Seeking Configuration Advise

[binar]

Greetings,

I would appreciate any comments on my Unraid configuration which is still in the planning phase. My choices are driven by the following three needs:

1. I need the system to be as silent as possible.
2. I need the system to offer the most future expansion as possible.
3. I need the system to be as reliable as possible. 

 

Below are the components I am considering:

1. For the case I am looking at the Mountain Mods Ascension PC Case. It can hold 42 hard drives. 
2. For Hard drives I'm considering twelve Seagate Exos 12TB hard drives. Two of them will be sacrificed for Unraid backup.
3. For Hard drive cooling fans I am considering fourteen Noctua NF-S12A PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin 120mm fans.
4. For Power Supply I am considering the Seasonic PRIME 600 watt Titanium Fanless power supply.
5. To increase the quantity of SATA ports I am considering the LSI Logic 3ware 9750-24i4e 28-port SAS RAID Controller. 
6. For the motherboard I am considering to options. One is the Asrock X99 Extreme 11 which has 18 onboard SATA ports. The second one is the Asrock Z87 Extreme11/ac which has 22 onboard SATA ports.

 

Below are my questions regarding my configuration:

1. Are my motherboard options good choices? I would like to go with a SuperMicro motherboard. But they do not make a motherboard that matches the quantity of SATA ports the Asrock motherboards offer. From what I gather, these two Asrock motherboards are the only motherboards that offer such an insane amount of onboard SATA ports. If I am wrong, please post any other motherboard options that have 18 to 22 onboard SATA ports. 
2. Is the LSI 9750-24i4e Controller compatible with either of the two Asrock motherboards? Will it support 12TB hard drives? Can the RAID be disabled so 24 SATA ports can be used in no form of RAID setup?
3. Am I correct to think the Seagate Exos 12TB hard drives are the most reliable hard drives for sale in the market? If no, I would appreciate any other suggestions.
4. Is a 600 watt power supply adequate? From what I know about Unraid, one has the ability to prevent all 12 drives from spinning at the same time.  Therefore, my thinking is I do not really need a 1200 watt power supply. Is this thinking correct?
5. Is my case good choice? Any opinions on alternative choices will be appreciated.  I was considering a Supermicro SC846 chassis however it generates a lot of noise so that killed it as an option. What I like about the Mountain Mods Ascension PC case is how it offers a lot of space for future growth.  

 

Those are a few of the most important questions I have for now. I hope to read any opinions that will provide new insights into configuring the best possible Unraid system to meet my three needs.  Thanks in advance for any help regarding this matter. 

 

 

 

[Frank1940]

35 minutes ago, binar said:

Is a 600 watt power supply adequate? From what I know about Unraid, one has the ability to prevent all 12 drives from spinning at the same time.  Therefore, my thinking is I do not really need a 1200 watt power supply. Is this thinking correct?

Personally, I think it is on the light side.  If you look at its spec's, the max output is a total of 600W for all voltages.  The 50A rating on the 12V equals this.  So you will be limited to considerably less in actual use!  Second, to my knowledge there is no way to limit Unraid from spinning up all of the HD drives at the same time.  In normal operation, it will happen during several different operations including startup and shutdown!  

42 minutes ago, binar said:

For Hard drive cooling fans I am considering fourteen Noctua NF-S12A PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin 120mm fans.

Having fourteen fans is no way to have a 'quiet' server.  I don't know why you want it quiet ( sleeping in the same room or in a home theater?) but it will be be making more noise than most common desktops (even without 'quiet' fans).  The temperatures will climb inside and moving  air is the only way to get them down.  

 

What other purpose are you planning for this server?  Any VM's?  I see no RAM or CPU listed in your parts list...  

[JonathanM]

1 hour ago, binar said:

For Hard drives I'm considering twelve Seagate Exos 12TB hard drives. Two of them will be sacrificed for Unraid backup.

Can you elaborate what you mean by backup?

 

Here is how I'm parsing what you said.

10 12TB hard drives in the unraid array. Arranged either with...

1 or 2 parity and 9 or 8 data for a total about 108TB or 96TB of array storage, and the 2 non-array disks used to backup 24TB of the data that's most important to you.

 

Unraid parity is a realtime protection system that can emulate 1 or 2 (depending on number of parity) failed drives in their complete state, filesystem and all. It cannot protect against accidental deletion, file corruption, or file system corruption.

 

Parity is not a substitute for backups.

[Vr2Io]

2 hours ago, binar said:

For Hard drive cooling fans I am considering fourteen Noctua NF-S12A PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin 120mm fans.

Interest case, but I never try any case more then 6+ fan even slient type.

 

 

2 hours ago, binar said:

To increase the quantity of SATA ports I am considering the LSI Logic 3ware 9750-24i4e 28-port SAS RAID Controller.

May be better with 8643 socket/plug HBA, because trend. BTW, I feels 8087 socket/plug more reliable and durable.

 

 

2 hours ago, binar said:

One is the Asrock X99 Extreme 11 which has 18 onboard SATA ports.

I won't use onboard SATA in general. If no. of SATA port on-board need to be consider, this just limited your choice. Go to SAS Expander solution would make disk stuff handle more easy.

 

2 hours ago, binar said:

Is a 600 watt power supply adequate?

For current 12 drive would be fine, but couldn't handle 42 drive, problem is not 12v rating, it is short of 5v rating even 1200w PSU.

 

 

2 hours ago, binar said:

I was considering a Supermicro SC846 chassis however it generates a lot of noise so that killed it as an option.

I have consider SC847, it provide 45 drive slot in 4U ( external disk enclosure ), I want run 2 unraid and seperate disks slot in 2 . But due to noise and power concern ( don't want all disk have all power up only ) so forget it.

 

Unarid allow 28 disk in array only, others will in cache pool, does this expect. And lot of power and SATA cable, this also use up many space and affect cooling, pls aware that.

Edited June 22, 2019 by Benson

[binar]

23 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Can you elaborate what you mean by backup?

 

Here is how I'm parsing what you said.

10 12TB hard drives in the unraid array. Arranged either with...

1 or 2 parity and 9 or 8 data for a total about 108TB or 96TB of array storage, and the 2 non-array disks used to backup 24TB of the data that's most important to you.

 

Unraid parity is a realtime protection system that can emulate 1 or 2 (depending on number of parity) failed drives in their complete state, filesystem and all. It cannot protect against accidental deletion, file corruption, or file system corruption.

 

Parity is not a substitute for backups.

Jonathanm,

Thank you for your post. I am still a newbie with this new tech so I'm sorry for tripping up.  What I meant was an Unraid array setup with ten 12TB  hard drives for data and two 12TB hard drives for parity. The totals I estimate are 120TB  for data and 24TB for parity.  I hope you can clarify the following for me. If five years from now one of my 12TB hard drives breaks down mechanically can Unraid recreate the lost data by using the two Parity hard drives? I'm asking this because you mention "Parity is not a substitute for backups"  but confusing the matter for me is this post where shEiD asks, "Does it really mean, that having unRAID use dual parity I could recover from ANY 2 drives failing?" and the answer he gets is a "Yes" (second post from the top). If I am not mistaken in the Raid6 world two hard drives failing does not mean you lose the data from both failed drives because the RAID6 stryping technology re-creates your lost data.  I was assuming the same holds true in the Unraid world by using two parity drives. In short, it will help me a lot if you can explain to me why it makes economic sense to spend the extra cost of setting up two Unraid parity drives if in the case of future drive failure the two parity drives cannot re-create the lost data? 

 

In my opinion, all of this emphasizes the importance of not being cheap when it comes to buying hard drives for an Unraid array and instead spend the extra money on buying enterprise rated hard drives that are designed to last a very long time.  I'm considering buying Seagate Exos 12TB enterprise hard drives  however I am still in the process of confirming if they are really the best quality enterprise level hard drives for sale in the market right now. 

 

Again thanks for participating in this thread.

[Squid]

20 minutes ago, binar said:

. If five years from now one of my 12TB hard drives breaks down mechanically can Unraid recreate the lost data by using the two Parity hard drives?

Yes.  Actually you can recover from 2 simulataneous drive failures when you have dual parity drives.

21 minutes ago, binar said:

I'm asking this because you mention "Parity is not a substitute for backups"

This means that by and large the most common cause of loss of data is user error.  Trust me that if/when you accidentally delete all of your baby pictures that your wife will not be happy.  This is where backups come into play.  The stuff that you absolutely cannot live without should always be backed up somewhere else.  No system, regardless of how many parity drives etc is immune to this.

[Frank1940]

First thing.  Unraid is not a RAID implementation (as the name clear states!).   It does duplicate many of the data recovery features that are in RAID setups.  You can read about how Unraid does this here:

 

     https://wiki.unraid.net/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#What_is_unRAID.3F

 

In addition, Unraid provides one more important bit of protection.  Each data drive uses a standard Linux file format for its data storage.  Unraid stores each file on a single disk.  Thus, you can mount any Unraid data drive in a Linux computer and read and write directly to the files on that disk.  This if you should have more disks fail then the parity setup can recover from, you can still recover the data from the drives that can be read.  Furthermore, if the failure is file structure failure, Linux has tools that can often repair this damage.   

 

This is not true for RAID implementations, if parity can't fix it, all of the data in the entire array is lost.  

 

A while back, I prepared a study of on probability of data loss for the following situations-- No parity, single parity, and dual parity.   

 

    https://forums.unraid.net/topic/50504-dual-or-single-parity-its-your-choice/

 

Note that when you have a dual parity system and you are a conscientious administrator, have set up Unraid's notification system, and address problems as they arise, you are more likely to lose data from fire, flood, server theft, lightning, etc. than you are from having a three disk failure!  

 

[JonathanM]

43 minutes ago, binar said:

If five years from now one of my 12TB hard drives breaks down mechanically can Unraid recreate the lost data by using the two Parity hard drives?

Yes and no. Unraid will faithfully reconstruct whatever was on the failed drive, whether it's valid data or not. If your data is corrupted, or the drive slot formatted, unraid will faithfully recreate the corruption or freshly formatted drive. Parity as unraid uses it doesn't have a concept of individual files, only the entire drive.

 

I just wanted to hammer home the reality that drive failure is only one of many ways to lose data, but unraid ONLY protects from drive failure. There are still other threats to your data that must be considered.

 

Any data that would cause you great distress if it were to be deleted must be stored in multiple locations. Many of us keep more than one unraid server, typically when it's time to do a major upgrade the cast off parts migrate to the backup server.

 

One more thing to consider when setting up a server from scratch. Bulk purchase and shipping of hard drives. As a whole, hard drives are MUCH more reliable than they were several years ago. However, they are still mechanical, and are vulnerable to hidden damage from handling. With this in mind, I strongly recommend not purchasing all your drives at once, preferably in ones and twos from different vendors. That way if the pallet of drives or just your box got used as a football during shipping your risk is mitigated. As an adjunct to this, before you trust any drive to participate in the array, I would recommend a full capacity test. Even blank or freshly formatted drives fully participate in parity, so any drive that doesn't perform flawlessly puts the recovery of a failed drive in jeopardy.

 

Do you really need 120TB of storage right away? If not, there is no harm in planning for it, but since unraid allows easy additions of data drives, it is much better to only make active what you really need, and commission new drives as needed for expansion. The fewer drive slots you use, the lower the risk. Plus, drives generally get cheaper and larger as time goes on, so spending the money before you really need the capacity can be wasteful. Personally I keep 1 new drive on the shelf the same size or larger than my largest parity, that way if a drive fails, or I need the space, I pop it in and order a replacement, either the same size or if the market warrants, the next size larger.

[Frank1940]

And add more more possibility for data loss-- Operator error.  If you follow this forum very long, you will find that a thread from some poor soul who deleted files of which he/she had only one copy!  All of my User Shares have their SMB Security set to Secure  which means that anyone can read the file but only a previous assigned user with the proper password can access them for any other purpose.  To further protect them, there are NO assigned users!  If I need to do anything to a file (modify, update, delete, etc.) I have to go in through a 'backdoor' as root to do it.  

[Squid]

10 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

some poor soul who deleted files of which he/she had only one copy!

Me  

 

[binar]

Frank1940 ,

Thanks for your postings. The purpose I am planning for this Unraid system is to use it as a PLEX server so I could stream video to my Smart TV or music to my stereo and also for archiving a bunch of video footage from a video business I use to own. Right now I have no need for Virtual Machines on it but in the future when I learn more about setting up virtual machines I may consider setting up Ubuntu 18 and/or Windows 10.

 

Additionally, I'm looking at Asrock motherboards setup with a 5th generation Intel Core i7-5775C 3.3 GHz LGA1150 Processor with 32 gigabytes of RAM. My thinking is this much processing power should be more than enough to stream some multimedia in my home network. 

 

Regarding the fans. Somewhere I read a post Unraid has a setting that enables one to put the hard drives not in use to sleep which I think would help power use and fans keeping things cool. I will try to find the posting where I read this so I can determine if I understood it correctly. 

[binar]

Benson,

Thanks for your post. May you please clarify the following. You mention 8643 socket/plug HBA, and 8087 socket/plug.  Are you talking about SAS controller cards?  Or are you talking about cables?  Can you post some links that will show me what component you are talking about because it is not clear to me.  Thank you for your help.

[binar]

Jonathanm,

Thanks for your post. Most likely I don't have an immediate need for that much storage. My reasoning is I just want to set the system up a single time and not mess with it for a very long time.  Nevertheless, what you are saying makes a lot of sense. Drive prices go down all of the time and it may make more economic sense to build the Unraid system capacity gradually.  

 

As for the two parity drives being able to recreate the lost data from a failed drive, I have to say that is good news. Now the extra cost to adding two parity drives makes a lot of sense to me.  

[binar]

Thanks to all for your post and I have one more post for the evening.  I am changing to a Deep Silence 6 Super Tower Case because of three reasons listed below:

1. The Mountain Mod case is just way too big to fit where I need it to fit.  Plus 42 hard drive capacity is too much for me.
2. The Mountain Mod case has no silence padding. In contrast, the Deep Silence 6 case has exceptional sound isolation padding.
3. The Deep Silence 6 has space for up to twenty five 3.5"  hard drives which is more than enough future growth space for me. 

Lastly, I learned the Asrock X99 Extreme 11 has the 18 onboard SATA ports assigned to two different controllers. 10 SATA ports are assigned to an INTEL onboard controller.  And 8 SATA ports are assigned to a LSI onboard controller.  Can anyone out there please answer the following question.  Does UNRAID care if I attach ten 12TB data hard drives to the ten SATA ports assigned to the INTEL controller while at the same time connecting the two parity hard drives to the two SATA ports assigned to the LSI controller?  

 

In other words, will having the two parity drives operate under a different LSI controller  compared to the ten 12TB data drives operating under a separate INTEL controller going to create a problem for me when the time comes to setup my UNraid system?  Or is UnRaid fully capable of operating with two different controllers at the same time? If the answer is no, is the best solution to buy a LSI Logic 3ware 9750-24i4e 28-port SASRAID Controller ?

 

I hope someone out there can answer my question because this potential problem has me stumped.   Thanks for your help with this matter.