Most drives with which motherboard?

[cwr]

So i'm looking at building another unRAID system which will hopefully become my main system. I'm probably going to get the Norco 4020 case (20 drives!) and i'm looking for a motherboard to accomodate whatever I can of that. So far i've found the GA-EP45-DQ6 which can use about 8 of the onboard ports, has 2 PCI slots (takes it to 16 drives) and maybe I can find a PCI to SATA card for the PCI 4x slots

 

Is this the best option, or is there something better out there?

[cwr]

the MSI P45 Neo3-FR is probably a better option (after a bit of forum searching)

[WizADSL]

the MSI P45 Neo3-FR is probably a better option (after a bit of forum searching)

 

I think you're FAR better off with the Gigabyte board, the MSI won't do at all if you want tons of drives.

 

The Gagabyte:

If you use a PCI video card, you will have 4 PCI-E slots (2 x16 and 2 x4).  The fact that the non-video PCI-E slots (the small ones) are x4 is unusual, and will let you use a 4-port SATA card such as the Adaptec 2240900-R. Using this board you could have 3 of those cards (12 ports) and the 8 onboard make 20 total, and it's all PCI-E.

 

Another more economical option here is rather than using the Adaptec card, which is top of the line but carries a relativly high per-port cost, you could use 4 SYBA SY-JM363-2S1P (available from NewEgg for $15.99; I'm currently using this board, it works), this board has 2 SATA and 1 PATA port (2 drives).  Using these you could get to 16 SATA ports (including onboard) and use the PATA for cache (assuming your case has a suitable spot for a PATA drive).

 

The MSI:

Only 1 slot capable of using a 4-port SATA card, the other PCI-E slot is a 1x slot and could only utilize a 2 port SATA card.  Assuimg you use the two cards mentioned above, that would allow you 14 SATA ports total, then you'd have to use PCI slots for more SATA cards.

 

PCI:

Yes, you could use PCI SATA cards such as the SYBA SD-SATA2-4IR ($43.99 at NewEgg) and it has 4 SATA ports, but being on the PCI bus, you're going to experience bottlenecks, as the PCI bus just dosn't have that kind of bandwidth.  A single SATA drive (a fast one, such as the Seagate 1.5TB) will saturate the PCI bus with it's sustained throuput alone, nevermind cache read bursts.  You may not experience the bottleneck THAT much in regular use, but your parity chacks are going to be SLOW.

 

Hope this helps.

[lionelhutz]

Looking at old technology which was about the cheapest for many ports, the Supermicro MBD-X7SBE motherboard is about $270. Add 8-port SATA2 PCI-X cards for $100 each and you can have 14 ports for $370 or 22 ports for about $470.

 

The motherboard you listed is good with all the PCIe slots for the $190 price point. Add $100 4-port SATA2 PCIex4 cards you can have 12 ports for $290, 16 ports for $390 or 20 ports for $490.

 

You want to avoid PCI controller boards. 8-port PCIe controller boards are still pretty pricy.

 

So, it looks like a winner to me. Has anyone used it?

 

Peter

 

[Romir]

If this Tyan server board works, then it and a couple SAT2-MV8s are less expensive than the Supermicro board alone. It's cheap because it's an older chipset that's limited to Pentium 4 D's and below. Fine for file servers, not so good for workstations.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151186

 

There's also a free shipping code (MB410FS) that works if you play around with the it in the cart. Closing my checkout tab and re-opening it got it to work for me.

 

I ordered one just in case I ever wanted 20-22 drives in a backup server.

[lionelhutz]

Yup that would make a cheap 20 port system if it works. I'm guessing you'll stick it and a Celeron together?

 

I've just posted the Supermicro because it is known to work.  You're looking for a board with 2 seperate PCI-X busses, which this board has. Put a single SAT2-MV8 into each buss and the speed will still be good. If that one works then $250 for a 20 port system is about as cheap as you'll ever find.

 

Peter

 

[smino]

ASUS P5Q Premium has 10 Sata connections. I know the Deluxe version works, and so does the drive expert raid 0 onboard also works.

Many people forget to count that esata connection that can be wired right back into the case with a simple esata to sata cable.

[mufdvr3669]

The GIGABYTE GA-MA790FXT-UD5P located http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128377 is probably going to be my next board and comes with 10 sata ports standard with 2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 & 3

PCI Express x1.  It's AM3 only, just waiting on future processors to come out so I can either put my current PII 720 in the unraid box or a lower wattage in the unraid box depending on what comes out. 

[smino]

Muf, check to make sure that the 10 sata ports, none of them are on the pci bus, but go straight to the chip.

Chances are that most MB today go straight to the chip. Same thing for your Gige!

[Romir]

lionelhutz,

 

Well I found the downside to the board after looking through the manual. The PCI-X chip is connected by a PCI-E x4 lane which gives a theoretical 62 MB/s for 16 drives. At 51.6 MB/s a 2TB parity check would take 10 hours, or 8.6 at 60 MB/s. That's actually decent because the Marvel controller on the SAT2-MV8 isn't full speed for 8 disks. I seem to recall it being good for 650 MB/s with a linux software raid 5 array of 8 disks. IIRC, the X7SBE uses an x8 lane doubling the available bandwidth to the PCI-X slots.

 

I don't have a 65nm 775 P4 with power saving features so I couldn't get a feel for the power consumption. My 115w TDP P4 560 that only features thermal throttling isn't exactly an ideal cpu.

[lionelhutz]

So, it works? That is some interesting hardware to build a really cheap server for lots of drives. That parity check speed really is not show-stopping slow. It should have good access times when reading and writing under normal use.

 

Peter

 

[Romir]

The Intel gigabit nic(s), ICH7 ports, and a pci-x raid card were all detected in unRAID 4.4.2. That was the extent of my testing, just booting it and seeing if everything showed up. It was extremely nice to able to re-use an older socket 775 heatsink and ddr2 ram.

 

I was learning towards returning it but its actually an ideal board for an offsite backup server connected by a wireless cpe. The 2.5 MB/s wireless link completely negates unRAID's biggest drawback, slow write speeds, making it a perfect fit. I wanted to avoid a parity solution because of the high costs of 16+ fast ports, but this build would be around $700 with 22 ports in a Norco hot swap case.

 

As far as P4 755 based cpus go, it seems like the best choice would be a "Cedar Mill" (65 nm) P4 631 with the 65w "SL9KG" sSpec . The "Cedar Mill" Celerons completely lack power saving features because they were still being used to differentiate product lines back then. A 95w Pentium D 915 might be acceptable as well. Pentium Ds have the newer C1E halt state feature instead of the simpler Thermal Monitor 2 (TM2).

[starcat]

I have ordered a Supermicro X7SBE mainboard with two Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers. I am not sure if I would run unRAID though as performance seems pretty low for a full blown system. I am willing to test and benchmark it though if Tom is willing to provide a temprary unRAID Pro OS license to me. Got a Lexar Firefly 2GB stick to boot from.

 

Is it possible to use any sort of port teaming with unRAID? I have a managed HP ProCurve based GigE network so no problems hitting limits on the network side either. Both NICs on the X7SBE are decent NICs going up to 95MB/s. The system is pretty decent.

[prostuff1]

I have ordered a Supermicro X7SBE mainboard with two Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controllers. I am not sure if I would run unRAID though as performance seems pretty low for a full blown system. I am willing to test and benchmark it though if Tom is willing to provide a temprary unRAID Pro OS license to me. Got a Lexar Firefly 2GB stick to boot from.

 

Is it possible to use any sort of port teaming with unRAID? I have a managed HP ProCurve based GigE network so no problems hitting limits on the network side either. Both NICs on the X7SBE are decent NICs going up to 95MB/s. The system is pretty decent.

 

The free version of unRAID (1 parity and 2 data) will allow you to test just fine.  There will be no limiting factor because it is the free version.  unRAID does not support NIC teaming/aggregation, so you are out of luck there.

 

If you can be more specific on why you need the speed we might be able to help a little bit more.  For most things the speed if perfectly fine.