talonegress Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 Decided to take some old hardware I had laying around and consolidate the variety of HD's I have in two different PC's and build a NAS. CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Mobo: Foxconn G31MV-K LGA 775 Micro ATX RAM: Corsair XMS2 2GB DDR2 (2x 1GB) Drives: 2x 128GB Crucial M4 SSD (Cache) 3TB WD Red WD30EFRX 2x 2TB WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB WD Green WD20EARX PSU: Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650w Case: Rosewill CHALLENGER ATX Mid Tower Case SATA Card: Syba SD-SATA-4P RAID Controller Card with SIL3114 Chipset Hope to start out with these parts and over time upgrade the variety of HD's to all being WD Reds. I know the Controller card is a RAID card, but going to see if that works as I had it lying around along with most of the other parts. Only new parts are the case, the WD Red, and the CPU Cooler(Arctic Freezer 7 Pro). Plan on using this as just a NAS for now. Using it for storing media, dashcam footage, and gameplay recordings. Will most likely add SABNZBD, sickbeard, and couchpotato in the future as my stream PC(twitch) currently handles that duty. Need to buy a flash drive today and get it put together tonight. Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 unRAID 5 runs great on older hardware, unRAID 6 can be a little more picky in my experience - but still generally runs well on older hardware. Let us know how things go. Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted February 3, 2016 Share Posted February 3, 2016 I know the Controller card is a RAID card, but going to see if that works as I had it lying around along with most of the other parts. If it doesn't work you should be able to flash it with the IDE bios, google sil 3114 bios, there's base (IDE) and RAID bios. Connect as few array disks as possible to this controller or it will be a major bottleneck during parity check/sync and disk rebuilds. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 3, 2016 Author Share Posted February 3, 2016 I was just thinking about it being a bottleneck. May have to upgrade to a PCIe sata card as my mobo does have an x16 slot. My mobo only has 2 onboard SATA slots and I was going to use those for the SSD's and connect the 4 HD's to the card. I had just looked up about the card bios just before posting this so I may put it into one of my other pc's to update the bios first as I think the RAID bios is on there now. Is it possible to just use that card for now and upgrade it in a few days when a new one arrives and not have to redo everything? Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 4, 2016 Author Share Posted February 4, 2016 Didn't get it put together last night. Going to wait until I get a PCIe sata controller card. My other two PC's don't have PCI slots on their motherboards so no way to get the non-raid bios on the card I have. I mean yes there's a way, but to much of a pain to do it that way for something I'm just going to replace. Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 If you haven't already bought a card, the trusty old Adaptec 1430SA is a great little 4-port card and is available very inexpensively on e-bay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Adaptec-AAR-1430SA-4-Port-SATA-PCI-E-RAID-Controller-PCA-0025-01-B-0836-/331750505705?hash=item4d3ddefce9:g:Q7IAAOSwL7VWkU7x Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted February 4, 2016 Share Posted February 4, 2016 ... if you get the 1430SA you may need to update it to the 2507 BIOS to support > 2TB drives (i.e. your 3TB Red) => but that's very easy to do without the need for any other PC. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 5, 2016 Author Share Posted February 5, 2016 Browsing the forums today for recommendations I saw that card mentioned. I went with this one: IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00 Also found out instead of 4GB of RAM I only have 2GB. 2x 1GB sticks. Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted February 5, 2016 Share Posted February 5, 2016 2GB is fine for basic NAS duties but may become an issue if you want to start running Dockers. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 5, 2016 Author Share Posted February 5, 2016 Already pricing parts upgrades and I don't even have this one built yet. DDR2 RAM is a bit on the pricey side compared to the same size DDR3 RAM. Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted February 5, 2016 Share Posted February 5, 2016 Browsing the forums today for recommendations I saw that card mentioned. I went with this one: IO Crest 4 Port SATA III PCI-e 2.0 x1 Controller Card Marvell Non-Raid with Low Profile Bracket SI-PEX40064 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00 Also found out instead of 4GB of RAM I only have 2GB. 2x 1GB sticks. That card will work, although it'll limit your parity check and rebuild performance because it's only a single lane card. That, plus the fact that your board's v1 PCIe bus means you'll only have 250MB/s of bandwidth available to share among 4 drives, which will be a notable bottleneck on performance when you have multiple drives in use at the same time (i.e. during parity checks). The 1430SA's 4-lane interface would have completely eliminated the bottleneck. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 5, 2016 Author Share Posted February 5, 2016 That's why it helps to do more extensive research. Ended up buying the 1430SA card and will just return the other. Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted February 5, 2016 Share Posted February 5, 2016 Already pricing parts upgrades and I don't even have this one built yet. DDR2 RAM is a bit on the pricey side compared to the same size DDR3 RAM. I've got some DDR2. PM me and we'll discuss. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 6, 2016 Author Share Posted February 6, 2016 I finally got the non-raid bios flashed to the card I have. Even with the major bottlenecking I'm going to at least get a start on things. Found a spare laptop HD and stole the ODD from my gaming rig and installed windows just to flash the new bios. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 8, 2016 Author Share Posted February 8, 2016 My God is this Controller Card slow. Got to 80% on the post read of the 3TB and I was at 40 hours....then I accidentally flipped the switch on my surge protector trying to plug in a new router. :'( I'll resume this when the Adaptec card arrives today. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted February 10, 2016 Author Share Posted February 10, 2016 Here it is all done. Got the Adaptec card installed and the 4th HD. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted March 24, 2016 Author Share Posted March 24, 2016 Upgraded to 4GB of RAM and installed a fan controller. Doesn't sound like it's trying to take flight anymore. Quote Link to comment
talonegress Posted November 8, 2016 Author Share Posted November 8, 2016 Few months ago I found my G3258 and decided to upgrade my second PC and take the old parts from that and upgrade the NAS. Mobo: ASRock H97M Anniversary Micro ATX CPU: Intel G3258 RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 This mobo has enough SATA ports that I didn't have to use the Adaptec card anymore. Been running good for the past few months. Quote Link to comment
garycase Posted November 8, 2016 Share Posted November 8, 2016 Nice upgrade => more than doubled your CPU "horsepower" [PassMark 3964 vs 1724] and all on-board SATA ports was a very nice change. Even saved a bit of power [TDP 53w vs 65w for the E6750] Quote Link to comment
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