Starting out, need Australian hardware recommendations


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Interesting strategy Pete, thanks for the input. I've been data hoarding for a number of years now, so I'm already at the 17 drive mark, they range from older 1TB to new 8TB WD Reds. I was thinking a 24 bay would let me add another 7 drives over the next couple of years, then swap out the smaller drives when it's full. As BetaQuasi pointed out, in Australia the Norco RPC-4224 is pretty hard to beat due to the lack of options.

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Do you mean SFF-8087, not 8077?
 
Thanks for highlighting that, I probably would've bought the 1 to 4 SAS cables if you hadn't warned me.
I'm working on CPU & RAM now, then I just need to fork out the $$$.
 
NBN gets connected today, looking forward to checking what kind of throughput/performance plex will get get with a 40Mbit upstream.


I’ve got 100/40 through my local node1 provider. I have about 4 external users at once. My Plex handles it with about 10 Mbit up. (I only do max 720p streams though).
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2 hours ago, enmesh-parisian-latest said:

Interesting strategy Pete, thanks for the input. I've been data hoarding for a number of years now, so I'm already at the 17 drive mark, they range from older 1TB to new 8TB WD Reds. I was thinking a 24 bay would let me add another 7 drives over the next couple of years, then swap out the smaller drives when it's full. As BetaQuasi pointed out, in Australia the Norco RPC-4224 is pretty hard to beat due to the lack of options.

 

All good. I'm sure you know this, but you can only recover a single drive with one parity drive. With that number of drives you may want to consider dual parity. 

 

The other thing to bear in mind is that all the remaining drives get used to recover a failed drive, so if you have a number of "old" drives in your system, they will get more stress on them if you have to recover a failed drive. ie: to recover a failed drive with single parity all your other drives need to perform flawlessly.  This may open up the possibility of a second failure due to the stress of recovering your failed drive. 

 

I'd suggest at a minimum inspecting the SMART data to see if there are some latent issues with your drives before you use them or potentially retiring some of the older drives and consolidating them into a larger drive.

 

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1 hour ago, PeteB said:

you can only recover a single drive with one parity drive. With that number of drives you may want to consider dual parity. 

 

 To clarify, I believe you mean "you can only recover a single drive with one parity drive at a time", meaning if you lose a second drive before rebuilding from parity then you'll lose the contents of both failed drives.

 

With the luxury of 24 bays I think I'll take your advice and use 2 x parity drives, the only downside is, the 2 largest drives in the array will be 8gb, so 16gb will be allocated to parity for much smaller drives.

 

Rest assured, I'll be running every disk checking tool in the book as soon as this thing is up and running. I've been stuck using a mac server since 2001, I'm looking forward to proper hardware management tools.

 

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13 minutes ago, enmesh-parisian-latest said:

With the luxury of 24 bays I think I'll take your advice and use 2 x parity drives, the only downside is, the 2 largest drives in the array will be 8gb, so 16gb will be allocated to parity for much smaller drives.

 

 

That's basically my setup in a nutshell.  The spare bay of the 16 in use is holding an already precleared 8Tb for when I next need to replace a drive.

 

image.thumb.png.41149499748c63d80f5f715d1471c6d5.png

Edited by BetaQuasi
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2 hours ago, enmesh-parisian-latest said:

 To clarify, I believe you mean "you can only recover a single drive with one parity drive at a time", meaning if you lose a second drive before rebuilding from parity then you'll lose the contents of both failed drives.

 

Yep that's correct. 

Edited by PeteB
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  • 1 month later...

Hey, I'm dredging this topic up again to ask opinions on motherboards (thanks for the replies so far):

 

I found a good deal on this CPU (USD $99 inc shipping) so went and bought it:

Intel Xeon CPU E5-2670 CPU Eight-Cores 2.6Ghz LGA2011 SR0KX

https://ark.intel.com/products/64595/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2670-20M-Cache-2_60-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI

 

So now I've narrowed down my motherboard options, I'm looking at this:

Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F+
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DR3-F.cfm

I'm currently lurking on ebay waiting for a good deal.

 

Anyone have any opinions or comments?

 

After posting the above question I found a local ad for some parts which looks reasonable:

Quote

 

Server grade Computer components
$500 (~USD $400)

Supermicro X9SRL-L server/workstation motherboard lga2011 v2

Intel 1650 xeon 6 core 3.50Ghz

16gb ecc ddr3

U9DX I4 cpu cooler

the motherboard has onboard video

for extra can provide adaptec raid card with raid 5 ssd 334gb or ocz 350 revo pci-e ssd and power supply

 

 

 

 

Edited by enmesh-parisian-latest
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