klipsch Posted July 20, 2010 Share Posted July 20, 2010 I am looking to build a budget server and embrace the world or unRAID ... Here is what I have thus far: Case: Cooler Master 590 Mobo: Asus M4A78L-M (6 SATA ports are attractive) Start with 1 Icy Dock PS: Corsair CMPSU-400CX RAM: Kingston 2GB PC6400 CPU Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7Ghz 45w Single Core 1) Any parts I should scratch or be wary of? 2) Outside of HDs, arctic silver, and a flash drive am I missing anything? (breakout cables and such?) Thanks for looking and happy RAIDing Link to comment
prostuff1 Posted July 20, 2010 Share Posted July 20, 2010 I am looking to build a budget server and embrace the world or unRAID ... Here is what I have thus far: Case: Cooler Master 590 Mobo: Asus M4A78L-M (6 SATA ports are attractive) Start with 1 Icy Dock PS: Corsair CMPSU-400CX RAM: Kingston 2GB PC6400 CPU Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7Ghz 45w Single Core 1) Any parts I should scratch or be wary of? 2) Outside of HDs, arctic silver, and a flash drive am I missing anything? (breakout cables and such?) Thanks for looking and happy RAIDing Looks good to me, but one quick questions. How many drives do you plan on going up to? If it more than 10 then i would look for a slightly larger PSU. Something in the Corsair line with slightly more wattage would do fine. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 20, 2010 Author Share Posted July 20, 2010 Thanks for the quick response. I am only planning to start with less than 6 drives and possibly grow to 12. Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W (will support up to 12 drives) Is the wiki not true then? SNT-3141 - Seems like these may be better and cheaper than the ICY Docks? Link to comment
prostuff1 Posted July 20, 2010 Share Posted July 20, 2010 Thanks for the quick response. I am only planning to start with less than 6 drives and possibly grow to 12. Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W (will support up to 12 drives) Is the wiki not true then? SNT-3141 - Seems like these may be better and cheaper than the ICY Docks? 10-12 is just an estimate, never hurts to have a little extra head room for when you are planning on expanding. The expansion may not happen now but buying/changing parts later can be a pain. Link to comment
Seven Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 I agree with what prostuff1 said about the PSU. I built an unRAID system just last week using most of parts you have listed here. I went with a greater horsepower PSU though, the CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX. To cut costs I got the Cooler Master 4-in-3 drive cages instead of the Icy Dock, but that's your call. I am happy with these drive cages but next time I'm going to spend the extra money to get the hot-swap option. Good luck! Link to comment
Seven Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 A couple more thoughts since you are building almost the same system as me: The AMD CPU you listed ships with thermal compound conveniently applied to it. Just in case you want to save yourself $10+ dollars on a separate tube of Arctic Silver. The stock cooling fan on the AMD CPU is the loudest fan in the case. It's not too bad once you close the case but it may still be noticeable to you depending on your environment. I may change this CPU fan out for a quieter one in the future. The PSU and SATA cables that came with the PSU/Mobo were plenty long for my 4 hard-drive system, no breakout cables or adapters were required this time but they will be needed when I add more hard drives in the future. Depending on how many hard drives you're planning to install you may need more SATA cables since the ASUS mobo only shipped with two. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 21, 2010 Author Share Posted July 21, 2010 I'll stop hunting for my lost tube of arctic silver and bump up my power supply. Good to know about the cpu fan ... Thanks Seven Link to comment
nAffie Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 The stock cooling fan on the AMD CPU is the loudest fan in the case. It's not too bad once you close the case but it may still be noticeable to you depending on your environment. I may change this CPU fan out for a quieter one in the future. I also have the Sempron 140 with the stock CPU fan, but I can't even hear it when the system is running. Even with my case opened the fan is hardly noticeable. In another system I have an AMD Athlon X2 CPU with a stock cooler, and that one is really loud and noticeable even when the case is closed. So there's definitely a difference in CPU coolers AMD uses... But I'm just glad my server is really quiet... Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 21, 2010 Share Posted July 21, 2010 Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W (will support up to 12 drives) Is the wiki not true then? This refers to 12 low power/green drives (I'll add a note to the wiki to clarify that). If you wish to use higher power 7200 rpm drives, you may need a larger power supply. Also be warned that the VX series of Corsair power supplies have had a squealing problem recently - not sure if that has been fixed or not yet. The CX, HX, and TX series are all fine as far as I know. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 22, 2010 Author Share Posted July 22, 2010 Thanks for clarifying Rajahal I've got 3 7200 2TB drives sitting here that I am planning to start off with ... And I was able to get the 400CX for $20 after MIR so I'll end up building the box with it ... Once I get everything figured out, I'll prolly upgrade to a plus license and add some more drives... Hopefully the 30A rail power supply can support 6 drives ... if not, was only $20 and I'll defintely have a use for it in another build All parts were ordered ... I'll report back once everything arrives at the door Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 22, 2010 Share Posted July 22, 2010 It will definitely support 6 drives. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 24, 2010 Author Share Posted July 24, 2010 I've got her up and running ... took me a few minutes to find the Forced FDD option in the BIOS to get the USB to boot, but other than that there were 0 hitches Ran the memtest for 3 cycles and all passed The CPU Fan is silent ... the case is silent ... I'm running preclear now on all 3 of the 2 TB disks ... assuming this is going to take a day attached the syslog for fun PS I didn't try to unlock the extra core on the 140 via the ASUS BIOS ... don't plan to at this point Thanks for the help ... I'll keep posting during this build / setup for those interested or for future reference syslog.txt Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 24, 2010 Share Posted July 24, 2010 Don't bother unlocking the 2nd core, unRAID really won't benefit from it. 2 TB drives take about 35 hours each to preclear, so be prepared for that. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 24, 2010 Author Share Posted July 24, 2010 The Hitachi drive is going leaps and bounds faster than the two Seagates ... wonder if it is the drive or the SATA cable as those are the only differences Link to comment
WeeboTech Posted July 24, 2010 Share Posted July 24, 2010 Don't bother unlocking the 2nd core, unRAID really won't benefit from it. If it's possible, it can be considered. unRAID or fileserving itself does not benefit much, but later on when we add more front end programming with PHP it may help. In addition, when I finish my new locate/md5sum database. It's going to require some heft cycles to generate all those md5sums. If someone were to then do a par2 as an additional layer of protection, the extra cpu will really come in handy. We are talking about terabytes of data that is read and crunched to create these special layered protection schemes. Granted they are not needed, but in a worse case scenario, someone may be happy to have them, or at least know. I have some corruption. This is where you will see people start to upgrade CPUs. Link to comment
Seven Posted July 24, 2010 Share Posted July 24, 2010 I've got her up and running ... took me a few minutes to find the Forced FDD option in the BIOS to get the USB to boot, but other than that there were 0 hitches Ran the memtest for 3 cycles and all passed The CPU Fan is silent ... the case is silent ... That's interesting about the CPU fan being silent. I got the same CPU as you and my CPU fan is pretty loud. Guess I was unlucky and received one of the louder fans with my CPU... Glad to hear you're up and running with no issues so far. Congrats! Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 24, 2010 Author Share Posted July 24, 2010 Seven, I would definitely say you got a bad fan ... 33% complete Post Read Seagate 58% complete Post Read Hitachi 35% complete Post Read Seagate I am assuming I should make the Hitachi my parity drive once I enable it, since it is clearly the "faster" drive? Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 25, 2010 Author Share Posted July 25, 2010 24 hours 52 minutes for the 2TB Hitachi Seagates are at 86% after 26 hours 33 minutes all looks right thus far ... hope to start adding data in the AM Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 28, 2010 Author Share Posted July 28, 2010 Got all the files on to the unRAID box from my various PCs and HDDs for back and storage... with the gigabit network I avg'd around 50 MB/sec for the large file transfers ... more than enough for me Just turned on the parity ... averaging 58,000+ KB/sec Very pleased with speeds and ease of use of unRAID Once I have this unRAID setup running for a bit, I'll delete the data off of the current drives (leaving it just on unRAID), get a Plus or Pro license and drop the few drives into the unRAID server Link to comment
Rajahal Posted July 28, 2010 Share Posted July 28, 2010 After your initial parity sync completes, run a parity check. The sync writes the parity data, the check reads it back. You really can't trust your parity data until the check completes with no errors. If there are errors, seek help here. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 29, 2010 Author Share Posted July 29, 2010 It looks like a parity check was done automatically ... there is a "Parity is valid" status ... been busy with work ... I'll post a syslog when I get a chance ... Thanks for all the assistance Rajahal Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 29, 2010 Share Posted July 29, 2010 It looks like a parity check was done automatically ... there is a "Parity is valid" status ... been busy with work ... I'll post a syslog when I get a chance ... Thanks for all the assistance Rajahal No, the initial parity "calc" is labeled identically. Press the "Check" button. If you've not pressed it, you have no idea if the data written to the parity drive is readable. Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 30, 2010 Author Share Posted July 30, 2010 Thanks Joe ... running the check now getting around 115,000 KB/sec ... should be done in about 4 hours Link to comment
klipsch Posted July 31, 2010 Author Share Posted July 31, 2010 Jul 30 00:55:54 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread checking parity... Jul 30 00:55:54 Tower kernel: md: using 1152k window, over a total of 1953514552 blocks. Jul 30 06:59:57 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=21842sec rate=89438K/sec Jul 30 06:59:57 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0 all looks well ... speed slowed down while I was sleeping Link to comment
Joe L. Posted July 31, 2010 Share Posted July 31, 2010 Jul 30 00:55:54 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread checking parity... Jul 30 00:55:54 Tower kernel: md: using 1152k window, over a total of 1953514552 blocks. Jul 30 06:59:57 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=21842sec rate=89438K/sec Jul 30 06:59:57 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0 all looks well ... speed slowed down while I was sleeping The inner cylinders on a hard disk are never readable at the same speed as the outer cylinders. You still did very well. Joe L. Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.