Playing with unraid? Building your test box. (NOOB INFO)

OK, I have to admit that I learned a good bit getting to where I am now.  One big thing I learned is that a test box of old hardware is just not good enough to give unraid a fair try.

Yes, three drives doesn't sound like much.  But if you're using old hardware you'll find that three drives might be more than that old power supply can handle.  The "piece of c*rp" hardware, I thought, must be at fault.  Pulled more drives.  Pulled all the cards.  Nothing.  I pulled out another power supply and this would at least try to start everything but it just didn't have the juice.    Ironically, the power supply that completely failed was made by Raidmax.

I found a local supplier with an Antec 650 Earthwatt.  That did the trick.  Solid boots and good memory tests - after I found that a 512m SIMM I'd just put in was bad and replaced it.

But there was another problem.  Until now the drives had been laying on the table outside of the case in a small metal drive rack.  Plenty of ventilation for cooling and some metal for a heat sink.  With the 650W the drives had plenty of power and during parity calculations they would get painfully hot.  The control panel reported temps of 50+ degrees C (That's darn hot..  Hot enough to set off SMART monitoring) Well after they started to get that hot I started to get "Sync Errors".

I was concerned that maybe the drives are just too old for this.  One has more than 26000 hours (almost 3 years) of power on time.  So I spread them out and put a fan by them to try to keep them cool to see if the Sync Error problems were temperature or simply just too old but part of the reason for using this kind of setup is that I can afford for one to fail.  After three parity checks and some heavy usage not a single error of any kind and temps stayed below 45C.  Temperature must have been the major problem with the Sync Errors.

So I looked around and found a case suitable for a 6 drive Unraid Plus license and found the Antec 300 case.  6 internal 3.5" bays and 3 5.25" with nice separation and cooling airflow right across the drives from two 120mm fans in the case and one in the power supply and right now under a hard parity check they're sitting at 36C.  On top of that it's a lot quieter than the old open case with the wonderful whine of a 10 year old 60mm case running at what has to be 10000 RPM.  The dog was complaining.

One thing to note - if Unraid is all you intend to run CPU is not generally the limiting factor for performance.  Your drives, memory and network are probably more important.  It does not take the latest and greatest.  Your last machine or your kids old machine should be plenty to run Unraid for evaluation.  But do make sure that you give the software a fair shot.  It does work, it is pretty darn reliable and certainly worth the effort if you want to manage your storage instead of waiting on the next larger size drive and praying that it lasts until the next one comes out.

Good luck!

Rob