Ok got tired of RAID 1 arrays in my main PC and decided to build an unRAID server with parts I have laying around

 

this is what I have running

 

1 X ASROCK P4 motherboard P4I65G 2 SATA ports

1 X P4 2.8 GHZ dual core

2 X 1Gb DDR 400

1 X Antec 450 power supply

1 X D-link 1gb network card PCI

1 X Promise 4310 TX SATA card 4 ports PCI

 

 

1 X OCZ rally 2 USB stick (unRAID)

 

2 X 2TB Hitachi 7200 RPM drives (1 for parity and the other for data)

2 X 1.5TB Seagate (data)

2 X 1TB Seagate (data)

 

 

all this in an old CUBE Case I bought years ago that can easily hold 20 hard drives ( I'll post pix at some point )

this rig is now doing parity at 25000/sec - how do i get more speed out of this?

 

it's taking about 16-18 hours to do a rebuild or sync ( what is the most important factor to a speedy unRAID server ( CPU/Drives/SATA Cards/Memory)

 

previously I was running in my windows box a 3ware 8506-8 with mainly all 1TB Seagate drives in raid 1 (8 drives / 4Tb)

 

I don't trust hard drives !

 

I still have a few 1 Tb drives I could use if only I can get the 3ware card to be seen in unRAID

 

I need the 3ware card to expand my array with the rest of my 1Tb drives

 

please leave comments and suggestions

 

TIA

You should be able to double those parity build/check speeds with a modern PCI-e or PCI-x motherboard. The problem you have is all your drives are on a single PCI bus of 133MB/s.

 

To get more speed it is time to change to a MB with more bus bandwidth. The ideal board (IMO) is a server or workstation board with dual pci-x buses, a PCI bus and a couple of PCI-e slots however these are expensive and tend to be power hungry. For a target of 20 drives you need to look for a min. of 6 onboard sata ports and dual 8 port capable expansion slots (at least dual pci-e x4 or dual PCI-x 100Mhz buses) capable slots. Remember PCI-x is a shared bus so ideally you want two buses if you go PCI-X or a board with PCI-X and PCI-e. PCI-e is 250MB/s per X1 so X4 is 1000MB/s etc...

 

The other advantage of PCI-e is it is bi-directional and concurrent (250MB/s reading and writing), PCI-x is either reading or writing.

 

Socket 478 CPU based boards with either PCI-e or PCI-X are few and far between. Time to upgrade that motherboard since you have a PCI-X 3ware 8506-8 I'd start looking for a PCI-X MB.