Inexpensive MB/CPU combo for 2nd Unraid

[ThatDude]

Background: I have 14 x 1TB drives and a 120GB SSD laying around and I'd like to use them to build a 2nd Unraid server that is purely for storage  - no dockers / VMs etc (my primary unraid server does all of that amazingly well).

 

I have everything I need (case, psu, ram, drives, spare unraid pro licence) but I don't have a MB and CPU so I'm looking for a combination that:

• gives me 15 or so sata ports
  
• allows the drives to run as fast as possible using a single parity drive
  
• is power efficient
  
• inexpensive
  

I was looking at something crazy inexpensive like the ASRock C70M1, but it only has 4 SATA ports and a single PCI-E slot (8 x SATA card?) but that's only 12 ports, ideally I'd like to use all 15 drives. Also I was wondering if a CPU that weak could run the drives at full speed with the parity calculation overhead?

 

If it's not up to the task, can anyone recommend a combination that meets my needs?

 

http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/C70M1/

 

 

[Hoopster]

Check out the ASRock C2759D41 (http://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C2750D4I#Specifications)

 

-12 SATA ports; 8 SATA 3 ports + 4 SATA 2 ports (plenty fast for HDDs)

- 8-core Avoton processor (3800 passmark so, plenty for a NAS, can probably coax a Plex stream out of it as well)

- Low power (20 Watt TDP)

- IPMI and built-in VGA

- x8 PCIe slot for a 4-port SATA controller to get you to 16 disks

 

Probably does not completely check off the inexpensive box ($270 used up to $450 new on Amazon) unless you go used.

 

EDIT:  Potential drawbacks; no onboard audio (should not matter for purely a NAS and no VM); no USB3 (again, no big deal unless you wanted a USB3 device connected through Unassigned Devices plugin).

 

"Inexpensive" means different things to differnt people.  This Avoton board is certainly not in the same price range as the board you linked.  However, for what it offers, especially if you can find a good used one, it's a decent price.

 

[tdallen]

I really don't think the C-70 would work well for you, though I haven't tried it.  People are having problems with their Sempron 140's keeping up with unRAID 6 and the C-70 has only 3/4 the Passmarks of the 140.  An Atom, or a Celeron or Pentium on a 6 sata port board (with 8 on a PCIex sata controller) is a better approach, or an AMD with a little more horsepower.

 

What size board can your case accomodate?  And do you have a SATA controller (if needed) or would that be part of the purchase?

[ThatDude]

OK I'm concerned about underpowering the system now!

 

How about:

 

• MB: GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XM-D3HP, it's cheap at £57, has 8 SATA (6G) ports, 2 x PCI-E x16 and 1 x PCI-E x 4 port for expansion and has onboard GFX
   
  
• CPU: AMD A8 7600 FM2+ "Kaveri" CPU (Quad Core, 3.1 GHz, AMD Radeon R7 720 MHz, 65 W), it's also pretty cheap at £70 and should give me plenty of headroom for unraid 6, when it's clocked down the TDP goes can be reduced significantly.
  

 

I've also just snapped up a Dell PERC H310 8-Port SAS-SATA RAID Controller Card HV52W 0HV52W PCI-E on ebay for £35

 

That will bring me to 16 SATA ports with expansion for more if I need them in the future.

 

Does anyone see any issues with those choices?

[Hoopster]

OK I'm concerned about underpowering the system now!

 

How about:

 

• MB: GIGABYTE GA-F2A88XM-D3HP, it's cheap at £57, has 8 SATA (6G) ports, 2 x PCI-E x16 and 1 x PCI-E x 4 port for expansion and has onboard GFX
   
  
• CPU: AMD A8 7600 FM2+ "Kaveri" CPU (Quad Core, 3.1 GHz, AMD Radeon R7 720 MHz, 65 W), it's also pretty cheap at £70 and should give me plenty of headroom for unraid 6, when it's clocked down the TDP goes can be reduced significantly.
  

I've also just snapped up a Dell PERC H310 8-Port SAS-SATA RAID Controller Card HV52W 0HV52W PCI-E on ebay for £35

 

That will bring me to 16 SATA ports with expansion for more if I need them in the future.

 

Does anyone see any issues with those choices?

 

 

That should more than meet your needs and get you to the 16 SATA ports you need.  There is plenty of horsepower there for a pure NAS setup.

[ThatDude]

Perfect, I've just read the thread on flashing the PERC too, looks pretty straight forward.

 

Have ordered for delivery on Wednesday which nicely coincides with a day off work :-)

[tdallen]

Yep, lots better .

[Fireball3]

I really don't think the C-70 would work well for you, though I haven't tried it.  People are having problems with their Sempron 140's keeping up with unRAID 6 and the C-70 has only 3/4 the Passmarks of the 140.  An Atom, or a Celeron or Pentium on a 6 sata port board (with 8 on a PCIex sata controller) is a better approach, or an AMD with a little more horsepower.

This is correct!

I had to replace the 140 Sempron with a dual core Athlon X2 24xe (45W)

 

I'm also using my old hardware to for building plain budget file servers.

If I have to replace one of my boards, I have bookmarked the GA-890GPA-UD3H.

8 SATA ports, 2 PCIe slots, onboard graphics

Occasionally I see it used for 30-40€.

I can use my AM3 CPU with as I already have it, but the 245e can be had for 20-30€ on occasion.

The Athlon II X2 260u (25W) will also fit and should be sufficient for a file server.

 

 

 

[Unqualified Spectator]

Fireball3 (or any of you guys!)

 

There used to be an issue with Gigabyte motherboards and unraid - is that history with unraid 6? It had something to do with drive performance or spindown, I think? Something had to be turned off on them or it cause problems.

 

I might be going to a table full of antique mobo goodness later today and having 8 sata ports would be sweet, so I am eyeballin' Fireball3's solution because I think I saw some of those Monday. And they were cheep. (The BEST kind of motherboard.) 

[Squid]

Fireball3 (or any of you guys!)

 

There used to be an issue with Gigabyte motherboards and unraid - is that history with unraid 6? It had something to do with drive performance or spindown, I think? Something had to be turned off on them or it cause problems.

 

I might be going to a table full of antique mobo goodness later today and having 8 sata ports would be sweet, so I am eyeballin' Fireball3's solution because I think I saw some of those Monday. And they were cheep. (The BEST kind of motherboard.)

It was dealing with an HPA partition being placed onto mobo attached hard drives in certain circumstances.  Not a deal breaker unless it winds up on the parity drive.

 

Either disable BIOS backup within the BIOS for the affected boards, or force an HPA partition to be placed onto one of your data drives by disconnecting all drives except the one you want the HPA on.  Set the BIOS to boot from the hard drive.  Reset.

 

Connect all your drives back again and set the boot priority to be the flash drive with all other priorities disabled.  With HPA on one of the data drives, the bios will not attempt to place it onto any other drive.  And do not attempt to remove the HPA.

 

Ideally though keep your parity drive on a separate HBA to not have to worry about this at all.

 

Basically its a non-issue that's been overblown

[MrLeek]

Fireball3 (or any of you guys!)

 

There used to be an issue with Gigabyte motherboards and unraid - is that history with unraid 6? It had something to do with drive performance or spindown, I think? Something had to be turned off on them or it cause problems.

 

I might be going to a table full of antique mobo goodness later today and having 8 sata ports would be sweet, so I am eyeballin' Fireball3's solution because I think I saw some of those Monday. And they were cheep. (The BEST kind of motherboard.)

It was dealing with an HPA partition being placed onto mobo attached hard drives in certain circumstances.  Not a deal breaker unless it winds up on the parity drive.

 

Either disable BIOS backup within the BIOS for the affected boards, or force an HPA partition to be placed onto one of your data drives by disconnecting all drives except the one you want the HPA on.  Set the BIOS to boot from the hard drive.  Reset.

 

Connect all your drives back again and set the boot priority to be the flash drive with all other priorities disabled.  With HPA on one of the data drives, the bios will not attempt to place it onto any other drive.  And do not attempt to remove the HPA.

 

Ideally though keep your parity drive on a separate HBA to not have to worry about this at all.

 

Basically its a non-issue that's been overblown

 

It's worth mentioning that I was experimenting with a 2nd unraid server using a Gigabyte mobo - and, despite setting the Bios correctly it still did a HDD backup. I can only conclude that I made a mistake somewhere, but it's worth flagging up as a possible issue.

 

I also think the HPA issue is easy to handle - but if the HDD that has the backup gets disconnected then would the bios drop a new HPA backup somwhere else? That could be the parity drive...?

[garycase]

... I also think the HPA issue is easy to handle - but if the HDD that has the backup gets disconnected then would the bios drop a new HPA backup somwhere else? That could be the parity drive...?

 

Yes, if the BIOS doesn't "see" an HPA with a BIOS backup on it, it will create one on the first disk it encounters -- which COULD be the parity drive (and clearly this would cause a problem).

 

Note that almost all recent Gigabyte boards have a setting to disable the BIOS backup feature  => look carefully in your BIOS to see if this is available for you.  If not, another approach is to take an old, small drive that you're not going to use with UnRAID and attach it to the SATA-0 port on the motherboard.  Then boot with ONLY that drive connected.  This will result in an HPA on that drive -- and then just leave it in the system (but not assigned to UnRAID).    Then you can add all of your other drives and you won't have to worry about the HPA issue.

 

[S80_UK]

I also think the HPA issue is easy to handle - but if the HDD that has the backup gets disconnected then would the bios drop a new HPA backup somwhere else? That could be the parity drive...?

Note that of the motherboard writes an HPA on any drive it will break parity protection, since it would be done outside of unRAID.  There is an argument for saying that the parity drive is the only place that you might not mind the HPA being written, since none of the data drives would be corrupted and parity could be recalculated, although in reality of course you don't want the HPA anywhere.

[Squid]

There is an argument for saying that the parity drive is the only place that you might not mind the HPA being written, since none of the data drives would be corrupted and parity could be recalculated, although in reality of course you don't want the HPA anywhere.

While I can see the basis for that argument, the argument only holds true if and only if the parity disk is larger than all of the other disks.  If its the same size as the largest data drive, then you are directly going to impact the ability to rebuild disks that are the same size as the parity.  (Not to mention the fact that if say you have an 8tb parity drive (with HPA) with 4tb data disks, you will be unable to add to the system an 8tb data disk  because it will be larger than the parity disk)

 

My argument boils down to if you have HPA on your data disks, then don't worry going about trying to remove it.  Keep it present (will you really miss the 32Meg in space lost?) and you won't get it on another data disk with some simple precautions.  If you've got it on your parity disk, then you have no choice but to eliminate it.

[garycase]

I also think the HPA issue is easy to handle - but if the HDD that has the backup gets disconnected then would the bios drop a new HPA backup somwhere else? That could be the parity drive...?

Note that of the motherboard writes an HPA on any drive it will break parity protection, since it would be done outside of unRAID.  There is an argument for saying that the parity drive is the only place that you might not mind the HPA being written, since none of the data drives would be corrupted and parity could be recalculated, although in reality of course you don't want the HPA anywhere.

 

Writing an HPA won't impact your data -- the BIOS shrinks the partition on the drive; but that won't happen if there's no unallocated space to allow that.  It WOULD, of course, result in some parity errors ... but these would be corrected on the next parity check (presuming you do correcting checks).    Nevertheless, it's best to simply get the system configured so the HPA issue won't happen -- either by turning off the BIOS backup feature in the BIOS, or by intentionally creating an HPA on a non-parity disk [either an extra disk that's completely outside of UnRAID; or on a data disk].

 

[MrLeek]

There is an argument for saying that the parity drive is the only place that you might not mind the HPA being written, since none of the data drives would be corrupted and parity could be recalculated, although in reality of course you don't want the HPA anywhere.

While I can see the basis for that argument, the argument only holds true if and only if the parity disk is larger than all of the other disks.  If its the same size as the largest data drive, then you are directly going to impact the ability to rebuild disks that are the same size as the parity.  (Not to mention the fact that if say you have an 8tb parity drive (with HPA) with 4tb data disks, you will be unable to add to the system an 8tb data disk  because it will be larger than the parity disk)

 

My argument boils down to if you have HPA on your data disks, then don't worry going about trying to remove it.  Keep it present (will you really miss the 32Meg in space lost?) and you won't get it on another data disk with some simple precautions.  If you've got it on your parity disk, then you have no choice but to eliminate it.

 

As a case study: the test server I've mentioned previously had a pair of 320Gb drives in it. HPA got dropped onto one of the drives, despite setting the Bios correct, and that drive would not become parity (as it's now smaller than the other). My point is that you can have a 4TB parity drive with HPA on it and it won't be an issue with 3Tb data drives installed. But drop a new 4TB data drive in and unraid will object about the size of the parity. Probably not that hard to deal with, but it's a hassle that can be avoided.

 

Personally I like Gary's idea of using a single drive to hold the HPA save, then include the remaining drives as normal. If the bios setting works as intended then no worries, but if the mobo does something silly then you've caught it. Could that single drive be a cache drive incidentally? If you know you need to add a new cache drive then you end up adding a layer of work (add just that drive, making sure HPA goes where you expect it to, add the other drives) but then you don't add a new cache drive that often.....right?

[garycase]

... Could that single drive be a cache drive incidentally? If you know you need to add a new cache drive then you end up adding a layer of work (add just that drive, making sure HPA goes where you expect it to, add the other drives) but then you don't add a new cache drive that often.....right?

 

Good idea -- instead of "wasting" a drive; just make sure the cache gets the HPA.  As you've correctly noted, that means a bit of extra work if you ever decided to replace your cache drive => the work to do that isn't all that hard [especially if you're using hot swap bays, so you can just unplug all of the other drives a bit -- don't even have to take them out of the bays ... just pull them out enough to disconnect them] ... but it IS something you need to be sure you do if you ever replace the cache.