1st unraid build, hardware questions

[chuga]

Hi all,

 

I am looking to build my first unraid system.  Currently I have a HTPC and three other desktops in the house.  I would like to move all media to the unraid system so it is easily available to the other systems.  Everything is hardwired (cat5e) through a switch.

 

My first question is how much of my old hardware lying around can I use?

 

--MSI K8N Neo2 board with 2x512mb mushkin dr400 ram (hardware compatibility does not recommend this due to nforce 3 ultra chipset?), I have an athlon chip on this board...don't really remember which chip, athlon 64 I think.

 

--MSI P965 Neo board with intel core duo 6300 and 2gig ram.

 

--various older video cards around

 

--A decent full tower antec case with lots of fans and psu

 

In regards to hard drives, I would need to order a few new ones as no reason to use my stack of old 200gig drives.  I would probably buy a few WD (slower greens ok?  I use blacks in my desktop).

 

thanks for the help,

 

chuga

 

[wsume99]

--MSI K8N Neo2 board with 2x512mb mushkin dr400 ram (hardware compatibility does not recommend this due to nforce 3 ultra chipset?), I have an athlon chip on this board...don't really remember which chip, athlon 64 I think.

I would take the advice from the HW compatability page and stay away.

 

--MSI P965 Neo board with intel core duo 6300 and 2gig ram.

Should work fine but you'll need to use one of those old video cards and I'm not sure how well the onboard NIC will perform.

 

 

--A decent full tower antec case with lots of fans and psu

An Antec tower (300,900,1200) will work fine.  The PSU might be another story.  Is this a single rail PSU?  If not then you might consider getting one that has a single 12v rail.  If you're only going to use just a few drives then it probably won't matter much but as you add more drives it is possible to overload a multi-rail PSU eventhough you are well below its rated watt output.  I have powered five green HDDs with my Antec Earthwatts 430 PSU which has 2 12v rails.  So it is possible to use a multi-rail PSU (with a few drives) but I just wanted to warn you.

 

 

In regards to hard drives, I would need to order a few new ones as no reason to use my stack of old 200gig drives.  I would probably buy a few WD (slower greens ok?  I use blacks in my desktop).

If they are SATA drives and they are still under warranty then I'd at least run a preclear cycle on them.  If you discover that they are failing or at least something in the SMART report gives you confidence that they are flaky then you could RMA them.  There is a chance that the mfg might give you a larger HDD in return (maybe a 500GB if you keep your fingers crossed).

 

Just my 2 cents -- If I was in your position I would use the free copy of unRAID and throw together a server using the components that you have on hand.  You'll learn a lot about unRAID in the process and if you decide that your current HW cannot satisfy your needs then you'll be better educated on unRAID and be able to properly select the components you need.  This is the path that I followed and I must say that my thoughts about what I wanted to do with my server changed as my knowledge of unRAID matured.  Had I bought new HW right off the bat I might have chosen something that would not have suited my eventual needs once I understood all the things I can do with unRAID.  So if you have the time and the spare HW I would give that a shot before buying anything.  Once you have a running system it's easy to upgrade/swap out any component - even the MB.  I'm on my 4th MB now.

[kizer]

Exactly what he said above about using what you have that should work. I started my array belive it or not tinkering with:

10GB drive 3.5

6GB drive 3.5

120GB drive 2.5 laptop drive

 

I did the preclear thing and toyed around with it until I was sure its what I wanted. Then to really make sure I had it all right I just copied the Budget Build pretty much to the letter. I use all Green WD drives because they are super quite and use hardly any power. My thoughts where not to build a speed demon, but a low power quite machine that you wouldn't even know was in the room. The only clue its in my office really is the LED fans on the front, which some day I'll disable. LOL

[wsume99]

LOL - I started my array with a 13GB IDE drive and a 160GB SATA I drive and no parity.  Now I have all 1TB & 2TB WD Green drives in there.  They are really quiet, use little power, and are easy to work with when it comes to advanced format drives.  (Although it sounds like that last benefit will be of little value when 5.0 released.)

[chuga]

Thanks for all of the quick replies.

 

In regards to the psu, I just checked and it is an "Antec Tru430"

 

For the hard drives, will going with WD greens slow anything down?  or is the bottleneck not HD speed.

 

I was thinking I would order a few new drives as I have ~1TB of storage in my HTPC right now full of DVDs, etc...and would need to move that to the unraid server.

 

Again, thanks for the replies.  I think I will stick with the case/psu/mb/cpu and order a few HDs and give it a shot.

 

chuga

[wsume99]

In regards to the psu, I just checked and it is an "Antec Tru430"

The label on the psu should tell you how many 12v rails you have.  There will be a column labeled +12v for each rail showing its capacity ... one column = single rail, two columns = two rails, etc.  In any case, if you are going to start with three drives your current psu should be up to the task.

 

For the hard drives, will going with WD greens slow anything down?  or is the bottleneck not HD speed.

Short answer is green drives will be fine.  7200 rpm drives will give you a little faster parity check and maybe a slightly higher data transfer rate but nothing real significant.  They will also cost more, produce more heat, and use more power.  I have all green drives in my server and it works great for me.

[prostuff1]

If the quick newegg search I did pulled back the correct PSU that one has 3 +12v rails.  Each rail has 16amps so you should be able to dangle 6-7 drives off it IF they are green drives.  I would not go any more than 7 green drives and 5 7200RPM drives.

 

You can start with this PSU but if you plan to add more later on you will need a new PSU.

[Joe L.]

Thanks for all of the quick replies.

 

In regards to the psu, I just checked and it is an "Antec Tru430"

 

For the hard drives, will going with WD greens slow anything down?  or is the bottleneck not HD speed.

 

I was thinking I would order a few new drives as I have ~1TB of storage in my HTPC right now full of DVDs, etc...and would need to move that to the unraid server.

 

Again, thanks for the replies.  I think I will stick with the case/psu/mb/cpu and order a few HDs and give it a shot.

 

chuga

The Antec manual for that power supply shows it has a single 20 Amp 12 volt rail.  Figure a few amps for the motherboard, a few more for fans, and you probably have about 15 amps capacity remaining for the drives.  That would be about 5 drives capacity unless they are all green drives.

 

Bottleneck is HD rotational speed.  The hard disk must rotate between reading a sector and subsequently writing it.  5400 RPM drives will be able to be written to about 1/3 slower than 7200 RPM drives.  7200 RPM drives will not be "green" as it takes more power to spin them faster.  The slowest drive involved (rotational speed) dictates the overall throughput when writing to the array.  When reading, any drive will be faster than your LAN.

[chuga]

Looks like I'll probably go the WD green route as speeds should be OK.

I also read on one posting that could use one of my old drives for a cache drive?  quite a few ~200gb sata drives lying around.

 

Also, was looking at the recommended budget box MB

BIOSTAR TA785G3HD

on newegg they are either out of stock or open box.

 

Is there a newer preferred budget MB now?

 

for my HTPC I use the Gigabyte 785GMT...

 

thanks,

 

 

 

[wsume99]

Is there a newer preferred budget MB now?

 

You could check out Raj's prototype design thread for some more info on sample builds.  I think he keeps it pretty up to date WRT including MBs that are available.

[Rajahal]

I generally update my prototype thread and the recommended builds section of the wiki at the same time, so when one is out of date the other tends to be as well.

 

If you need to buy today, I would recommend the ASUS M4A785-M.  Note that it uses DDR2 RAM, but everything else listed for the Budget Box designs will work with it.  I'm using one right now for a 15 bay budget box for a client, it is a great board.

[chuga]

Thanks Raj...any reason to get a board that supports DDR3?  If so would you stick with Asus?

 

I ask in that I have 2 other boards which use DDR3.  I could swap around things easier in the future if using the same (Gskill) ram.

 

Also, I notice in newegg on the 1TB WD Green drives there are quite a few DOA and failing drives.  Any other recommendation for that?  or maybe the fail/DOA postings are just the normal number given the thousands of those drives that sell...

 

thanks,

 

chuga

[dgaschk]

You can use the CPU.

[wsume99]

Thanks Raj...any reason to get a board that supports DDR3?  If so would you stick with Asus?

 

I ask in that I have 2 other boards which use DDR3.  I could swap around things easier in the future if using the same (Gskill) ram.

You answered your own question there.  DDR2 vs. DDR3 is just a matter of what you have laying around.  There is no performance difference in unRAID.  If you don't have any DDR2 laying around that you can use then go with DDR3.

 

Also, I notice in newegg on the 1TB WD Green drives there are quite a few DOA and failing drives.  Any other recommendation for that?  or maybe the fail/DOA postings are just the normal number given the thousands of those drives that sell...

In my opinion people are much more likely to write a review if they've had a problem with a product.  So for a product like a 1TB or 2TB HDD that Newegg has probably sold tens or hundreds of thousand units of I'd expect for there to be a lot of bad reviews.  All HDDs will eventually fail.  The best thing to do is run pre-clear on any drive before installing it into your array.  That will hopefully detect any suspect drives from the get go.  Then continue to monitor its health as you use it.  That way hopefully you'll detect the drive starting to go bad before it causes any major problems.  I've purchased 4 WD green drives in the last 6 months and I had to RMA one because it was a little suspect during pre-clear.  Getting a DOA or early failure seems to be the norm now for all HDD mfgs.  But isn't this one of the reasons why you're using unRAID - to minimize the impact of a HDD failure?

[chuga]

thanks to all of the input...here is my plan after all of the good advice.

 

1) use antec case and psu for now

2) order 3 WD green drives, probably from different sites(amazon, newegg,etc)

3) use the P965/core duo board for now

 

Spend awhile kicking unraid around and learning.  Then if it does what I need I might upgrade the MB/CPU to something a bit better and more energy efficient...

 

thanks again for all of the people here willing to answer the same questions everyday!

 

chuga

[wsume99]

thanks to all of the input...here is my plan after all of the good advice.

 

1) use antec case and psu for now

2) order 3 WD green drives, probably from different sites(amazon, newegg,etc)

3) use the P965/core duo board for now

 

Spend awhile kicking unraid around and learning.  Then if it does what I need I might upgrade the MB/CPU to something a bit better and more energy efficient...

Sounds like a very good plan to me.  I think you'll be surprised how much fun you'll have building your own server.

 

thanks again for all of the people here willing to answer the same questions everyday!

You're welcome.

[Rajahal]

Sorry I got back to this thread late, but wsume99 said nearly everything I would have said anyway.

 

The only bit I'll add is that in general I would prefer DDR3 over DDR2 when buying new as it is more 'future proof'.  The concept is that DDR2 will be obsolete sooner than DDR3, but of course both will be obsolete within a few years anyway.  So I do give a small nod to DDR3 for that reason, but I don't fret about it at all if I have to use DDR2 instead.  If you have one or the other laying around already, that's a great reason upon which to base your decision.

[mbryanr]

Sounds like a very good plan to me.  I think you'll be surprised how much fun you'll have building your own server.

 

And how little it takes to maintain.  The server just works with the proper basic care maintenance.