Expanding past available drive ports on mobo?

[markguy]

I didn't see anything in the FAQ or related material, nor have my forum search skills turned up anything, so... what's the best practice for expanding past a motherboard's available drive slots. I have an AN7 that booted up (to cheers... yay for old hardware still being useful!), but only has 2 SATA slots on it. For the Basic version, obviously this works. Assuming everything goes as well once I have that up and running, I'd like to know if there's a decent path to using the same motherboard for Plus/Pro.

 

Also, while I'm at it, anyone have any experience running unRAID on an AN7? It's not on the motherboard list, which isn't particularly surprising.

 

Thanks very much for any advice, information or other help!

[SSD]

I didn't see anything in the FAQ or related material, nor have my forum search skills turned up anything, so... what's the best practice for expanding past a motherboard's available drive slots. I have an AN7 that booted up (to cheers... yay for old hardware still being useful!), but only has 2 SATA slots on it. For the Basic version, obviously this works. Assuming everything goes as well once I have that up and running, I'd like to know if there's a decent path to using the same motherboard for Plus/Pro.

 

Also, while I'm at it, anyone have any experience running unRAID on an AN7? It's not on the motherboard list, which isn't particularly surprising.

 

Thanks very much for any advice, information or other help!

 

I'm assuming your talking about the Abit AN7?  It has an AGP video slot and several PCI slots.  Have you run both a parity build AND a subsequent parity check.  Just because you are able to setup a basic array and compute parity, you are not really sure if you are compatible or not.  It really takes a month or so of use with a clean parity check at the end to give you good confidence that you are compabible.

 

If you look on the hardware compatibility page you'll find some info on motherboards based on the nForce2 chipset.  There is a note about them not being recommended.  RobJ knows more about these chipsets and may be able to provide more info.  (The wiki could use updating on the whys of this statement).

 

Don't really understand the confusion about pushing past the onboard sata ports.  You just need an add on SATA card.  One of the negatives about the older generation MBs is they do not have any PCi-e ports.  The PCI bus is easy to saturate doing parity checks, but for normal media purposes works fine.  Look here.  There are two links in there that you should look at - one called "Add on SATA Controllers" and other other called "PCI or PCI-E, That is the Question."

 

After reviewing, please post back with any questions.

[Joe L.]

I didn't see anything in the FAQ or related material, nor have my forum search skills turned up anything, so... what's the best practice for expanding past a motherboard's available drive slots. I have an AN7 that booted up (to cheers... yay for old hardware still being useful!), but only has 2 SATA slots on it. For the Basic version, obviously this works. Assuming everything goes as well once I have that up and running, I'd like to know if there's a decent path to using the same motherboard for Plus/Pro.

 

Also, while I'm at it, anyone have any experience running unRAID on an AN7? It's not on the motherboard list, which isn't particularly surprising.

 

Thanks very much for any advice, information or other help!

Pick up an inexpensive 4 port PCI based SATA card.  That's what I did.  It won't be as fast as many newer PCI-e based motherboards, but it will extend the life of your old hardware.

 

Joe L.

[jupilerman]

Pick up an inexpensive 4 port PCI based SATA card.  That's what I did.  It won't be as fast as many newer PCI-e based motherboards, but it will extend the life of your old hardware.

My mobo hasn't any sata ports, so i did that too : I use 4 pci cards with 2 and/or 4 sata ports.

Well, i can say that it is working perfectly. Of course, i don't have the speed some other users have or would like to have but it is enough for me. Waiting 15 seconds before accessing my files won't kill me.

With 9 sata disk and 1 ide, parity check goes ~11Mb/s, so i do it when i sleep.

[markguy]

Thanks again for the replies.

 

It's good... perhaps fantastic is a better choice... to hear I can grow some without a whole new set of hardware. I'm sure this is something I've just managed to overlook, but I think that would be an easy thing to highlight in the unRAID advantages list.

 

In response to bjp999, I haven't yet moved much past the tower login, other than making sure eth0 had an IP and I could reach the web UI. I realize that it's not cause for a victory dance, but things went far better than they did with a *really* old Dell Dimension 4300. That was sad. I am currently rounding up drives for a complete install. I would like to know why the board isn't recommended, but I'm fine with steaming ahead as if everything will be fine. What could possibly go wrong?!

 

As far as the SATA cards, I've never needed one before. Typically I buy a motherboard to run what I expect and the number of drives has never been a sticking point before. So, chalk it up to sheer ignorance. Speaking of which, am I correct in assuming that you can install a SATA card in each open PCI slot? Obviously, PCI channel would be overwhelmed, but other than that, it should work? Short of any IRQ conflicts?

[jupilerman]

Well, i had some problems with differents sata cards.

And some with differents pci ports.

And as far as i know, those problems can be mobo and/or sata-pci cards related.

 

My advice is if you use more than one card, have them all the same, try to not mix differents cards.

I did and i had to try all the cards on differents ports before been able to boot correctly.

I don't know how many you can use and if there are some irq issues. That depends of the mobo. You'll have to try.

[markguy]

Thanks for the info jupilerman.

 

On a somewhat related topic, am I correct in believing that unRAID is basically ignorant of what channel a drive is using? You could mix whatever SATA with IDE and unRAID would chirp along contentedly, yes?

 

Oh, getting back to an earlier response from bjp999 about the nForce2 chipset not being recommended, it apparently boils down to anything prior to nForce5 (with some exceptions amongst nForce4) being known for a variety of data corruption issues. This is above and beyond unRAID, which makes you wonder why it wasn't a more known issue (I've owned this board for five years without hearing about it) and why it took so long to resolve. In any case, I'll be giving it a go just as soon as I move personal files from the drives I plan on wiping and using. Short of throwing the box through a window afterward, I'll post any weirdness I discover.

[RobJ]

Going from memory (for more info, you can check the links with those nForce comments), there were mainly 3 separate areas of issues with the nForce 4 chipsets.  I understood from some of my research that at least some of the problems were also common to the nForce 2 and nForce 3 chipsets, but I do not know which ones.  The 3 main issues (and others were rumored/suspected) were incompatibilities with certain drives (especially older Maxtor's), problems with IDE drive identification (would miss certain IDE drives occasionally or would fail to boot/post), and the data corruption issues (probably associated with bus contention, with simultaneous traffic on the busses).  My own theory about why these boards had been so successful and popular with gamers and others, is that most people including gamers do not use more than one drive at a time (often only have one drive), and therefore never faced any simultaneous traffic problems on the PCI and other busses.  I don't know if that is true, but it seems to fit.  The kind of simultaneous access that we unRAID'ers do (when writing to parity protected drives) is more typical of server usage, not desktop usage, and I don't believe the nForce chipsets were designed for server use, just desktop use (in my opinion).

 

I don't want to say that any nForce board, earlier than nForce 5, cannot work, because a few of them do.  The problems show up pretty quickly, can't really miss them.  So some simple testing, copies (of multi-gigabyte file sizes) and file comparisons or CRC/MD5 checks, should quickly indicate whether you will have problems or not.

[markguy]

Thanks, RobJ. I had started to wade through all those threads and then decided it might make more sense to just boot the thing up and see what happens. One of the drives I'm using is a 250GB Maxtor, which also happens to be an IDE drive. I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope things work before having to decide on several new drives.

 

I agree with your assessment of why your average user wouldn't notice the drive issue... I certainly didn't have any trouble with the board in the five years I've had it. Here's hoping I get some more time out of it, even in a different capacity.

[SSD]

With 9 sata disk and 1 ide, parity check goes ~11Mb/s, so i do it when i sleep.

 

At 11 MB/sec (assuming we're are talking megBYTES, not megaBITS), a parity check would take about 12.5 hours with all 500G disks, 25 hours with all 1T disks, and 50 hours with all 2T disks.  (With mixed capacity drives, the speed increases as the as the parity check extends beyond the capacity of smaller drives).  Parity checks are recommended once a month, and finding a day or even two to run one is likely not so hard.  Each disk added would further slow parity checks due to PCI bus saturation getting worse and worse.

 

Having the network card on the PCI bus does not impact parity checks, but when copying data to or reading data from the array, you are basically doubling the load on the PCI bus.  So if you are copying data at 45 MB/sec (about the fastest anyone gets coping to a cache disk), the load on the PCI bus will be 90 MB/sec.  The PCI bus can handle about 133MB/sec, so this does not become a problem unless performed multiple operations at the same time.

 

But for media-playing the chances of saturating the PCI bus is almost zero.   Even a BluRay disk averages only about 5 MB/sec, causing a 10 MB/sec load on the PCI bus.  Even accounting for 10x more than that at peak moments (far exceeds actual), the PCI bus will not be saturated even with 2 uber-streams.