Motherboard's all list they support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10 but no 6???


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Hi all,

 

Completely new to Raid and i'm very keen in building my very first Raid machine.  I have lots and lots of questions (which i wont bore you with now) but i guess the main one is that why do all the motherboards that i am interested in only say they support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10?  It appears from most of the community threads that i have read that the majority of people are using Raid 6 now so why do none of the motherboards do it?

 

The boards i am looking at arn't particularly cheap either (i'm happy to spend up to around $2000USD on the complete setup) so any help would be appreciated.

 

The 2 boards i like the sound of and have great reviews are;

 

Asus Strix Z270E Gaming

Asus Strix z270G Gaming (this is a M-ATX board which i'm actually leaning towards as PCI slots arn't important to me).

 

Just a bit of side info, i'm mainly looking at using it as a media server which is always on and downloading.  I want it to be quick though with a possible option of turning it into a gaming machine further down the line.  As well as the board, i'm looking at getting

 

Intel i7 7700K CPU (i want to overclock)

G.SKill Trident Z RGB F4 16GB 3200MHZ Ram

 

To be honest, looking at the differences between Raid 5 and Raid 6, 5 actually looks better for me as i can use less drives and its slightly faster, it just worries/confuses me as the majoirty of people are doing Raid 6 now.

 

Many thanks

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Welcome to the unRaid community!

 

You do not need RAID capability in the motherboard at all to use unRaid. Because unRaid does not create RAID arrays. A RAID array stripes data across all drives, and requires all disks to be the same size. It is quite fast, but if more than one disk fails (Raid5) or 2 disks fall (Raid6), the entire array is lost. In RAID, the entire array acts like one large volume, and adding disks to the array is difficult.

 

In unRaid, each disk is individually formatted, each its own filesystem. If something bad were to happen and several disks failed at once, the remaining disks would still be readable. It is also possible to mix drives of different sizes and grow the array over time. The trade-off is speed. Striping data results in faster reads and much faster writes. But for media applications, unRaid users here are willing to sacrifice speed for the flexibility and easy expandability of unRaid. That and dramatically reduced risk of losing everything. There are features, mainly the cache disk, that help overcome the write speed issue.

 

I would not recommend overclocking your unRaid server. I was a big overclocker back in the day but with all that data stored on my unRaid,  I was not interested in the lowered reliability and risks of overclocking there. But that is a decision you can make.

 

UnRaid does provide some awesome features to allow your media server to also be a gaming system at the same time. And also provides Docker technology to make installing a whole host of applications to do downloading and other functions. You will enjoy exploring this features, which offer an ease of installation that will surprise you.

 

Many pitfalls of new unRaid users can be avoided with a few simple tips. These include using locking SATA cables and drive cages (4in3 or 5in3). These help avoid the most common problems people have, intermittent connectivity with drives. Such intermittent issues make drives appear to fail and are frustrating. Any time you put your fat fingers inside the case you risk disturbing the delicate cabling connections to your drives. And with 8, 12, even 20 drives in a single server, there are a lot of such connections! The locking cables are much less likely to succumb to a gentle nudge. And the cages allow adding and shuffling disks without opening the case at all. Being able to replace a failed drive or add a new one in 30 seconds with near zero risk of disturbing another disk in the process is very very valuable, and the drive cages earn their keep despite added cost IMHO.

 

You'll find people here will be able to answer your questions, and are friendly and passionate on a variety of topics. We don't always agree, but are always respectful and try to be helpful.

 

Feel free to ask questions about cases, motherboards, CPUs, controllers, drives, cages and all the primary and secondary things you need for your server. Soak it all in and make your selections.

 

Best of luck and enjoy your array!

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Hi!

 

Thanks so much for that very detailed response, i wasn't expecting such great advice.

 

I must own up to something then... I thought Raid and Unraid were the same, one was just an abbreviation! Idiot!

 

So if i understand you correctly, i should be able to use Unraid 6 with my motherboard after all!  Just to confirm, my final motherboard will be the Asus Rog Strix Z270E Gaming, along with a i7 7700K CPU.  I'm not wanting to go cheap on these two items as i see them as fairly important items to future proof the machine should i start using it for gaming, so would you agree with my choice??  Or would you go for a slightly better CPU as i want to VM my machine with maybe more than one operating system? 

 

Regarding my storage for unraid 6 would i be correct in maybe using;

2 x M.2 for a Cache Pool (as well as where i install applications and operating systems for faster loading)

1 x 4TB Sata3 HHD (for Parity)

2 x 2TB Sata3 HHD (for array)

 

Will that give me the best performance set up?

 

Thanks so much again

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You need to get the motherboard that has the features you want. Every motherboard has strengths and weaknesses.

 

It's funny, but users who have been here for a long time, like me, are not always the best to advise on motherboards and CPUs. These change rapidly from year to year - and I find an unRAID build suits me for at least 3-4 years. Knowledge of the latest and greatest is obtained only when I am digging in and doing all that homework. So I am knowledgable for 6mos to a year and then everything has changed and I'm not as much help. Often relatively new unRAID users are the best source of specific MB/CPU advice! The wiki may also be of help, but with fast hardware turnover is often dated unless someone documents what they learn as a resource to others after making a purchase.

 

I'll also say I have a big array and the things that matter to me and the things that matter to you might be different. I haven't been a big gamer since Age of Empires 2!

 

But, here are my thoughts ...

1 - up to 64G memory - whether its VMs, real time decoding in RAM, more is better in RAM dept. I might not put 64G in to start, but having the expandability is great

 

2 - 6 on-board SATA - this is a little light - many motherboards have 8 or even more. But you do have the M2 slots which you plan to use for cache, which otherwise would take 1-2 Sata slots. Overall I'd say this is good esp. for someone that is only looking for 2T of usable storage right away.

 

3 - Lots of fast PCIe slots, good for SATA controllers.

 

4 - the i7 - 7700K looks pretty awesome. It has a passmark of 12,263, which is very high. In comparison, my Xeon has a passmark of just under 10K, so this is 20%+ faster. I expect that Kaby Lake also have the specialized hardware to efficiently decode HEVC 10-bit streams, which would come in handy if you are using Plex for real time transcoding. (I'd double check to ensure I am right). Based on light reading in the forums, the highest end servers these days are using dual Xeons in 2011 package (E5-2609 / E5-2620). There have been recent threads about cheap Xeon CPUs on this forum (not sure which ones). 2011 Motherboards are pricey. But some Xeons have 8 real cores (not 4+4virtual with my CPU and well as the i7's). The clock speed might not be 4.2GHz, but with VMs CPU "pinning" is used, and more real cores is better. Plus with expandability to 2 CPUs (16 cores), you are much better set up for lots of multiprocessing. You may loose some of the HEVC power (Braswell does 8 bit, not 10) which may play into the decision. It takes some research. And whether faster cores or more cores is going to help you more, I can't answer.

 

5 - Memory is not ECC. On a machine where a memory error could result in faulty data being written to my array, I am all about reliability on my unRAID server. ECC (error correcting) memory may not your highest priority - but I would recommend it. This would be a deal breaker for me for an unRAID server.

 

6 - No IPMI. I really like IPMI on my servers. This would be a deal breaker for me for an unRAID server.

 

7 - Only one ethernet. Some servers has multiple, and there are features to team them to provide more network bandwidth. Not a huge deal, but worth mentioning. My motherboard has I think 4, but I am only using 1. Have been thinking about playing with adding more.

 

Unrelated - but I recommend THESE for drive cages.

 

Hope this gets you started.

 

Good luck!

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Thanks so much folks for your great responses...

 

Okay.. so taking into account what you've said i think i'm changing my mind slightly and i'm now going with a processor with more cores (and also performs better) the Intel i7 6800K 3.4Ghz and also a motherboard that seems to tick more boxes, the AsRock X99 Taichi.

 

Unfortunately the motherboards that are required to run a processor with more cores as well as more Sata slots and dual LAN etc are much more expensive (especially here in Hong Kong!) so this motherboard is at the cheaper end of the scale.  That said it still has great reviews and seems perfect for what i require. Regarding your suggestions, i now have...

 

1. Up to 128GB Memory

2. 10 x Sata3 Slots

3. Lots of PCi slots

4. A CPU with 6 cores, 12 threads (Benchmark of 13560)

5. Motherboard is now ECC compatible

6. No IPMI!!!!

7. Dual ethernet

 

So as you can see, the new motherboard ticks all the boxes now, everything apart from IPMI!! I've looked into this and it seems brilliant, i'm just not sure it is a deal breaker if i'm wanting to keep the cost down...

 

I'll certainly look at the trial version first to text my components out and i have also ran it through pcpartpicker.com

 

Please let me know what you think of my new CPU and Motherboard set up.

 

Many thanks!!

 

Matt

 

 

 

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Looks good to me. My MB is an AsRock and works great. I can't personally speak to that MB but features are good. Did you look into the HVEC decoding? IPMI is awfully nice when you need it. I've used it to reboot my server while i was traveling. But it is an infrequent need, and if you've never had it you won't miss it.

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