ASUS P5b Plus vista edition question

[sacretagent]

HI all

 

I am running my unraid 5.2 on this mobo and it runs great but the UCD kicked in and i want to add more drives

now i have 6 drives connected to the 6 onboard ich8 connectors

1 HDD on the JMicron sata connector and 1 HDD on the JMicron ESATA connector with an Esata to sata cable that i pulled back into the case

i bought 2 adaptec 2 port (1220) pcie x1 cards which have each 2 drives

which makes a total of 12 drives now

 

now i still have

1 pcie x1 port so i can still add an adaptec or one of the cheaper cards as i see Rajahal using these cheapo cards (PCI-Express x1 Controller Card (Silicon Image SIL3132))

3 x PCI slots which are useless i guess (PLEASE CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG ... it is the purpose of this thread to get more info) if i want to continue using 3 gb/s speed

1 x pcie x16 which is for the moment used by my graphics card

 

now this graphics card is pure overkill for an unraid machine and i was wondering

if i could trow out the graphics card and use a Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 or similar pcie x4 card to add more drives ??

replace the graphics card with a pci vga card ?? which pci vga card will run with unraid ?

 

So if i use another 2 pcie x1 adapter  and a 8 drives supermicro then i wouldn't need to buy a new mobo (and processor and ram and... ) to get a complete unraid setup with 20 drives / parity and cache

i will only need to buy an antec 1200 with 5 in 3's or the icute A11-01 case with same 5 in 3's to get a complete machine

 

your advice will be greatly appreciated

 

also have an extra question about the AHCI that Rajahal is talking about all the time

mobo slots with 5 data drives and 1 parity drive for now is set to IDE in bios

there is an option to set it to ahci

what are the advantages of AHCI ? and can i still change it now that the server is running with 12 drives without loosing data  ?

 

Here is a pic of the mobo

[Rajahal]

As you said, the last PCIe x1 slot is good for another 2 drives.

 

All the PCI slots combined are good for another 1 drive.  Worth it?  Probably not.  Any more than one drive (even if you used separate cards) will likely result in a bottleneck.  Whether or not this bottleneck is something you would actually notice depends on your usage patterns.

 

Replacing the graphics card with a PCI version is generally a good option.  If you went this route, you could cram another 8 drives into the PCIe x16 slot with a SASLP card or similar.

 

AHCI is basically 'SATA mode'.  It allows the drives to operate at full SATA speeds (and be hot swapped and other stuff that isn't important).  It will also cause your drives to be identified by unRAID as SDX instead of HDX.  When in IDE or any other mode, your drives aren't operating at optimal speed.  If you don't have any complaints about the speed of your drives, then it isn't terribly important to enable AHCI mode - but now that you have UCD you will almost certainly want to .  You can enable it at any time without data loss if you decide to do so.

[sacretagent]

Thanks for the Reply Rajahal

 

i changed the settings from IDE to AHCI in the bios

when unraid came up i was missing 4 drives but putting them back on the right place in the unraid disk config menu solved the issue :0

unraid running again with 10 drives

 

looking now if is still have a pci vga adapter somewhere

 

 

[SSD]

I like that you are running unRaid version 5.2. You must be running TimeMachine. :D

[sacretagent]

I like that you are running unRaid version 5.2. You must be running TimeMachine. :D

 

I will rephrase

 

unRAID Server Pro

version: 5.0-beta2

 

i am baaaaaad with numbers