Promise ones.

[Mopar_Mudder]

I use the SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 card. It has 8 sata ports. I have one in a regular PCI slot & it works great. I have a 1tb Seagate hooked up to it as my parity drive. Here is a link to the card.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

 

Hope this helps..

 

Phil

 

Thats a great help. Just what I was looking for, what works. Got the card figured out, just have to start shopping.

 

I have one question though. Is their a problem using that card that is 64 bit in my mother board which is only a 32bit PCI slot?

[ilovejedd]

Thats a great help. Just what I was looking for, what works. Got the card figured out, just have to start shopping.

 

I have one question though. Is their a problem using that card that is 64 bit in my mother board which is only a 32bit PCI slot?

 

Functionally, not really. It'll just be really slow on parity sync/check if you've got a whole bunch of SATA drives connected to it. PCI-X cards are also longer than regular PCI cards so make sure the extended leg isn't going to hit any heatsinks, caps, etc on the motherboard.

[Mopar_Mudder]

As far as size goes their is no problem, lots of room.

 

Write performacne is not a huge deal for me. The thing that is important is read speed, this will store Blu-Ray movie rips that get played by mt HTPC. Now I have no problem at all playing them off the IDE drives.

 

I guess the other thing to look at is what would a new Mother Board cost -vrs- this card......

[PhilH]

If you have no problem watching movies off of the IDE drives then you will have no problem watching them with this card. When you read from this card there is no bottleneck when you are reading from a single drive. Parity checks are slow but other than that reads are great.

 

Edit: You can't go wrong with getting this card now & adding it to your current system. If you decide to get a new motherboard later with 8 sata ports then you can use this card to get to the 16 drive limit. Something to think about. 

[SSD]

I can't comment on a PCI SATA card. but for 1TB drive, in my opinion, the Seagate 1TB is a no brainer. Simply due to the 5 year warranty and great price (12 cents a gig). I have 4 (2 in production, another 2 waiting for my unraid server to be built).

 

I am a big Seagate fan too, but for unRAID I am moving towards these drives instead.  They don't spin as fast so they are cooler and draw less power (about HALF).  Their sequential read performance is the same as the 1T Seagate's (maybe faster) because the data is stored more densely.  Their random access times are a tad slower.  Since the array is on the network and limited by the Gb LAN, the difference between these two drives from a performance perspective is none.  You will never notice a difference playing movies!

 

I wish WD offered a 5yr warranty, but to be honest most drive problems I've had have been within the first month of ownership.  YMMV

 

I use one of the Seagates for parity, but wouldn't have an issue running WD even for that.

 

If you want to step up to 1.5T drives, Seagate is the only option - but there have been a fair amount of trouble with their firmware.  Seagate has acknowledged the problem but not sure the status of a fix.  I've decided to stick with the 1T drives for now.  The 1.5T drives are fast because they spin faster AND have the higher density storage. This comes in handy for parity checks.

 

The issue with PCI cards mostly has to do with parity check speeds.  In normal use they are fine.  But if you have 8 drives all running at once on the PCI bus, they will move data slowly.  (2 drives can max out the PCI bus),

 

To improve parity check speeds, try to assign your disk slots to alternate interfaces.  (e.g, parity on MB, disk1 on PCI card, disk2 on MB, disk3 on PCI card, etc.)  I have had good luck with this technique.  Keep your parity disk on the MB port.

 

[Mopar_Mudder]

I kind of have to agree on the warrenty thing. But do you have any input on the GREEN vrs the BLACK drive, the BLACK is $30 more and has a 5 year warrenty.

 

As far as reads go it woould be very unlikely that it would be reading from more then one drive at a time. I have it set so that a Movie folder can't be spread between drive, the entire movie is always on one drive.