October 22, 200916 yr Hi I have been getting more and more hacked off trying to find stuff i have on a random hard drive some place in one of my computers/laptops and along with it been getting a little paranoid about a hard drive going down! So i decided it was time to do something about it. I have 10+ random sized sata hard drives, some 1.5Tb all the way down to 120Gb both 2.5" and 3.5". I wanted a solution that would be able to use them all without causing headaches and still keep my data safe. Speed is not my first concern as its only for myself and to serve my 2 laptops and 3 pc's which i have in the flat with movies and music (i work in the computer business and tend to over do things!). So i have settled on unraid pro, as it will take all my drives, keeps my data safe, is cheap (when you look at others), gives me the chance up my storage when needed and the last most importent reasons, gives me the option to have 1 HUGE share to dump my data to and doesn't cost the a bomb on the electric bills to run by keeping drives up full time. Anyone got any pointers for my first build? Heres what i have planned so far: Thermaltake arrmor case I have this from my old computer Asus P5G41-M 4x onboard sata. I would have used a atom motherboard but have no chance of getting enough satas to run the drives, this board is nice and low powered Celeron E1500 Its s low powered duel core which i can down clock to cut the power usage 2x 2Gb ddr2 ram 4Gb might be a little over the top but ram is cheap! 11x sata removable caddys These are going to have the smaller drives for easyer upgrading to bigger units as needed, they also have fans for cooling 750W PSU This should have enough for spinups 2x SIL3114 sata card 8x sata ports in total 2x 1.5Tb drives 2x 1Tb drives 8x random drives The above motherboard, processor and ram gives me just over 50W at the plug (tested) and with down clocking and other tweeks this should drop below 50W. Does anyone have any recommendations that might make it better or help the build go smoother? Rick
October 23, 200916 yr I appreciate that you are aiming for a low power build, but I personally wouldn't buy a motherboard with only 4 SATA slots when the market is flooded with motherboards with 6 SATA slots. The more onboard SATA slots you have, the faster your server will be (especially during writes and parity checks). Also, the SATA cards you mention, are they PCI? If so, then this will be another bottle neck in your server. You may want to look for a PCI-e SATA card. If you have 6 SATA slots on the motherboard and 4 SATA slots on a PCI-e card, that will give you 10 total slots (which is your goal, right?) with no bottle necks. So my primary suggestion is to trade out the motherboard for one with 6 SATA slots. Admittedly, this will probably use a bit more power, but you can compensate by getting a low power (45 W) CPU. I'm a big fan of the AMD Sempron 140. Also, a 750 W PSU is definitely overkill. I run my server with 8 drives on a 380 W PSU. If your goal is 10 drives, a 400 W or 450 W PSU should do fine. I tend towards Corsair or Antec EarthWatts PSUs. I'm sure you realize that the SATA caddies are unnecessary and may be a bit expensive, but I understand the draw of all externally mounted drives. This is my goal some day as well. I know that you specifically said you care more about power efficiency than speed, but why not have both?
October 23, 200916 yr Author Hi, Thanks for your reply. Yes one of my main goals is for power, with performance being a very close second. Im looking to be able to got the full 22 sata ports as i get extra drives, I know by using pci its going to be a bottleneck but i dont think it will be a problem as the most im going to need is for media playback (feel free to correct me if im wrong). The motherboard in question has 1x PCIXx16 slot, 1x PCIX x1 and 2 PCI slots. I plan on getting a 8 port ssata PCIX card, two PCI 4 port cards on the pci bus, and a 2 port sata card on the PCIXx1 slot. This would give me a total of 22 ports. The parity and cache drives being on the onboard ports. The caddys i already have and i was lucky enough for them to have cost me nothing as they were going to be put in the bin where i work. Rick
October 25, 200916 yr Have you tested if a hard drive controller card will work in the PCIe X16 slot? if anything I would consider a 4 port PCIe card there (Adaptec 1430sa or Rosewill card). then the 2port SIL3132. I do not think we have an 8port PCIe card that is proven to work in unRAID reliably yet. This provides 10 ports on that board. I probably would not go to 22 ports on that board. I would wait until I absolutely needed. With the way hard drive sizes grow each year, you may not need as many ports vs just upgrading drives. FWIW, the super micro dual core atom boards could support 2 PCIe cards + 2 PCI cards + 4 oboard SATA ports.
October 25, 200916 yr Author I looked around for a duel core atom board with enough slots but have not been ablt to find one. Hane you got a model number of link? I think you will fine the Supermicro 8 Port SATA 2 Card (PCI/PCI-X) AOC-SAT2-MV8 works with unraid, i have seen people using it on the "pimp your rig" post
October 25, 200916 yr I looked around for a duel core atom board with enough slots but have not been ablt to find one. Hane you got a model number of link? I think you will fine the Supermicro 8 Port SATA 2 Card (PCI/PCI-X) AOC-SAT2-MV8 works with unraid, i have seen people using it on the "pimp your rig" post http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182205 This is my next purchase! There is at least 1 guy on this forum (dlmh) with the board, search for it. He has had great results with it (~40 watt with drives spun down) I'm adding 2 of these cards: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018 Total I'll have 12 ports. Which for me is totally fine. If the Supermicro MV8 PCI-E card was known to work in unRAID, I'd get 1 or 2 of those instead. But At the end, I don't mind staying at 12 drives. I'm at 6 now.
October 25, 200916 yr Author They look like nice board and i know the power load on them is low. I like to build to what i might need, i like the idea of being able to max it out.
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