Chuck Posted January 6, 2011 Share Posted January 6, 2011 This boxes primary purpose is to serve media over a gigabit LAN to a WDTV Live Hub and/or Seagate Free Agent Theater +. It also stores a small amount of personal data (photos etc.) as backup for the PC's in the house. It replaced a Netgear RNDU4000 NAS that only had 5.4TB usable, and cost nearly as much including disks. In a previous life, this case was a PC running XP. After that it ran Suse Linux for a several years. Everything except the case and Vantec fan are new in the past couple months. Hopefully other than upgrading unRAID, it will serve our family as it sits for several years to come. Well other than a few disk replacements lol. OS at time of building: unRAID 4.6 Pro, Upgraded to 4.7 1/24/11 CPU: 2.7 GHz AMD Sempron 140 CPU cooler: ZALMAN CNPS10X FLEX (passive, no fan) Motherboard: MSI 880GMA-E53 RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 x2 4GB total Case: Antec Sonata (2004 vintage) Drive Cage: SNT 4x3.5" Hard drive in 3x5.25" Bay Cage Power Supply: Corsair CX430 Cables: SATA cables from monoprice, 7" 3-pin fan extension cable (Cable to Go IIRC) Fans: Scythe SY1225SL12SL 120mm on 4 internal drives EVERCOOL FAN-EC5010M12CA 50mm x 2 to replace original fans in SNT. Vantec Stealth 120mm case fan, Skythe 120mm 500rpm fan on internal disks Misc: Startech Mobo header to USB adapter to move USB boot device inside the case Scotch brite pads in the hope it will kill some fan noise. Parity Drive: Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB, CC35 firmware Data Drives: Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB x 6. CC35 firmware Online Spare Drive: Seagate ST32000542AS 2TB, CC35 firmware Total Drive Capacity: 8 drives (16 TB raw, 11TB usable file system space.) Primary Use: Media server (BD/DVD/FLAC) Likes: Total cost, ease of setup, performance, flexibility Dislikes: It weighs a ton. Add Ons Used: unMENU, custom scripting in go, ssh Future Plans: None until a larger case is needed, at which point the 8 port Supermicro SATA card will be added. I need to get the UPS status reporting working, auto-shutdown if power is going down, along with email notification. Boot (peak): 198 Spinning up disks peak: 148 All disks spun up no activity: 76 occasionally jumping 5w Idle (avg): 46 watts Watching one movie: 52 watts Active (parity check): 103 (range is 91 to 103) The power numbers were very repeatable. My parents bought that table around 1981 for a TRS80 Model III. The box is running headless. The KVM was only used to setup the BIOS. My next mobo will have IPMI. Total cost, not counting the case I already had, was a tad over $1,100 including the unRAID license AND eight 2TB disk drives. I spent a bunch of time getting the cooling like I want. The two fans in the SNT are connected to the mobo FAN1/FAN2 ports, and set to run at 50% in BIOS. The Vantec 120mm Stealth case fan is connected to the CPU fan port, with a target CPU temp of 50º and a minimum fan speed of 50% set in BIOS. The Scythe 120mm fan on the internal 4 drives, operates at 500rpm and is nearly silent, and is connected to a Molex. Disk temperatures during parity check run between 32º and 39º C. CPU temp, measured by infrared pyrometer at the top of the copper plate over the CPU, is staying a little under 50º C. Temperature in the room was 22º C (72º F). While playing a movie, the disk it is on typically runs in the 31-33º C range. The system was very loud when originally built, but the fan modifications not only quieted the system down, but moved the disk temps from too cold to close to the ideal range (35-40º C IIRC). With the fan mods, it is MUCH quieter. I would estimate it at 1/3 as loud. Special thanks to Rajahal for answering several questions during my build, along with providing inspiration and ideas in the prototype designs thread. He made this process much easier than it otherwise would have been. Performance: Write speeds over NFS without parity: 64.9 Mb/s (4 TB of BD images) Write speed over NFS with parity: 22.7 Mb/s (2 TB of DVD images) Quote Link to comment
Ken R. Posted January 6, 2011 Share Posted January 6, 2011 I have two SNT bays (7 HDD slots) in my server. I gave up on those fans completely and bought one 120mm fan to replace the three jet engines in the SNTs. I used 90d SATA cables and a custom power supply cable to keep a low profile and made a frame around the back of the SNT bays to hold the 120mm fan (I mocked it up with cardboard and duct tape - it worked so well I never made the real one I was planning to out of plastic. Quote Link to comment
queeg Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Hi Chuck. Can you confirm that you have drives connected to the white sata ports on your 880GMA-E53 motherboard? I think your the first to report using that chipset. Quote Link to comment
Chuck Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 Absolutely there are and have been disks on the SATAIII ports since day 0. No issues at all. Only thing that has kept me from the Level 1 on this board is I keep changing stuff and taking it down. But trust me when I say I have had zero issues with this board. Quote Link to comment
queeg Posted March 3, 2011 Share Posted March 3, 2011 Absolutely there are and have been disks on the SATAIII ports since day 0. No issues at all. Only thing that has kept me from the Level 1 on this board is I keep changing stuff and taking it down. But trust me when I say I have had zero issues with this board. This is very exciting news! Did you need to disable usb3? What bios settings did you make? Quote Link to comment
Chuck Posted March 3, 2011 Author Share Posted March 3, 2011 I don't think I disabled USB3, and the boot device was in the rear USB3 ports for a while. I had to change the device type for both SATA buses. At first the SATAIII ports came up as IDE. I don't recall what else I changed, not a lot. Boot device, fan settings, not much else. Quote Link to comment
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