New Build - beta or stable?


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19 minutes ago, johnny2678 said:

just curious what you would do.

If it were me, I would start with the unRAID 6.9 beta.

 

It has a much newer Linux kernel than the 6.8.3 release and better supports the Intel 10xxx CPUs (especially the iGPU) and has updated NIC drivers for many newer NICs.

 

Frankly, 6.9 is pretty stable and many already have it in production.  Not guaranteed to be problem free, but, I would start there.

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4 minutes ago, trurl said:

I am running it on my main server

2 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

If it were me, I would start with the unRAID 6.9 beta.

thx @trurl and @Hoopster

 

I know I said 'No liability here' but gotta mention this whole journey started with a google search that somehow led to one of your threads @Hoopster about getting an ebay deal on a Xeon 2288g mobo combo.  Haven't built a PC since college, which was a bit more than a minute ago.  So thanks for that 😂

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4 minutes ago, johnny2678 said:

Haven't built a PC since college, which was a bit more than a minute ago.

If it was more than a minute ago for you, it was probably more than an hour ago for me.  :)

 

I'm no spring chicken (I'll let @trurl speak for himself), but, even us old guys know our way around a PC build.

 

I've been building my own desktop/server PCs for almost 30 years.  For me it is a matter of getting exactly what I want and knowing I can change anything in it I want to when I want to.  Too many off the shelf machines are way too proprietary for my liking.

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4 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

For me it is a matter of getting exactly what I want and knowing I can change anything in it I want to when I want to.

haha, agreed 100%.  I won't lie, got a little itch when I saw the new release of MS Flight Sim 2020.  Not a gamer at all but I played that game quite a bit in the early 90s. Not since, but thought it would be icing on the cake to build a machine I could load that up on.

 

I almost jumped on the ebay deal you posted, but I wanted an ATX mobo for expansion (maybe a nvidia card for FS2020 down the line).

 

Figured wth on the LGA1200 chipset.  Giving it a shot.

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9 minutes ago, johnny2678 said:

I almost jumped on the ebay deal you posted, but I wanted an ATX mobo for expansion

ATX MBs will give you more PCIe slots, but the real question is, can you really use them all? 

 

On both the Intel and AMD side, most of their consumer/entry level server CPUs support a max of 24 PCIe lanes.  Add up all the PCIe lanes your expansion cards could use and factor in that PCIe M.2 devices are also going to use PCIe lanes (disabling PCIe MB slots) and you will find that in most cases, you are lucky to be able to fully utilize 3 PCIe slots.

 

The mATX board I bought gave me the three I am likely to be able to use and the x4 is disabled because of the x4 PCIe M.2 SSD.

 

The only way around this PCIe lanes limitation is going high end ($$$$) Xeon CPUs or Threadripper/Epyc on the AMD side.

Edited by Hoopster
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3 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

you are lucky to be able to fully utilize 3 PCIe slots.

yea, I'm not worried about the PCIe slots at the start.  Will have a LSI HBA card at the start and maybe a graphics card down the line.

 

More concerned that I hamstrung myself on SATA ports if I want to use the m.2 slots for NVMe drives.  From what I can gather NVMe is different than PCIe and shouldn't lock up the MB SATA ports but I've read circles around whether this is true or not.

 

Last piece of the puzzle (CPU) arrives tmr.  Other 8 array HDDs, 2 parity HDDs, 2 SDDs, 2 NVMe's are loaded up and ready to go.  Hope they all work. 

 

As I mentioned... last build I did there was just PCI and nothing else and no one (not college students anyways) was building 8-14 drive storage servers.  Just going to try it and see. Heard that if I set BIOS for the m.2 slots to x2 I should be ok with the NVMe drives and not lose MB SATA ports but not even sure what that means 😂

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3 hours ago, johnny2678 said:

More concerned that I hamstrung myself on SATA ports if I want to use the m.2 slots for NVMe drives

NVMe drives can have either a SATA or a PCIe interface.  On most most motherboards, including mine, if a SATA NVMe M.2 device is used, a motherboard SATA port is disabled, especially on motherboards such as mine with 8 onboard SATA ports.

 

If a PCIe NVMe device is used, a PCIe slot on the motherboard could be disabled.  Whether or not that happens depends on the PCIe lanes used by the device.  In my case it is an x4 NVMe SSD so the x4 PCIe slot is disabled.  In the case of some motherboards, an x2 PCIe device may disable a couple of x1 PCIe slots (usually only found on ATX motheboards) or a SATA port. It gets very confusing without block diagrams.

 

In my MB manual, the text in the specifications table contradicts what the block diagram says.  It turns out the block diagram is correct.

 

Another possibility is that the motherboard has fewer SATA ports than the maximum the chipset can support and that bandwidth is allocated to M.2 device use.  It does appear from your motherboard manual that using an x4 PCIe NVMe drive in the M,2_2 slot will disable two of your SATA ports (SATA_56) and that M.2_1 shares bandwidth with SATA_2 if a SATA NVMe device is used.  This is why it is important to know if your NVMe device is SATA or PCIe.

 

Your motherboard manual does not have a block diagram which makes all this bandwidth interplay easier to understand.  Here is the info provided in your MB manual (which I am sure you have already studied):

 

image.png.8ec833d9b4532d040fd81247215c091b.png

 

image.png.a8361844ad9d47912ea7f43835ac8323.png

 

image.png.1c3a9f400344bb363d70a84d683c5844.png

 

It looks like you could lose up to 3 of your 6 SATA ports with both M.2 slots occupied if M.2_2 has an x4 PCIe SSD.

 

A block diagram would make it so much easier to interpret as you can see the either/or paths represented graphically.

 

Here's the pertinent portion of my MB block diagram (I have only one M.2 slot):

 

image.png.e0e7c4f8af7c82d407eb279e32a8f757.png

 

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. It gets very confusing without block diagrams.
 


Exactly, tried to make sense of everything but won’t know for sure until I just turn the damn thing on and start to play in the bios.

I can always return the MB and get another one but haven’t figured out what plan B is.


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9 hours ago, johnny2678 said:

New to Unraid - about to complete this build - https://pcpartpicker.com/list/bYBwx6

 

Usage will be Plex, dockers, vms, python, etc.  Go with the stable 6.8.x or is 6.9.x good to go?

 

No liability here - just curious what you would do.

Note that if you start with 6.9.x, any newly-formatted SSD by Unraid will not be backward compatible with 6.8.x because of the new 1MiB alignment. So downgrading would require a re-format of the SSD. Keep that in mind if you just want to try things out and want to change your mind later.

 

I run 6.9.0-beta25 at the moment and have no problem to report. But make sure to read the release notes - people tend to ignore them but they contain some very useful info.

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5 hours ago, testdasi said:

Note that if you start with 6.9.x, any newly-formatted SSD by Unraid will not be backward compatible with 6.8.x because of the new 1MiB alignment. So downgrading would require a re-format of the SSD. Keep that in mind if you just want to try things out and want to change your mind later.

But also note that using an earlier version, then upgrading to 6.9.x, while it would still support the old alignment, will require reformatting to take advantage of the new alignment.

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6 hours ago, testdasi said:

Note that if you start with 6.9.x, any newly-formatted SSD by Unraid will not be backward compatible with 6.8.x because of the new 1MiB alignment. So downgrading would require a re-format of the SSD. Keep that in mind if you just want to try things out and want to change your mind later.

 

I run 6.9.0-beta25 at the moment and have no problem to report. But make sure to read the release notes - people tend to ignore them but they contain some very useful info.

coming from 6.8.3 and upgrading to 6.9 the SSD must be reformatted to take advantage of the new alignment? What are the advantages ?

Thanks. 

Edited by xPliZit_xs
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8 minutes ago, xPliZit_xs said:

coming from 6.8.3 and upgrading to 6.9 the SSD must be reformatted to take advantage of the new alignment? What are the advantages ?

Thanks. 

In many cases the new alignment offers better performance.    This is probably because it is the same alignment Windows uses so it is what the manufacturers are tuning the drive for.

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48 minutes ago, xPliZit_xs said:

coming from 6.8.3 and upgrading to 6.9 the SSD must be reformatted to take advantage of the new alignment? What are the advantages ?

Thanks. 

Better performance, lower CPU usage and lower write wear. The last one is pretty major as Johnnie tested and it halved the amount of loop2 write. which was a bug with btrfs multi-drive pool.

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