March 18, 200719 yr I've been spending quite a bit of time updating my UnRaid equipment recently and after some hiccups that turned out to be faulty hardware I've now got to a point where my 2nd & 3rd UnRaid Servers are built. UnRaid2 has been built in anticipation of the forthcoming 14 Disk facility in a future UnRaid Update. I used a CM Stacker case and populated it with a Mix of IDE & SATA HDD Caddies. If I didn't already have several large IDE HDDs around I would have gone all SATA. A Bigger Picture Here I've never seen a CM Stacker before and the amount of space inside to keep things organised made building this system a pleasure. I did replace the rear 120mm Fan as the one fitted require a Molex Power connector, the one I replaced it with ran off the fan power connector on the motherboard. Even though the indiviual caddies can just slot-in (no crews required) I found that they were a little wobbly until I additionally secure them with the screws supplied with the caddies. A Bigger Picture Here A Bigger Picture Here The Motherboard is an Asus P5LD2-SE R2.0. I meant to order the Asus P5LD2-VM R2.0 which would have given me onboard GFX & 2 extra onboard IDE Channels but obviously wasn't concentrating when I ordered (3 of them ) For the PSU I went for the Corsair HX620W. My case would have supported 2 Smaller PSUs (The newer CM Stackers don't), but I thought this PSU was the best bet for the following reasons. 1./ I have completely removed the ON & Reset switch from the case so I wanted a simple 1 switch (the PSU Power Switch) to turn on/off 2./ The Modular Cable design means that I only needed to plug in the connectors I wanted 3./ This PSU has 3 x 18A +12V Rails and due to it's architecture rails can "borrow" resources from each other when a demanding load is in progress. I read this, I don't proclaim to be an expert There are plenty of connectors, but in my configuration I needed more Molex ones so I used a 2nd "1 x 16 Inch cable with two 4-pin IDE drive connectors" which was surplus to requirements from another HX620W I installed in UnRaid3. The additional Molex requirements for my configuration would have been be easily added using Y-Splitters. I use the Hiper HLC-3M3C Molex to 2 Molex as they are very neat & tidy, but they are expensive and come with a Molex to Floppy Adapter you won't use. 2 of the Sata Power connectors (for HDD 4 & 5) on the 5-Into-3 Caddy are too close together for bot to use the included Corsair cables, so I used a Hiper T24S-15 Molex to 2 Sata Extender. These are very neat & come in packs of 2. The rest of the Specification is as follows:- Intel Celeron 3.33ghz CPU (Overkill I know, but it was cheap) Arctic Cooling Freezer7 Pro Heatsink & Fan 2 x 512MB DDR2 Ram (I had these anyway) 1 x Promise 300TX4B 4-Channel SataII Controller 1 x Promise TX2-133 2 Channel IDE Controller XFX Geoforce 6200LE PCI-E Gfx Card (Very Cheap on Deal of the Day) 1 x Cremax/Icydock 5-into-3 SataII Caddy 3 x Cremax/IcyDockMB123SK SataII Caddies 6 x Cremax/IcyBox MB123AK IDE Caddies The Sata leads I used are SilverStone SST-CP01 Serial ATA II Cables. These claim to be "Higher signal quality for all connected devices". They are 50cm long (about 10% longer than standard) which is helpful, but I found the actual plugs were not a sufficiently snug fit for me to recommend them to anyone else. They would fall out whilst I re-routing other internal cabling. I also bought a Cross-Flow Fan, but the caddies block the space where this needs to be fitted. I will be switching all the large HDDs (those 400gb+) from my UnRaid 1 into this togther with some other surplus HDDs, but it won't be fully populated for a couple of weeks. In the Mean time the system is available for beta-testing new UnRaid features. Mark.
March 18, 200719 yr Author Congrats on getting your new rig(s) up and running! Thanks, it's a relief after all that wasted time on what turned out to be a duff Mobo. I'm currently trying to decide which HDDs to allocate to which server. I want to do some beta testing before this goes into full use. I've been mucking around with UnRaid 3.1beta2 and it's very stable. I've been deliberately putting HDDs back in the wrong caddy, it allows you reconfigure this without re-building the parity. I've changed positions and recalculated Parity to get the device name order more logical. All very robust. Mark.
March 18, 200719 yr Yes It's a very nice system...I'm also using 3.1beta 2 and have had no issues so far. I might have to build a second machine soon since I only have space for one more drive in the current configuration. However if Tom gets the 14 disks working I would always add 2 sata drives to my current configuration.
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