First Time Build

[lambretta15]

hello everyone,

 

As you can see this is my first post, i have been reading through the forums for sometime now and i thinking about building a unraid server. I use xbmc as my frontend and two 1TB usb drives for my media.

 

Unraid looks to be the perfect solution for me as i dont want to waste any more money on external drives and i like the fact i have fault tolerence. Being able to add more storage is a big selling point.

 

I was wondering if anyone can take a look at my componet list and give me some feed back, good or bad.

 

Motherboard: Asus M4A88T-M 880G Socket AM3 Onboard Graphics 8 Channel Audio mATX motherboard

                  http://www.ebuyer.com/product/220150

 

RAM: Kingston 2GB DDR3 1066MHz i5 Memory Module CL7 1.5V

      http://www.ebuyer.com/product/169490

 

CPU: AMD Sempron 145 2.8GHz 45W Socket AM3 Retail Boxed Processor

      http://www.ebuyer.com/product/238329

 

Power Supply: Corsair 500W CX PSU - 5x SATA 2x PCI-Express

                  http://www.ebuyer.com/product/240999

 

Case: Antec 900 Nine Hundred

       http://www.ebuyer.com/product/118268

 

Total £232.59

 

I alread have the hard drives which are 2TB Western Digital WD20EARS, is it correct i would need a jumper on the 7th & 8th pin of all the drives. In the future i want the rig to support 15 drives and i would like to get some 3-in-5 hotswapable caddys.

 

I would just like you guys to know you have a great project going here and its by far the best solution for my media needs.

 

Thanks in advance Sam

[joshpond]

Hi,

 

Can't help much on the mobo but with the RAM unless you have plans other than storage 2GB is enough i find. I'd buy a better brand of RAM though like Kingston but that is just my preference.

 

Run unRAID ver 4.7 then you won't need the jumper on your WD drives. If you search around you'll find you can use v4.7 and run those drives starting on the 64k boundary.

 

Josh

[Rajahal]

The motherboard looks fine, as does the CPU and power supply.  However, for only 15 green drives you could get away with a smaller PSU, such as the Corsair CX-500.

 

I can't find any good pictures of that case, so I can't tell if it will work well or not.  It looks like it might support three 5-in-3s, but I'm not convinced.  If you want to play it safe, go for the Antec 900 or 902 instead, as I can guarantee that both of them will work.

 

I agree that the RAM looks pretty generic, so that's a bit of a gamble.  It will probably be fine, but no way of knowing for sure.

 

As joshpond said, use unRAID 4.7 or newer and you won't need any hard drive jumpers.

[lambretta15]

Thanks for the replies

 

I totally agree with using some branded Memory, I should of known to play it safe. I am also going to change the PSU to the Corsair CX-500 and the case to the Antec 900. AS you have said, I could get away with a 500W PSU and the case you suggested is proven to work, i don't want to risk using the antec 100. the 900 is only £20 more.

 

I have read it is better to copy the data across before using parity to get a faster write speed, is this correct?

 

I have updated my first post with the new hardware changes, any final thoughts?

 

Cant wait to get some serious storage on the go, thanks for the advice

 

Thanks Sam

[Spectrum]

I have read it is better to copy the data across before using parity to get a faster write speed, is this correct?

 

Better is subjective

The advantage of seeding the array without a parity drive is faster writes.  The disadvantage is your data is not protected from a single disk failure.

The advantage of seeding the array with a parity drive is your data is protected form a single disk failure.  The disadvantage is slower writes.

 

Only you can decide your priorities.

[kizer]

I'd rather be slower than worry.

[kal]

Well if you're keeping the copies on the external drives till parity is established, I'd go with the speedy route. If a drive does fail (straight off the bat, following a couple of pre-clears? wow, that'd be unlucky!), you've always got your original external drive copies

[lambretta15]

Sorry for the confusion, it was a long day yesterday. Ill try again, after I have built my unraid server, I will be copying the data from my external drives to the server. Is it correct I can copy my data across with no parity and benefit from faster writes? Once all the data has copied I can enable parity on the array to protect me against a single disk failure.

 

I want to do it in this order so I can copy my data across in the fastest time possible

 

Thanks again

 

[kal]

Will you be connecting the external drives directly to the unraid server?

Or via another computer and be doing alot of network transfers?

Are the drives USB?

 

to be honest, reading over it again, you've only got, what? 2tb of data? I dont think theres going to be a large time difference between running with, and without parity. Especially, since (assuming), you're coping from USB connected drives - they may be the bottleneck

[Venares]

If your copying from USB drives than you will top out at 30MB/s anyway so it really wont matter.

[lambretta15]

Will you be connecting the external drives directly to the unraid server?

Or via another computer and be doing alot of network transfers?

Are the drives USB?

 

Thats was the plan to connect the drives directly to the server, yes they are usb 2.0.

 

to be honest, reading over it again, you've only got, what? 2tb of data? I dont think theres going to be a large time difference between running with, and without parity. Especially, since (assuming), you're coping from USB connected drives - they may be the bottleneck

 

After looking into it and the comments here i dont think it is going to make much difference. The USB would be limited to 30MB/s.

 

 

Thanks for all the advice, i will post some pictures of my progress. Hopefully i can get the parts some time next week