Just wanted to see what people thing of the hardware I’m going to use for my new unraid server and find out if there is any know issues with the hardware I’m going to use.

 

Motherboard. Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-HD3. link http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4406#

CPU. AMD A-Series A4-4000. link http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Bulldozer/AMD-A4-Series%20A4-4000%20-%20AD4000OKA23HL%20-%20AD4000OKHLBOX.html

Ram. Corsair 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz. link http://www.corsair.com/vengeance-8gb-dual-channel-ddr3-memory-kit-cmz8gx3m2a1600c9.html

Case. Gigabyte GZ-G2 with front removed and fans attached directly to case for better airflow to hdd's. link http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4054#kf

PSU. OCZ Technology ZS Series 750W 80+ Bronze. link http://ocz.com/consumer/psu/zs-series-550w-750w-power-supply

Hard drives in order of size

Seagate 2tb sata

Western Digital 1tb green sata

Seagate pipeline hd 500gb sata

Seagate 320gb ide

Western Digital 200gb sata

Seagate 80gb ide

The sata drive's will be attached to the motherboard sata ports the ide drives will be attached vie a pcie x1 to ide

The build looks okay, but I would reconsider whether to use the lower-capacity drives ... especially the old IDE units.    They will significantly slow down parity checks (a LOT), and add very little capacity ... the 4 lower capacity drives only total 1100GB => you could add a new 2TB drive for < $100 and nearly double that capacity while freeing up 3 additional drive slots.

 

You may also want to use a higher-capacity parity drive, so you're not limited in what you can add as you later expand.    In fact, buying a nice new 3 or 4 TB drive for your parity drive would let you use that 2TB unit instead of the 4 smaller ones (as I just suggested).

 

Although this is highly not recommended I'm not using any of these drives for parity as this server isnt going to hold any vital data it going to be used mostly used for streaming video and music and a few backups.

I have a question than, why are you using unraid if you are not going to use Parity protection.

you can any main stream Linux distro with an LVM volumes for drive pooling and SAMBA for pool share with window clients  and be done with it.

 

you can also go the same as above but install Avahi or some other media server too...

 

the whole point of UnRaid  is the data protection + ease of pool expansion (while protecting the data ) it offers. without Parity it's just highly limited proprietary Linux distro.

 

 

I did originally have that but unraid is simpler also it merges all the hard drives as one so when i query the drive in windows it shows how much space I have left altogether. There probably is a way to do that through normal linux through software raid but unraid is easy plus i don’t have to go back and forth from the nas to my pc because of the web gui. also it preforms faster and so do the media servers they run a lot smoother too. I already have a unraid server with those listed drives and a old gigabyte motherboard and dual core AMD but I wanted to change the mb and cpu as the motherboard is failing in it's old age as the on-board Ethernet no longer works correctly and it not a problem with unraid i have checked and also the new mb and cpu will reduce power costs and heat generated. as the psu ram case and hard drives I already own.

I'd go for an Ivy Bridge based Celeron CPU instead. It'll smoke that AMD chip in terms of performance and cost the same. It'll also run cooler.

Definitely agree with going Intel ... absolutely a better choice.

 

However ... if you're not going to use UnRAID for its fault tolerance;  and only have about 4TB of total storage on the system; why bother with a NAS at all?    You could simply install a 4TB drive in any system you have and share it on your network.

 

Definitely agree with going Intel ... absolutely a better choice.

 

However ... if you're not going to use UnRAID for its fault tolerance;  and only have about 4TB of total storage on the system; why bother with a NAS at all?    You could simply install a 4TB drive in any system you have and share it on your network.

 

I am a hardcore AMD fan,  have been for the last 15+ years, but t each is his own not going to start a war here.

 

As for the second part I said the same thing earlier up. Just load any stable linux distro, and setup lvm+samba and be done with it.

 

Sent from my SGH-T889 using Tapatalk 4

 

 

I will in future be adding more drives to the nas and bigger ones and will eventually add a parity drive but to save money for now I'm not im useing mostly just spair drives I have lying around and i dont realy need to worry about them dieing as I have done smart checks and not a single one has a fault not even the oldest drive which is around 7 years old. again I could just use a linux distro like I originally did but unraid is far easier to set-up and use and preforms smoother plus I have already bought a licence so I'm sticking with unraid . As for getting an intel cpu I would prefer to stick with amd. I have had a fair share of amd and intel based pc's over the years and have spent a decent amount of time with both and from what I have experienced intel cpu's run anything but cold I found intels like to idle around  40c to 50c depending on how much power the cpu has and the heatsinc you are using and amd I found to idle around 20 to 30 again depending on how much power the cpu has and heatsinc you are using. I'm also using an apu because of lower power consumption and I will probably underclock the gpu on the chip to save power and heat generated and it would easy be able to keep up with real time conversion as the amd can it a AMD Phenom II X2 550 not the most powerful dual core on the market but for a nas it fine. The reason for having a nas is simple there a 4 people in my house all 4 people have pc's there are also laptops a ps3 and soon a network TV and having a nas just make it a hell of a lot easier to watch stuff and share files on all those devices without the use of memory sticks or portable hard drives. Putting these hard drives in my pc is out of the question my main pc already has 4 hard drives in it and this nas has 6 and my case is not big enough not do I have the sata ports left for all of them I also cant leave this pc on because of it's power usage a ati 7970 and amd fx 8150 are not exactly the most eco friendly parts on the market .

Since you already have an UnRAID license that makes sense.

 

UnRAID does provide an easy way to combine all your various drives of disparate sizes into a logically single storage medium with user shares, so it will work well for what you have in mind.    Obviously most of us also want fault-tolerance;  but you can always add that at some point in the future [probably after the first time you have a drive fail and lose some data  ]

 

The Intel/AMD bit is a personal choice ... AMD does allow you to build lower-cost systems, but Intel provides better performance.  As you noted, however, the AMD is "good enough" and will work fine for UnRAID.    Your comments r.e. heat, however, are simply wrong for modern core architecture CPUs.    The older Netburst chips were indeed pretty warm (Pentium-IVs); but the Core architecture chips are far more efficient, and run much cooler than their AMD competitors.    For example, a Pentium G2020 Ivy Bridge CPU has more than 50% more CPU "horsepower" than the AMD CPU you're looking at, and has a TDP of 55w compared to the A4000's 65w.  So it consumes less power, generates less heat, and has far more processing power.

 

But the AMD CPU is $20 less expensive, so you can indeed save a few $$ by going that route.

 

BTW, the same is true on the higher end => your FX-8150 has a TDP of 125w, and scores a respectable 7750 on PassMark's CPUMark (a very good measure of CPU "horsepower").    An i7-4770k significantly outperforms the 8150 [Passmark 10128] while only drawing a max of 84w ... and really blows the 8150 away on any single-threaded tasks, since it's providing that level of performance with only 4 cores.  [i.e. it's "per core" performance is almost 3 times the 8150's]

 

... and if you get into the low-power Xeons, the comparisons are even more stark -- but these add significantly to the cost.

 

I have had drives fail on me before but I always know before hand when they are going to fail as I keep a close eye on all my hardware in my pc using temperature motoring software like speed fan and using the smart checker also in speed fan to keep an eye on my hard drives. I use my pc for gaming and 3d modelling and rendering and losing my work is not something I want to do. As for amd intel this is through personal experience what I about to say so no wars plz anyway intel does better when it comes to single threaded applications there is no doubt about that as I use a intel xeon based server for a minecraft server and that runs very smooth and they aren’t top of he line xeons either they are rather old. as for amd they do better when it comes to highly multi-threaded  applications and I have found that when the load gets higher the performance of intel drops off rather fast while amd don’t as I use an amd-fx 8150 for 3d rendering and video conversion and it gets the job done very fast. in short intel cpu's can handle small amounts of information very fast and large amounts of information rather slowly while amd is the other way around and as said this is though personal experience and usage. also I don’t trust review websites as they have been found to lie  and like you said it is also personal preference and the cpu you go for should depend on what you want it to do and you should go for what suits your needs as both company’s CPU’s have there advantages and disadvantages and one is better at one thing while the other is better at something else.

Definitely agree it's a personal choice.    That's why my original comment said "... The build looks okay ..." and the only thing I commented on was the low-capacity drives (which I think are using too many drive slots and too much power for the amount of storage they're providing).    I didn't comment on Intel/AMD until it was mentioned later ... and only wrote the last post to clarify that your comment r.e. their CPUs running hotter was NOT correct.    But I certainly agree that both Intel & AMD processors have their own unique sets of advantages/disadvantages.

 

We got a little off topic but along as there are no problems with the hardware I'm using and unraid will run fine on it then all is well.

as for the smaller hard drives they will eventually be all removed as probably when i get the new mb and cpu i will be adding another 2tb and removing the 200gb drive.

 

However I have a question the 80gb hard drive is use as a cache drive and has pending cahe on it and also there are a few apps I have install that use the cache drive like serviio so how would I go about changing the drive as I want to upgrade it to a faster and larger drive.

Good luck with your new build. It's good to hear you're sticking with unRAID through it's ease of use! It's always nice to see posts like that!!

However I have a question the 80gb hard drive is use as a cache drive and has pending cahe on it and also there are a few apps I have install that use the cache drive like serviio so how would I go about changing the drive as I want to upgrade it to a faster and larger drive.

 

Copy everything off of it to another drive  (on another system or simply to a folder on your array);  unassign it so there's no cache drive assigned;  then replace it with a new, larger drive;  and assign that drive as cache.    Then just copy everything back to the new cache drive.