Upgrade from v5 to v6; Also upgrade Single-Core Sempron to Athlon or Phenom first?

[wheel]

I'm about to upgrade a box from unraid 5.0.6 to 6.8.3, and I've been reading posts voraciously to make sure I'm not missing out on anything important before making the leap. This is a pure-unraid box - never had any plugins running, never plan to have any docker stuff running. Just adding drives, storing stuff on them, replacing dead ones / upgrading to more space as necessary.  The box has 19 8TB drives in play, and I'm about to upgrade its parity to 12TB and start replacing data drives with 12TBs.

 

I went ahead and replaced Marvell SAS cards with Genuine LSI 6Gbps SAS HBA LSI 9211-8i P20 IT Mode ZFS cards (seem OK so far; installed, recognized all drives, running a non-correcting parity check now).

 

It sounds like I may want to upgrade my single-core AMD Sempron to a multi-core chip for parity checks. Motherboard's an ECS A885GM-A2 (v1.1) AM3 AMD 880G SATA 6Gb/s ATX AMD, and box has 2GB of Crucial 240-pin DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) SDRAM (Desktop Memory Model CT25664BA1339).

 

Existing (but not for long) parity drive is a WDC_WD80EFZX; upgraded 12TB parity drive will be a shucked WD12TB drive. 6 of the data drives are known-SMR drives (ST8000DM004), but I'm pretty sure the rest are CMR: 10 of the data drives are WDC_WD80EMAZ, two are WDC_WD80EFZXs, and one is a ST8000AS0002.

 

Currently, my parity checks seem to be consistently 65MB/s, and the parity check runs for close to 35 hours (will confirm exact timing after this one completes; been going for 15 hours and has about 20 hours remaining according to the GUI).  Having read that parity checks can be longer in V6 than V5 (especially working on a single core CPU) and knowing a jump from 8TB to 12TB should add some serious time to parity check anyway, a potentially 2-day parity check or rebuild operation feels really weird (if not downright risky on a regular basis), I'm leaning towards ordering a new CPU today in hopes of getting it sometime next week and upgrading everything then.

 

I'm thinking the only bottleneck I'm going to be looking at that's easily upgradable is the CPU (presuming the 6 SMRs aren't what's killing my parity speeds) - am I missing something else / more impactful, though?

 

I'm looking at AMD Phenom IIs on ebay and saw a warning that at least one model (Black) will ONLY work with DDR2 (not DDR3) ram, so I'm avoiding that one, but does anyone know a specific model of AMD Phenom II or Athlon II that'll be ideal for my hardware setup / future needs?  I'm genuinely ONLY caring about parity check / rebuild performance, and will absolutely not be adding a cache drive or docker apps / VMs / anything beyond vanilla unraid to this particular box.  It looks like I'll be buying used regardless, so that'll be its own adventure, but identifying the right CPU for my specific situation (if a CPU upgrade's even my smartest move right now) is my primary concern with which I'm going to need some experienced help.

 

Really appreciate any guidance anyone can provide, as I'm in way over my head as far as hardware goes and have been learning on the fly almost exclusively through reading forum posts.

 

Thanks in advance!

Edited April 17, 2020 by wheel
incomplete sentence

[bcbgboy13]

I am not sure where are you located - but it is best to retire the old AMD platform and replace it with an Intel one (even if old).

 

Check Ebay, your local Kijiji or Craigslist boards - there are a lot of people selling used server grade hardware where you could probably find an used Supermicro MB, XEON CPU(s) and 4-8GB ECC memory for $100 or so.

Check it out to see if it is stable - run memtest for a day,  even install some old windows and run some of the software for stress test and if stable then upgrade.

 

This is the one thing that will speed up you parity test or rebuilds and even leave some horsepower for other stuff that you are not presently using but may consider doing in the future.

 

Reason for that - the newer Unraids are using newer Linux kernels, which are using newer instruction sets (AVX2) which are not available in these older AMD CPUs - Semprons, Athlons x2, x4 or Phenoms.  If you keep your present system even with a new CPU (raw CPU speed is better than more cores) you will have a very long parity checks, especially if you update to the dual parity. There is no way around that....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions

 

I personally loved these old AMD CPUs for basic Unraid functionality.

 

The AMD CPUs were always ECC capable and ECC and a UPS is a must for me.

Some of the motherboard manufacturers at the time (Asus, Biostar, ) actually routed all 72 tracks to the RAM slots and kept (or did not disable) the ECC functionality in the BIOS - so by using the slightly more expensive unbuffered ECC memory one could end with an energy-efficient "server-grade" system at very low cost compared to the price of the Intel Xeon stuff.

However I started out with a dual core 4850e (45W TDP), once I migrated to 6.6.6 I upgraded it to a 4-core 610e (still 45W TDP) but it was still not powerful enough. Doing a parity check I was afraid to use anything else, even preclearing a new HD on the side as it was maxed out. But for basic Unraid functionality they were OK.

If you decide to stay with the current system and just change the CPU - raw CPU speed is better for the parity speed than the number of cores.