Finally need a serious upgrade, but need assistance....

[rharvey]

I have one of the original unRaid servers in the old (huge) Cooler Master tower's.  Two years ago I pulled out all the IDE trays and upgraded to SATA but with that old Intel board having only 2 on-board SATA ports and only PCI expansion slots the system has become quite slow on parity checks which I was able to survive with.  Over the last 6 months the system has become very un-stable with various drives coming up as disabled from time to time.  Often just a simple re-boot will get it all back but sometimes I need to mess around with SATA port swaps to get it all back.  Frankly, it's time to upgrade....

 

So far I'm going to stay close to the current unRaid standard and use the Super Micro C2SEA motherboard and then add 2 of the Super Micro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards to get support for 22 drives total.  I know that I need the SAS/SATA breakout cables as well.  I'm going to go with a lower end dual core E5400 processor with 4GB dual channel memory.

 

I have read the long thread on the AOC-SASLP-MV8 and it seems like this card is working well for folks now including having two in one system, do I have that right.  One other question is around my existing power supplies, yes the original unRaid came with two power supplies in order to power up all those hungry IDE drive.  Does anyone have any experience in retro fitting a new ATX style MB into one of these older systems....?  Did the power supplies work out or did you need to replace them...?  Anything else that I need to consider with this upgrade.... 

[WeeboTech]

One other question is around my existing power supplies, yes the original unRaid came with two power supplies in order to power up all those hungry IDE drive.  Does anyone have any experience in retro fitting a new ATX style MB into one of these older systems....?  Did the power supplies work out or did you need to replace them...?  Anything else that I need to consider with this upgrade....   

 

The case itself should be fine for a newer motherboard.  You will need to change the back io/plate but it should work out fine. Did for me I have the X7SBE.

 

Regarding the two supplies.  I would consider upgrading the PSU first, your problem could be the motherboard aging or the PSU aging.  I certainly would trade out the two PSU's for a modern single rail PSU.

 

I'm sure Joe L. will comment as he has one of the original stacker machines too.

[rharvey]

Yeah Joe, time for more of your wisdom here......are you still at AVAYA...?

[teamhood]

I had one of the original stacker cases with 2x psu and full of IDE hard drives. I upgraded the MOBO, PSU and also just recently purchased the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 Sata card. I'm not sure if the original 2 PSU could power everything as I wanted to get 1 single PSU.

 

The original upgrade which consisted of just the MOBO/CPU/PSU/SATA & IDE mix went smooth. Just last week I finally made the switch from the older 8 port Supermicro PCI-X card to the AOC-SASLP-MV8 PCI-E card and ran into a problem where one of the SATA ports on the breakout cable was bunk. Other than that it went... Last week I also did a 4.3.3 Pro to 4.5.6 Upgrade and had trouble as my Flash Drive had something go wrong, but at the end of the day all my data was totally protected and my unRAID array is rocking mighty fast parity checks

 

I still love the old stacker case and I'm hurting to buy my 4th 5-in-3 drive cage...

[teamhood]

I'll also add that my original unRAID mobo/CPU/ram/1xpsu is still in use... it's a linux box hosting my private gazelle tracker Still working perfectly

[rharvey]

Thanks guys, sounds like this SAS/SATA card can be a tad challenging but it's sure an awesome option for cheap expansion.  Got my new MB/PSU/Memory/CPU/Breakout Cables from Newegg yesterday and the two AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards arrive today so guess what I will be doing Saturday morning.....wish me luck.

[Joe L.]

Yeah Joe, time for more of your wisdom here......are you still at AVAYA...?

No... not currently working.  Avaya closed the office here about 1 1/2 years ago.

 

I am just about to replace the MB on my original server.  It was either that, or to upgrade the memory from the original 512 Meg. It was cheaper to replace the entire MB/CPU/Memory than upgrade the old DDR memory.

 

I've built an entirely new second server that is entirely SATA based with the Super Micro C2SEA MB, but still have the old drive trays and IDE drives in the older server.

 

The MB destined for the old Cooler-Master case is this one. http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SE7501BR2-KIT-R&cat=BAP&cpc=APM

It came with the 2 XEON 2.4GHz CPUs, the heat-sinks, the fans, and 1Gig of ECC RAM.  I already had 2GIG of ECC RAM, so for $57 I have a dual-cpu PCI-X based server quality board with 3 Gig of RAM.  I set it to boot from a 4Gig compact flash drive plugged into an IDE-to-CF adapter.  Each cpu is hyperthreaded so it shows in "top" as a 4-cpu machine.

 

My old PCI based Promise IDE disk controllers should be able to run at 66 MHz, and the PCI-X slots allow a gradual upgrade path to much faster disk controllers.