Hello,

 

I've currently got 7TB worth of WD NAS drives that I'm looking to upgrade/replace. The one thing I like about using the NAS drives as I am now, is that I can turn the drives completely on and off with a network power controller and each drive uses 0 power when off (which is 99% of the time).

 

I'm looking to build a completely new setup, starting with a couple 2TB internal sata drives. I'd like this to be easily expandable for up to 8 drives in the future. I was looking at building a new low power system with unRAID and adding in something similar to http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111051. Would a port multiplier setup like that work well with unRAID? Port multipliers are new to me, so I'm also wondering how power management comes in to play with it. Am I also able to get (close to) full speed if I'm only accessing one drive at a time?

 

As I said, this is going to be a completely new setup, so I'm open to any ideas on hardware to buy here. My main concerns are keeping it very low power, small, cost effective, and expandable.

 

 

-Blake

IIRC, you can't get disk spindown using port multipliers.

Thats exactly what I was afraid of, which pretty much rules out that entire setup if correct.

 

Anyone able to confirm that? Any other hardware suggestions for me?

Check out the Hardware Compatibility Page and the Pimp Your Rig thread for some current setups that are being used.

 

I would not bother with that encloser you linked to; just build a machine and house all 8 drives inside of it.  I currently have 8 drives in my machine and only two run drives run 24/7 (running a bit torrent client on my server).  unRAID does not take a lot of power so you can go with a low watt, low power CPU and be totally fine.

 

If you have more questions feel free to ask.

 

Also, the Topical Index and Best of the Forums might help in your reading.

IIRC, you can't get disk spindown using port multipliers.

 

I do not think this is correct.  The disks will spin down depending on the hardware type.

I.E. If you are using a port multiplier in a JBOD array you have individual access to each drive.  Thus you can send smart and hdparm commands.

If you are using a port multiplier that has built in hardware raid capability, and have enabled this. I.E. Raid1.RAid0,BIG,SPAN,etc, etc,  Then you do not have individual access to the drives with smart and hdparm... Thus preventing spin down.

 

 

Anyone able to confirm that? Any other hardware suggestions for me?

 

The enclosure itself is pretty cool. It would be useful if you already had a 9 bay tower that you wanted to expand.

 

I was considering a similar test build using one of my CM590's, a couple port multipliers, some bays and building something similar. Then again, I have a full machine with a full case already built.

 

In reality, one of the supermicro atom atx boards, a coiple controllers, some ram and a coolermaster CM590 with some bays would suffice for a new low power system.

 

As far as drive speed with PM's.  Expect around 60MB/s per drive (if the drive itself is capable of that).

 

If you want to be really aggressive about minimizing power use:

 

Calculate your power requirements for the system at idle.... since it will be idle 99% of the time.  Get a PSU that has the highest efficiency at that power level, and has the highend capacity for your max power draw.  DO NOT OVERSIZE the PSU.

 

Pick the mobo based on the NB power usage.... the NB is a bug power hog on many mobos.

 

Pick your CPU based on power as well as undervolting/underclocking ability.

 

Use the minimum number of fans and slow them down.

 

Use a SMALLER UPS.  A big UPS may give you a hour of runtime, but it sucks juice and generates heat the rest of the time.

 

The system that runs my phones pulls 12 Watts.  Just for giggles, I booted it up with unRAD once, and it worked.  Even with 8 drives, the total draw would be under 120 Watts, so a high efficiency pico-psu could work.

 

On average, every Watt of power draw in an "always-on" device costs $1/year in the US.

I can turn the drives completely on and off with a network power controller

I would like to learn more about this. What network power controller?

Use the minimum number of fans and slow them down.

 

This is one of the things that I always question myself.  It's HOW the fans are slowed down.

If using resistance, then part of the power is still being used. but it is expelled as heat.

So I believe a person needs to re-wire for 7V or use PWM fans (correct me if wrong).

 

I can turn the drives completely on and off with a network power controller

I would like to learn more about this. What network power controller?

 

IP Power 9258T, which is usually fairly hard to come by for a decent price. Geeks.com has a few more right now it sounds like (http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=9258T&cpc=SCH - careful, they have it listed with 2 model numbers, one is out of stock, one is in). 4 Individually controlled power ports. Very basic interface, but I just have a custom PHP app that sends the requests to turn a drive on or off. On the windows machine, I made an app that gets in the middle of requesting a file and checks my webserver to see if the drive is on or off. If its off, the webserver sends a request to turn it on. Works well, and its stable.

Use the minimum number of fans and slow them down.

 

This is one of the things that I always question myself.  It's HOW the fans are slowed down.

If using resistance, then part of the power is still being used. but it is expelled as heat.

So I believe a person needs to re-wire for 7V or use PWM fans (correct me if wrong).

 

 

Very true. Any fan controllers that uses a rheostat is wasting energy. I started making a PWM fan controller board several years back, but never finished unfortunately due to lack of time. Woulda been cool, was USB controlled..... oh well.... The fan itself doesn't have to be PWM, but whatever is controlling it needs to be.

Check out the Hardware Compatibility Page and the Pimp Your Rig thread for some current setups that are being used.

 

I would not bother with that encloser you linked to; just build a machine and house all 8 drives inside of it.  I currently have 8 drives in my machine and only two run drives run 24/7 (running a bit torrent client on my server).  unRAID does not take a lot of power so you can go with a low watt, low power CPU and be totally fine.

 

If you have more questions feel free to ask.

 

Also, the Topical Index and Best of the Forums might help in your reading.

 

 

I think you inspired me to just get a decent size server case, put some backplanes into it, and go that route. Means I need to buy more sata controllers and such though I guess. I'm sure it would have to be a good bit more power efficient than the original idea, since then thats 2 power supplies always on, which would definitely lead to extra wasted power. I'm going to continue looking at some of the other builds later on and get some more ideas. I'm hoping to keep this under $400 or so for everything but the drives, though thats starting to look unlikely.

Yes, only use PWM if you want VARIABLE fans (i.e. using lmsensors package and PWM capable fan headers on the mobo)

 

But you can also use 7v and 5v lines from the PSU to power fans.... to slow them down w/o wasting heat.

 

You can also slow things down by select fans that pull lower Wattage because they spin slower at the full 12 volts.

Back to port multipliers, I use an AMS Venus T4S 4 bay port multiplier drive enclosure with their included generic Sil3132 PCI-E card, and my drives spin down just fine in the enclosure using unRAID 4.5b7 (4.5b7 was fine as well).

 

My only real complaint is that the cooling on this enclosure is horrible, but a dremel and covering up the OEM vents helped redirect airflow to a lot more usable state.

Back to port multipliers, I use an AMS Venus T4S 4 bay port multiplier drive enclosure with their included generic Sil3132 PCI-E card, and my drives spin down just fine in the enclosure using unRAID 4.5b7 (4.5b7 was fine as well).

 

My only real complaint is that the cooling on this enclosure is horrible, but a dremel and covering up the OEM vents helped redirect airflow to a lot more usable state.

 

Get pretty decent performance out of it? Also, any idea how the power usage of the enclosure is when everything is spun down? I'm guessing the PSU in those enclosures aren't top quality.

Performance isn't too phenomenal. When I do a parity check, those drives are about 40MB/sec, while my internal drives are closer to 90MB/sec. Part of the fault lies in the drives, as I stuck my oldest, slowest and smallest drives in the enclosure, but part of it seems to be the enclosure itself.

 

I have not checked the power consumption, but the fan keeps running 24x7, so I would assume it's not saving much power even when all drives are spun down.

 

I really only used the enclosure because I already owned it and the PCI-E eSATA card, and had some extra drives I wanted to use. If I were to be building a setup 100% brand new, I would probably go with a larger case for my unRAID system for more drives, and skip any PM enclosures. They work, and get the job done, but it's certainly a sacrifice in terms of performance (at least in my setup), and some complexity.

Performance isn't too phenomenal. When I do a parity check, those drives are about 40MB/sec, while my internal drives are closer to 90MB/sec. Part of the fault lies in the drives, as I stuck my oldest, slowest and smallest drives in the enclosure, but part of it seems to be the enclosure itself.

 

I have not checked the power consumption, but the fan keeps running 24x7, so I would assume it's not saving much power even when all drives are spun down.

 

I really only used the enclosure because I already owned it and the PCI-E eSATA card, and had some extra drives I wanted to use. If I were to be building a setup 100% brand new, I would probably go with a larger case for my unRAID system for more drives, and skip any PM enclosures. They work, and get the job done, but it's certainly a sacrifice in terms of performance (at least in my setup), and some complexity.

 

Yea the more I read on here the more it sounds like PM is probably not the way for me to go. Guess I'll do a little more research tonight and put a quote together for myself. The numbers are starting to scare me.

In my non-empirical opinion, if you want to build a low power system, try to avoid port multiplying enclosures. You don't know what PSU is in there, plus they usually have fixed speed fans. I think you can do better by planning a full case build carefully. Furthermore I've never been that impressed with external enclosures ability to cool drives. I recall back in the dark ages, building a 4 drive SCSI system in a 9 bay case, simply because cooling was such a problem. That was 15+ years ago, and things haven't changed that much in terms of enclosures, as compared to PC cases/fans/etc.

 

However, just answering the question posed above - port multiplying enclosures can spin down drives (at least mine does, though I can't state that all do, since I don't have any experience).

Just read a review of the Kontron KTUS15/mITX - 1.6 Plus board with an Atom CPU.

 

It only uses 5W's Only 2 SATA ports but it has a PCI-express port.

I thought about going mITX/Atom, but decided it might not be a safe bet since it only has one PCIe port. If I need another SATA controller in the future, I'd pretty much be SOL. Still considering it though, since it would lower costs and definitely keep power usage down.

I thought about going mITX/Atom, but decided it might not be a safe bet since it only has one PCIe port. If I need another SATA controller in the future, I'd pretty much be SOL. Still considering it though, since it would lower costs and definitely keep power usage down.

 

There are atom 330 FlexAtx boards from Supermicro that support 2 PCIe slots x8 & x4. (and 1 PCI slot).

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/ATOM/945/X7SLA.cfm?typ=H

Not a bad looking board, my only request would be that it could hold up to 4GB of memory. I'm strongly considering (If I go through with all this) combining my WHS and FreeBSD server into the new unRAID server as VM's. Don't really want multiple idle machines sitting around running.

 

Out of curiosity, whats with all the Supermicro I keep seeing around here? I'm more of a mac guy these days and haven't been building many machines in the past few years, but I've never even heard of them til I saw this unRAID forum, and they're everywhere on here.

Out of curiosity, whats with all the Supermicro I keep seeing around here? I'm more of a mac guy these days and haven't been building many machines in the past few years, but I've never even heard of them til I saw this unRAID forum, and they're everywhere on here.

 

Limetech uses Supermicro boards and most/if not all boards from them have video built in.  This is great in the case of a server as it allows more room for expansion cards.  The next board I upgrade to (might be a little while) will probably be a Supermicro board with plenty of x4,x8 and PCI-X slots so that I can spread the disks out and not bottleneck on anything.

Not a bad looking board, my only request would be that it could hold up to 4GB of memory. I'm strongly considering (If I go through with all this) combining my WHS and FreeBSD server into the new unRAID server as VM's. Don't really want multiple idle machines sitting around running.

 

A low power ATOM board is NOT for you. My research reveals that an atom processor is as fast as 900-1.2Ghz Pentium M.

Capable of low usage applications (DNS, Nagios, file serving) but I would not run a VMware environment on it.

 

In your case, I would recommend a decent core 2 duo solution and possibly recompile the kernel to use a CPU govenor.

A large cache processor running at medium clock speeds will do well in your situation.

 

Another choice (albeit more costly) is to go for a mobile motherboard/processor combo.

I've done this with mini-itx solutions and they have great performance vs low power.

You might be able to get this with a low powered wolfdale system too.

 

Out of curiosity, whats with all the Supermicro I keep seeing around here? I'm more of a mac guy these days and haven't been building many machines in the past few years, but I've never even heard of them til I saw this unRAID forum, and they're everywhere on here.

 

They are well made very stable boards. 

Not for overclocking, but usually set up to be very stable.

Limetech uses Supermicro boards and most/if not all boards from them have video built in.

 

Actually if you look into it, it does not free up a slot. Usually there is one less slot because of the onboard video.

However it does reduce the electronics a bit as you do not have a full blown video card in a slot.

 

Also the boards with built in video are usually workstation or server class boards. Designed for reliability.

Many server class boards with built in video also support IMPI which allows you to control the machine at the BIOS level remotely. Like remove KVM over IP.