So I think I am pretty much just going to buy a prebuilt case from lime, but my main concern is the heat / noise output from any case I put together, as I am sure a lot of people are. My thing is that I live in a one bedroom apartment, and really the only place I have to put it is in my living room which is not very big. Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about which case has the lowest heat / noise output of the boxes sold here? Or anyone think that this could be an issue for me?

 

I am not a huge hardware head who wants to spend the time researching on newegg the best deal for the $ for case and the drive cages and proper power supplies, etc so I am thinking a prebuilt one here is the way to go for my time, unless someone thinks I could get something comparable for much cheaper buy doing it DIY. But again I am the person if I do DIY I want everything to work perfectly as is, and if I happen to get something that is going to be too noisy or keeps the whole living room at a nice warm 90 deg year round I wont be too happy. My last pc (which is still ticking going on 7 years now), is too loud for my tastes so I'd like to not risk it unless im 100% sure that everything will work as intended.

 

Thanks.

I don't have a LimeTech box, so I can't comment there, but I can tell you that both Lian Li (the brand that LimeTech uses) and Antec cases are generally very good at minimizing sound.  I personally use an Antec p180 case with all internally mounted drives (so no drive cages or hot-swap style bays) and its so quiet that if it weren't for the power LED on the front of the case, I wouldn't ever know if it was on.  I also have my server in my living room, and it doesn't bother me one bit.

Great. This is good news to know. Now I just need to figure out which model...

Ordered a machine this weekend, Tom let me know it will be shipping Thursday. Ordered 5xST31000528AS 1TB Seagate drives last night. Can't wait to get this running...

Congrats!  It's probably too late to change or cancel your order now, but for future reference, consider this: the best practice for buying hard drives is to buy a grab bag of different drives from different manufacturers, and ideally, to only buy one drive from each manufacturer.  The problem with buying 5 of the same drive, like you did, is that if they just so happen to all be from a bad batch of drives, then your chances of a 2 or more simultaneous drive failure go up.  unRAID can recover from a single drive failure, but not from a double or greater hard drive failure.

 

Assuming it is too late to change your order, you may want to run the PreClear script on your new drives to make sure they are all trustworthy.

to only buy one drive from each manufacturer.  The problem with buying 5 of the same drive, like you did, is that if they just so happen to all be from a bad batch of drives, then your chances of a 2 or more simultaneous drive failure go up.  unRAID can recover from a single drive failure, but not from a double or greater hard drive failure.

 

Assuming it is too late to change your order, you may wanhttp://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?action=post;quote=37078;topic=4166.0;sesc=2f938e89279bf70d6fab0ff847ca803ft to run the PreClear script on your new drives to make sure they are all trustworthy.

 

I've said this in a number of posts too.

When buying a number of the same manufacturers drives from the same location at the same time, the chances of a multiple drive failure are greater.

I've seen this a number of times on production systems.

I think it's best to buy just what you need to get by, then upgrade incrementally as time, money and availability permits.

it also does not always pay to be on the bleeding edge of drive technology when newer larger drives come out.

 

The Seagate 1TB drives have been pretty reliable, so you should be OK. In the future, I would suggest scattering your purchasing pattern.

Humm. Well crap. That is smart thinking, I never thought of that. I already have 3 different size hd's in my existing desktop, maybe I should pull those out and use them in the array and move in the other seagates as needed? I was planning on checking out and using the preclear script every drive before I put it into actual use also. Also I guess I could look at the drive serial numbers and try and see if they happen to look to be from the same production batch couldnt I?

 

Thanks alot for the suggestions, I will do this next time. Actually next time around I am just going to be buying one offs as needed, but I am really looking forward to getting to use this baby 

I would run 2-3 passes of the preclear script on the new drives before adding any of them to the array. If they pass the stress test then I would feel fine adding them to the array.

I already have 3 different size hd's in my existing desktop, maybe I should pull those out and use them in the array and move in the other seagates as needed?

 

I would do the pre-clear as suggested. Put the drives you actually need online, leave the others as idle spares until the moment you need them. I would not replace all 3 desktop drives in one machine with three new drives unless I had to. Maybe one.

 

Keep at least one warm spare ready to go. If any of these drives fail, you can rapidly replace a drive, requesting an RMA the moment it fails.

Ok will do. Thanks for the tips.

 

Also I am going to  rsync ~2 TB to this as soon as I have it setup and online via NFS. I haven't read exactly the gain, but do you think setting up one drive as a cache drive at this time would speed things up a bit? I am going to be buying a GB switch to hook the unraid and my htpc up so that this will be much faster, do you think the cache drive would save a good bit of rsync time? Thanks.

What's usually recommended is not enabling parity until your data has been moved over, then enable parity and let it run to the end.

Ah ok cool. I will do that then. Thanks again.