Portuguese Unraid Users


soupn

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Hi,

 

I'm half portuguese (but don't live in Portugal anymore) and am planning to start my first unRaid build next week. Will be getting an old PC from my brother and I want to use the trial version on it. I haven't used unRaid yet, but am planning to use it to replace my Qnap NAS. I hope to have my final unRaid build finished by summer.

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Olá! I started just like that. Had a Qnap Nas, heard about unraid, and got an old pc to play with. It was easy to setup, and with spaceinvader's videos, I´ve installed some tools to "upgrade" my unraid.

 

Now I have a costumer with a simple pc with unraid, and i'm looking for hardware to build a more professional unraid server. That´s my problem right now, to find the hardware that fits my needs.

Edited by Paulo Costa
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I was born and grew up in Lisbon, but am living in Germany now, I have dual nationality. My friends and family still live there and I try and go back when I can.

 

As to my unRaid build, my problem is understanding the hardware. I'm trying to understand how HBA's work what cables are needed, etc... If I use 10 drives, how would I connect that using one of those LSI 9211-8i? The documentation says these can take hundreds of drives, how would you do that? Or just connect 30? Then all those SFFxxxx cables, breakout cables, SAS Expanders.... I"m having a hard time understanding how all that works together.

I'm getting an old build from my brother (hope it still works) and I'll play with unRaid once I get it this weekend. I basically only want a fileserver (main usage), but down the road I'd like to run a couple VM's as well for testing (not permanently on). Small steps :)

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1 minute ago, Odom said:

If I use 10 drives, how would I connect that using one of those LSI 9211-8i?

9211-8i connects directly to 8 devices (the 8i means that, there are 4i, 16i models, also models with external outputs, e.g. 9200-8e).

 

To connect more than 8 devices to that HBA you'd need one or more SAS expenders.

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Many thanks for the info!

So, you can connect the 2 ports of the LSI 9211-8i to 8 drives using those breakout cables (4 SATA on one end, an the other goes into the LSI card). The SAS expanders are yet another card, so another slot, right? How do you connect the expander to the LSI card? Is there a drawback in connecting more than 8 drives via an expander to an 8i?

If you don't mind some more questions :)

I looked on eBay, for example. Are there any relevant differences between LSI 9211-8i and 9240-8i? Dell Perc H200, Dell H310, LSI 9211 or IB versions, is that more or less all the same? I understood that you need to flash them to IT Mode, so that they only pass-through the drives, essentially losing all the functions form the card itself. Does it make a difference wich one you get then?

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10 minutes ago, Odom said:

The SAS expanders are yet another card, so another slot, right?

Yes, though slot is only required for power, and some expanders can be powered by a molex instead connector, for example, this is a second atx case with an Intel expander to increase the max disk capacity on one of my servers, it's connected by an external SAS cable to an LSI 9207-4i4e HBA:

1529199142_2018-03-0412_47_18.thumb.jpg.5719e22a537a40742b5ad4615c453ff0.jpg

 

 

13 minutes ago, Odom said:

Dell Perc H200, Dell H310, LSI 9211 or IB versions, is that more or less all the same?

Yes, they are the same once flashed/crossflahed to LSI IT mode, it's easy to find on ebay HBAs already flashed to IT mode, though flashing isn't very difficult.

 

 

 

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oh, nice. that was one of my questions also.

 

Now, imagine that I want to have a maximum 12 hdd + 2 cache + 2 parity, so 16 disks in one case. Do you recomend any case for this?

I have seen some cases but they have 8 to 10 3'5 slots at max. Then I saw some hdd enclosures like chenbro, but still confused.

 

Do you have some unraid machines and the hw that you used?

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20 minutes ago, Paulo Costa said:

Now, imagine that I want to have a maximum 12 hdd + 2 cache + 2 parity, so 16 disks in one case. Do you recomend any case for this?

Unfortunately it's increasingly difficult to find tower cases for many disks, there are of course rack cases, from Chenbro, Supermicro, Norco, etc, but they can be expensive and noisy, though it's always possible to mod them, but for a variety of reasons I prefer tower cases, even if sometimes one isn't enough, I have several servers at the moment, some say too may 😛, the larger ones use mostly discontinued Coolermaster Stacker and Centurion cases, with an assortment of 5in3 and/or 4in3 modules, I would love hot swap but I already spend more money than I should on the servers so I try to save where I can, every server has a twin for backup, for hardware they are mostly based on the Supermicro X9SCL/SCM motherboard, Xeon E1220v1/v2, 8GB, and controllers are mostly LSI HBAs with SAS expanders when needed.

 

 

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48 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

 I can, every server has a twin for backup, for hardware they are mostly based on the Supermicro X9SCL/SCM motherboard

 

 

twin for backup?

why supermicro motherboards, is it because working 24/7?

 

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11 hours ago, Paulo Costa said:

twin for backup?

I backup every media server to and identical one.

 

11 hours ago, Paulo Costa said:

why supermicro motherboards, is it because working 24/7?

Not because of that, I use server boards mostly because of IPMI, number of PCIe slots and ECC support, but when I first started with Unraid I used regular desktop boards, depends on your priorities.

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18 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

To better illustrate this is how they are connected:

imagem.thumb.png.78976b0affb7e2c1a58fc1fd81dbfd54.png

Thanks, that drawing explained a lot, I'm finally beginning to understand :)

 

I have an older Coolermaster C690 II that I'm planning to use. I have many smaller drives that I want to play with when testing, but for the proper build I'm planning to put in Seagate Exo drives. Somehow here they are cheaper than the other Seagate or WD of the same size. I was thinking of getting one or two 10TB or 12TB Exo drive for parity, so that they are big enough for the future. I have a few WD Red 8TB drives I can use from my old QNAP, then add 2x Samsung QVO 1TB drives for cache (as these cost 112€ at the moment).  I don't know what CPU and motherboard my brother still has, I'll find out next week.

Initially I was thinking of getting an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 and 16GB or 32GB RAM. These Ryzen CPU's are cheaper than Intel and also support ECC RAM, should I decide to get that. I was planning on a microATX, but I see that won't work, as I need multiple PCI slots (SAS card, video card).

I'm also thinking about upgrading my network to 10GBe at home and recently found two affordable switches.

 

4 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Not because of that, I use server boards mostly because of IPMI, number of PCIe slots and ECC support, but when I first started with Unraid I used regular desktop boards, depends on your priorities.

How important is ECC for unRaid?

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13 minutes ago, Odom said:

How important is ECC for unRaid?

I would say it's important to anyone who really cares about data integrity, though RAM is usually reliable, errors do happen, for example just recently got two errors in the space of a few hours:


 

Tue, Mar 5, 2:15 PM
Event: unRAID Server Alert
Subject: Notice [TOWER2] - IPMI Event
Description: localhost *Warning* Memory - Correctable memory error ; OEM Event Data3 code = 00h

Tue, Mar 5, 10:26 PM
Event: unRAID Server Alert
Subject: Notice [TOWER2] - IPMI Event
Description: localhost *Warning* Memory - Correctable memory error ; OEM Event Data3 code = 00h

 

Didn't get any more since, and it was the first time I got some, and I've been using ECC exclusively on all my servers for 4 or 5 years, good to know it's working as it's supposed to.

 

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