ASUS P5Q Deluxe (A+!) Raid 0


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I just bought the Asus P5Q Deluxe.

The only problem I ran into was using a PCI video card. As soon as I switched over to a pcie card, everything worked fine.

Silicon Image Sil5723 (Drive Xpert technology) - 2 x SATA 3Gb/s setup in Raid0, and it worked very well in unRaid.

I never seen unRaid and bubbaRaid boot so fast, not even on my other dual core system (Intel E6850/4GB), same speed roughly.

I will have to look into why that is later.

I tested transfer speeds with and without parity, stability.

 

Gear:

Asus P5Q Deluxe (Left everything default, except removed floppy) (Will have to test again changing the AHCI vs IDE)

Intel CPU E8400

Kingston Value Ram 8GB (planning for future)

Antec 1200 Case 12 bay case for 190$ Canadian (it even comes with manual variable fan speeds for all 6 fans.)

(I will post a review on it at the end of the post. Lots of fans and cooling!)

 

I also just borrowed a kill-a-watt. Will test!

 

Tested using a clean unRaid latest beta4

 

Disk status

Model / Serial No. Temperature Size Free Reads Writes Errors

parity Not installed

disk1 ata-DriveXpert_HDD0_CP-5723_Port_0_1_0_F * 781,422,736 749,322,752 436 189,567 0

disk2 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD03EHT 38°C 732,574,552 501,380,680 502 46,835 0

 

 

Notice the temperature is not properly read from the Disk1 Drive-Xpert.

Not certain if the drives spun down or not...will confirm at a later point.

 

There is a significant performance gain between disk 1 and disk2.

Disk 1 two seagate 400GB (older gen SATA2 drives 7200.8 ) Model:ST3400832AS

Disk 2 one 750GB Seagate Sata2 drive(7200.10 newer gen)   Model:ST3750640AS

 

Transfer speeds from xp pro sp3 gige (Cat6 direct connected to same switch)

 

The transfer of two files 15 and 16GB in size (No parity drive)

Disk1(DriveXpert Raid0) 42-55MB (mostly 49) MB/s 

Disk2 31-47 (mostly 38) MB/s

 

Update as of 21 April: Using Drive Expert for Cache with two 500GB Seagate 7200.12 Drives saw a performance increase. Transfer to the cache drive now hover around 65-71 (mostly 69) MB/s.

How sweet it is!

Also I am changing my parity drive to a Seagate 1.5 TB 7200.11, but the drive itself is not the bottle neck, my two pci 4 port Promise cards are the bottleneck. Only getting 14MB/s on parity right now. I have a Supermicro AOC card ready to go, when unRaid 4.5 Beta5 comes out, I will test it.

I did not see any performance difference between AHCI and IDE drive, although switching between the two modes requires you to re-setup your devices in unRaid. Also, it does not seem

that the motherboard can boot headless. Keyboardless is no problem.

 

MD5 Checksum of first file to both drives is perfect, no corruption:

ORIG: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a

Dsk1: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a

dsk2: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a

 

After this transfer test I will use the Disk1 for Parity.

Test speed of parity and transfer:

Parity Drive Rebuild: between 43 to 58MB/sec (Average around 54MB/s)

 

The transfer of two files 15 and 16GB in size (With parity drive)

Disk2 12-18 (mostly 15) MB/s

It seems the drive Expert Raid zero has little effect for a parity drive.

Best to use it as a cache drive.

MD5 Checksum checks out.

dsk2: MD5: 9aa3eb3c17f202fef560694a534a880a

 

Syslog is attached as a zip file.

 

 

Kill-A-Watt power usage:

Motherboard,8GB RAM, GPU, CPU only, no hard drives: Not available...

Full Slavo with Drives: 450Watts for a few seconds at boot, then it hovers around 207-235 watts after the boot with all drives powered up.

During file transfers with parity and cache drive up, remaining drives idle 118Watts.

 

Too bad sar/iostat are not built in. I would love to see performance over time.

 

LIMEtechnology

Server name: Tower

Comments: Media server

 

unRAID Server Pro

 

Main | Users | Shares | Settings | Devices version: 4.4.2 (Production version is running 4.4.2, not beta)

Disk status

Model / Serial No. Temperature Size Free Reads Writes Errors

parity ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1VGNP 27°C 976,762,552 - 26 0 0

disk1 ata-ST31000340AS_5QJ036TR 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0

disk2 ata-ST31000640AS_3QJ00AJF 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0

disk3 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD046F9 29°C 732,574,552 - 30 0 0

disk4 ata-ST3750330AS_9QK0Q3JY 27°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0

disk5 ata-ST3400832AS_3NF0T88Q 25°C 390,711,352 - 32 0 0

disk6 ata-ST31000340AS_9QJ1KE5W 29°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0

disk7 ata-ST31000340AS_5QJ0ZSRQ 26°C 976,762,552 - 30 0 0

disk8 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD04LCF 30°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0

disk9 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD0CZSP 30°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0

disk10 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD4RPF3 31°C 732,574,552 - 32 0 0

disk11 ata-ST3400832AS_3NF11LFN 26°C 390,711,352 Clearing - - -

disk12 ata-ST3750640AS_5QD03EHT 28°C 732,574,552 Clearing - - -

cache ata-Maxtor_6B200M0_B413F2CH 25°C 195,360,952 - 30 0 0

 

I have never seen the drives so cool. consider that I am using home built 5drives into 3 (5.25 inch bays) x 4.

The case is amazingly quiet, with all fans on low. With the temperatures so low, I have disabled some of the fans, and the temperatures have not changed.

 

I have 3 spare SATAII cables and two IDE cables. I am currently not using the drive expert drives. No reason really.

The transfer speed is decent. I will replace by 200GB Cache drive with a 1.5TB Seagate drive(just as fast at the 10K raptors for less money and more storage).

I might even buy two and setup Drive expert on it.

 

Here are pictures of the case and the setup.

DSC_5278.jpgDSC_5290.jpgDSC_5291.jpgDSC_5293.jpgDSC_5295.jpgDSC_5272.jpg

 

Notice the Case comes with 3 120mm fans in the front, a 200mm fan on top of the case, and two 120mm fans at the back. You can add a forth fan in front of the drives in the front of the case, and another one on the side panel. But it is not needed. I did have to assemble the 4th fan cage for the front. All parts come with the case, but Ihad to buy one 120mm fan. See photos.

DSC_5279.jpgDSC_5264.jpgDSC_5273.jpg

 

Here are pictures of the 5 drives in 3 5.25inch bays I made. Not perfect, but it works. Jig Saw and drill is all that is needed.

http:[/img]

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Very cool! I just finished building my 1st unRAID box over the weekend using the same case with three Icy Dock 5-in-3 bays and the ASUS P5Q Premium model; same as the Deluxe except w/ 10 SATA ports, two of which are expert ports. I am just in the process of transferring some data but haven't had a chance to test anything besides memory yet... learning as I go and as time permits. I will post details and pics when I have time.

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I was going for the premium as well, but it was going to take too long to get it, and the price hear was 60$ more.

I put the 60$ on an 8 port Supermicro PCIe card. Now I just need to get unraid to detect it.

What kind of drive temperatures and performance are you getting?

If you can put two segate 1.5TB drives on the drive expert, and set that for either your cache or parity drive. Test the performance difference.

the 1.5 TB seagate drives are just as fast as the 10K veloraptor drives 300GB drives. Less heat , noise, and more space, cheaper price too.

That is my next step next month. I will use my cache drive as my download drive.

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I just got lucky on the Premium model. I purchased the Deluxe and then found another local retailer that had one in stock for less than I paid for the deluxe ($225)

 

At the moment I am running 7 Seagate 1.5TB drives with one as parity. I have 2 Seagate ST3320613AS setup in performance mode (raid 0) using the Drive Expert ports. Per Tom's Hardware Disk Charts these are darn close to the VelociRaptors at a fraction of the price. Off the top of my head (didn’t write the numbers down_ Performance over Gig Ethernet is up in the 50Mbps range writing to the cache drive, 40Mbps without parity and about 20Mbps with.

 

The only issue I have run into so far is when transferring large amounts of data (8 Blu-Ray Disks) from the cache drive to the array both with and without parity on it seems to not successfully complete the transfer. My ICY DOCK 5-in-3 shows a drive error light on one drive but unRAID shows no errors. Large continuous writes to the cache drive don’t seem to be and issue. If I use it for incremental transfers (1 BD at a time) it does seem to have a problem. Thought at 1st I might have a bad disk but now I am thinking it might be a problem with the ASUS proprietary Drive Expert implementation, as I understand unRAID does not officially support raid 0 for the cache drive.

 

Temp wise I think I am seeing mid 30s on continuous writes with a couple of drives getting in the high 30s (probably a airflow issue.) For additional cards I went with two of the Adaptec 1430SAs, that are working well so far... I figure 16 ports/disks should cover my DVD/BD collection for the foreseeable future. Keep us posted on your progress with the SuperMicro 8 port PCIe card. If I get a urge to use the last 5.25 bays for a 4th 5-in-3 carrier I may need to look at it.

 

Hopefully I will get around to posting pics and detailed specs in the next couple of days. I spent a ridiculous amount of time wiring that case as I am bit OCD :)

 

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Is it confirmed that the Premium supports 10 sata drives at "high" speed (not pci)?

 

Also, what is the advantage of the expert sata ports? 

 

I'm getting ready to start my unRAID build and this motherboard is a top contender.  Thanks guys.

 

Jim

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Drive expert has three modes: backup (raid1), Speed (raid0), normal (but only one sata connector works in normal mode I believe).

 

My intention was to use it for cache in raid0 mode, or parity. But from my tests, I did not see a huge improvement using it as a parity drive, so

for me i will become my cache drive as soon as I pickup two new 1.5 TB Seagate drives. I do not need TB of cache for my drive, but the speed is there and cheaper than two veloraptor(spelling???) 10K drives. So far I am very happy with how well the system has been performing. You should also look at the other threads where some people have their unraid using 30 watts at idle instead of 114-118 I use. Right now, I think that a single gigE might be my bottle neck.

Cheers for now.

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Drive expert has three modes: backup (raid1), Speed (raid0), normal (but only one sata connector works in normal mode I believe).

 

My intention was to use it for cache in raid0 mode, or parity. But from my tests, I did not see a huge improvement using it as a parity drive, so

for me i will become my cache drive as soon as I pickup two new 1.5 TB Seagate drives. I do not need TB of cache for my drive, but the speed is there and cheaper than two veloraptor(spelling???) 10K drives. So far I am very happy with how well the system has been performing. You should also look at the other threads where some people have their unraid using 30 watts at idle instead of 114-118 I use. Right now, I think that a single gigE might be my bottle neck.

Cheers for now.

 

Apologies in advance for this post.  I know that a segment of unRAID users are really focused on tweaking unRAID performance.  Out of these activities have come solutions to some nasty performance problems (the “ls-r” script comes to mind).  But some attempts to improve performance just don’t and can’t.

 

The speed of transfers from workstations to the unRAID server are bottlenecked by gigabit ethernet.  Any modern drive is more that fast enough to keep up.  Therefore, speeding up the cache disk, even dramatically, is going to have little impact on performance from client workstations.

 

Discussions around using RAID1 for the cache disk are to provide redundancy.  If the cache drive were to fail, all of its data would be lost, making it a poor choice for storing anything valuable, and creating a risk for loss of data bound for the protected array.  The redundancy of RAID1 on the cache drive create possibilities for many non-media uses of the unRAID server.  I think it is smart, and hope that Tom will consider making it available without special hardware.

 

But applying RAID0 to the cache disk not only provides little if any speed improvement, it doubles the likelihood of the cache drive failing, because if EITHER of the two disks were to fail the entire contents of cache would be lost.  I run RAID0 on my workstation and love the speed improvement it gives.  But it would be totally wasted on the cache disk.

 

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I'd go with a Seagate 7200.12 500gb drive for the cache. It has the same or better write speed at the 1.5tb and a higher minimum which is important since they're slower than what an ideal gigabit connection could do. It also uses 2.5-3w less when idle and in use which makes it one of the coolest running drives. Good traits for an 24/7 spinning drive.

 

hdtach-write797.gif

 

The 500gb platter performance is disappointing though. I suspect Seagate kept the write speed the same or only a little faster to increase the reliability. Future 500gb platter drives from other manufacturers could yield higher speeds.

 

Vertex SSD to an empty Seagate 1.5tb cache drive.

4.35gb transfer with Intel nics and a cheap D-Link "green" switch:

99mbs571.gif

 

Seems good enough to me, and it's without a faster managed switch or use of jumbo frames.

 

 

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Thanks for the info on the expert sata ports, guys.  If anyone can confirm that all 10 of the sata ports do not run on the PCI bus, I'm ordering this sucker.

 

Also, it sounds like there is a need to run a pci-e video card with the Deluxe board.  Is this the same for the Premium?  I would really like to not have any video card if possible.

 

Thanks again!

 

Jim

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I guess I could try to run it headless, but I prefer to have a small video card in there.

A pci video card might work, the ones I had in stock did not. If I get a chance tonight, I will try to go headless, and let you know what happened...

 

22Apr:

Worked late last night. Will try tonight.

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Update as of 21 April: Using Drive Expert for Cache with two 500GB Seagate 7200.12 Drives saw a performance increase. Transfer to the cache drive now hover around 65-71 (mostly 69) MB/s.

How sweet it is!

Also I am changing my parity drive to a Seagate 1.5 TB 7200.11, but the drive itself is not the bottle neck, my two pci 4 port Promise cards are the bottleneck. Only getting 14MB/s on parity right now. I have a Supermicro AOC card ready to go, when unRaid 4.5 Beta5 comes out, I will test it.

I did not see any performance difference between AHCI and IDE drive, although switching between the two modes requires you to re-setup your devices in unRaid. Also, it does not seem

that the motherboard can boot headless. Keyboardless is no problem.[/color]

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Although Drive Expert works in unraid, unraid does not know how to handle the drive temperature of a raid 0 system.

edit 1 May09: Also unraid seems to power down the cache drive in this config, even though it is set to never power down.

Odd really. Maybe in the future. For now I will temporarily stop using the cache drive in a raid 0 setup.

 

Apr 23 14:43:51 Tower emhttp: disk_temperature: ioctl (smart_read_values): Input                                                                    /output error

Apr 23 14:48:51 Tower emhttp: disk_temperature: ioctl (smart_read_values): Input                                                                    /output error

Apr 23 14:53:51 Tower emhttp: disk_temperature: ioctl (smart_read_values): Input                                                                    /output error

Apr 23 14:58:51 Tower emhttp: disk_temperature: ioctl (smart_read_values): Input                                                                    /output error

Apr 23 15:03:51 Tower emhttp: disk_temperature: ioctl (smart_read_values): Input                                                                    /output error

 

Is there a way to suppress this error?

Also, I find that the drive once powered down, seems to require a reboot to power up again.

I have not decided 100% wether or not I will use it.

 

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  • 4 months later...

Folks, stay away from the OCZ 800W eliteXtreme power supply. I am now on my second RMA!@!

Still waiting to get my RMA back.

I did not wait, and went out and bought a Corsair instead. The replacement will be a backup.

 

Curious if anyone knows of good cheap Dual hotswapable power supply that would do the trick?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Folks, stay away from the OCZ 800W eliteXtreme power supply. I am now on my second RMA!@!

Still waiting to get my RMA back.

I did not wait, and went out and bought a Corsair instead. The replacement will be a backup.

 

Curious if anyone knows of good cheap Dual hotswapable power supply that would do the trick?

 

OK, I know they received the powersupply, they tried to pawn off a model which is cheaper, half price! I told them I would wait for

the proper replacement! Still waiting, not impressed. Good thing I wnet out and bought a corsair in the meantime!

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...
  • 7 months later...

I figured if I wanted more speed, I could always put in one of the newer SSD drives for cache. I am currently not using it, but there was nothing wrong data wise, after running multiple checksums on large files. I just got anoid at the errors in the error logs, and I also upgraded my cache drive to a fast 1.5TB drive that is also energy efficient. So if you need the performance, over 80MB/s you will hit the network bottleneck for a 1GB/s network anyways...

 

Why do you need the performance? Or are you just testing? Understand I have not tried it with the latest code.

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Oh, I just started using unraid over the weekend.  I actually have the P5Q premium, and it doesn't support over 1TB drives on the Drive Xpert.  Don't ask me why.  I checked out the Bios's on Asus's website, and they updated the P5Q Deluxe to support over 1TB and not the Premium.  Oh well, it doesn't matter anyway.  You are right, I have 12 Samsung Spinpoint 1.5tb drives for my raid, and then I use the Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 drive as the cache drive.  I am not even using it on the Drive xpert port, because I didn't like some of the errors that I was getting in unraid.  I am still getting 70-80+mb/s right now.  I am good with that.

 

I am coming from using a 3ware 9650SE-24M8 hardware raid card,  that was a very expensive card, and I was running raid 6, and I had two isntances where I had 2 drives fall out of the raid just because of an ECC error, and there was no way to by pass an error like that.  Which, never lost any data, but man that was some stressful times while it was rebuilding the raid.  So I went on the hunt to find a better type raid for my media.  That is when I fell upon unraid, which not that I love the idea of losing data, but man I love the idea if I lost 2 drives, I only lose those 2 drives and not everything.  Plus I am really enjoying not having to run windows on my server and such.

 

Right now I am trying to figure out why it is throwing these codes:

 

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4528]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:32'

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4543]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:48'

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4558]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:64'

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4573]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:80'

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4588]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:96'

Jul 5 09:39:01 Tower ata_id[4603]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/block/8:112'

 

All I have found in the forum is that it states it has something to do with requests sent to the drives.  How do I track it down though cause it is really filling up my syslog.  I just have my drives hooked up to the 6 regular ports on the P5Q and then the rest on the Supermicro 8 Port PCI-E SATA Cards.....

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