Pimp Your Rig


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This is a Gigabyte "GA-K8N Ultra SLI" (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=1867&ProductName=GA-K8N%20Ultra-SLI) ...

 

It's a pretty old mobo with 8 onboard SATA ports - 4 from the NForce chipset and 4 from an added Silicon Image sil3114 controller. The NForce ports are 3gb/s, the Simg ports are 1.5gb/s. It was my Windows desktop before I went pretty much all mac + linux, and has worked well over the years - like you said, nice to have 8 onboard sata ports.

 

Yeah, I know the taped drive is ghetto, and yes - it is the cache drive. I couldn't figure out a place to mount an IDE drive - I tried a few places. Might be better for heat to stick it back by the unused power supply cables. It's the last vestige of my IDE drives.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Completed my build a couple of weeks ago. I managed to get unRAID up and running on an old P4 MB I had but I decided for aesthetics and power consumption to start a fresh build. My design criteria were (in order): function, quality, price. After a lot of research I ended up with the following:

 

CASE: Lian Li PC-K12B - $120

4x3: Lian Li EX-34N (x3) - $37 ($111)

Power Supply: Corsair VX450 - $50

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 - $50

CPU: AMD X2 4050e (OEM) - $35

Memory: Crucial 2 x 1GB DDR2 800 - $21

HDDs (Parity + 1 Data): Samsung Ecogreen F2 1TB - $70 ($140)

Cables: SATA, fan, power - $30

 

Total: $557

 

I reused a PCI SATA card and CPU cooler I already had as well as 5 other hard drives (250 GB to 1TB).

 

The PC-K12B is the same case used in the MD-1510. It's well built, with excellent cable management features and 9x5.25 bays.

1zxetu.jpg

 

The EX-34Ns replace the single built in 3x3 HDD rack. They each come with a 120mm fan which is fairly quiet at low RPM. At the top inside you can see a 3 (LMH) position switch which I have connected to the 3 HDD fans.

vsnxol.jpg

 

The case has good cable management on the right side. I used 2 fan splitters in series to send power to the 3 front HDD fans from the front switch.

t7fuy8.jpg

 

The MB has 6 SATA ports and I only have 7 drives at the moment so only one connection needed to the PCI card. Flash drive connected to internal USB header. Rear fan and CPU fan are temperature controlled by the MB.

2h508wg.jpg

 

I much prefer the right angle SATA connectors for the drives (Monoprice).

dw9i8g.jpg

 

 

The drives run cool at the lowest fan speed and the entire build is very quiet. Max HDD temperature I've observed is 37C and the green drives are always under 30C.

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  • 1 month later...

Moved my Unraid box from the Antec 300 case pictured earlier in this thread to a Antec 900 case last night, also added another Supermicro 5-in-3.  Now I just need one more of the 5-in-3's, and the system will support 15 drives, all hot-swap (that's more drives than my mobo/card combos will support at the moment, so I'm also looking at upgrading the board to something that I can hit the 15-drive mark on the PCI-E buss, no standard PCI).

 

 

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Moved my Unraid box from the Antec 300 case pictured earlier in this thread to a Antec 900 case last night, also added another Supermicro 5-in-3.  Now I just need one more of the 5-in-3's, and the system will support 15 drives, all hot-swap (that's more drives than my mobo/card combos will support at the moment, so I'm also looking at upgrading the board to something that I can hit the 15-drive mark on the PCI-E buss, no standard PCI).

 

 

Nice looking rig. 

 

Be aware, even though the hardware is hot-swap, unRAID is not hot-swap.  At least one user caused a series of failures when hot-plugging an additional drive into an array caused it to re-assign drive IDs.  He attempted to recover on his own, and ended up making an error that caused a loss of data on an entire drive.

 

Always power down when plugging and un-plugging drives.

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  • 5 weeks later...

My Norco 4020 was also way too loud for my home theater rack, thus pimped mine too:

 

Figured it might be worth $12 for each of the 3 XLF 140mm fans since they claim <16dB.  Simply epoxied them together, with a strip of aluminum across the top.  Two strips of wood, held in place with screws through the case side, to keep the fan assembly in place. 

 

I also built a mini thermostat to control the fans.  See the variable resistor sticking through the front of my case.  Honestly, there is no sound from these fans on, so the thermostat is simply to save a some watts of power when the system doesn't need the fans.

imga0103k.jpgimga0097r.jpgimga0100.jpghttp:imga0101.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

Basic Beast

 

This is my first NAS build. Probably not exceptional, but I'm happy with it, so I'm posting this as an example of a simple but, I think, fairly high performing build for anyone just starting out to take a look at.

 

I tend toward the frugal Yankee mindset, in that I don't want good resources to go to waste, and I also want to get as much bang for my buck as I can.

 

So all of the hardware I used here, except for the case and hard drives, I already had on hand from a previous workstation build and I simply recycled to put to use for this unRAID NAS.

 

I found the Antec 200 case on sale at Newegg for ~$40 including shipping + $10 for two additional fans. The case comes with 2 two-speed ( 1x140mm and 1x120mm) exhaust fans. There are cutouts for mounting two additional 120mm intake fans in the lower drive bay, and one more on the side of the case. For a budget case, I think it works out quite well for this purpose. Plenty of room for hard drives, good air-flow, etc. From a construction perspective its certainly no Lian Li but it is still well designed and put together, and fine, I think, for a server that is hiding in my basement.

 

I went with three new relatively high priced, high quality Western Digital (WD1001FALS-00J7B1) hard drives because these are the critical "wear items" of the system. The motherboard and processor are overkill, but they do perform well. The video card is even more overkill (a power waster for this application) so I'll keep my eyes open for an inexpensive "greener" alternative.

 

Its taken me maybe 30 hours to get everything working as I want, but I have done a bit of tweaking and enhancing. That's the nature of "rolling your own". I'm pleased with the current results. I have good performance (67Mbps reads over a gigabit network using NFS disk shares, 61Mbps with user shares) and capability to automatically go to S3 "sleep" to save power for the 80-90% of the day the box won't be utilized.

 

The main question remaining is long term reliability, and only time will tell for that.

 

NAS Hardware running unRAID Basic 4.5-beta6

Motherboard: Asus A8R32MVP Deluxe

BIOS: 7.01

NB: ATI Crossfire Express 3200

SB: ULI M1575

Onboard SATA Controller: Silicon Image 3132

Onboard NIC: Marvel 88E8053 PCIe Gigabit LAN Controller

Processor: AMD Opteron 185 @ 2.6GHz

RAM: 2GB 400MHz DDR

Storage: 3 X 1TB WDC_WD1001FALS-00J7B1 (read testing at 106-109 MB/s)

PSU: Enermax Liberty 500w

Case: Antec 200 w/ two added Cooler Master 120mm LED intake fans

Video: PowerColor Radeon X1800GTO

USB Drive: Generic card reader with 1GB SD card

 

Optional Packages / Scripts Installed

unMENU

FEMUR

S3.SH

bwm-ng

pci-utils

Clean Powerdown (powerdown 1.02)

rsync-3.04

 

go

#!/bin/bash
# Start the Management Utility
/usr/local/sbin/emhttp &
# Start unMENU
/boot/unmenu/uu &
# Start FEMUR (Firefox Tool)
nohup awk -W re-interval -f listen.awk >/dev/null 2>&1 &
# Auto-install selected packages
cd /boot/packages && find . -name '*.auto_install' -type f -print | sort | xargs -n1 sh -c
# Enable WOL
ethtool -s eth0 wol g
# Execute s3.sh sleep script
fromdos < /boot/custom/bin/s3.sh | at now + 1 minute

 

LAN

Client & server connected at 1000Mb/s to 3COM Gigabit network switch

 

Media Player

Western Digital WDTV-HD

Firmware: WD beta 1.02.10 beta plus Zorander ext3-boot 0.9.2 mod

TrendNet TU2-ETG H/W: V1.3R USB Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (AX88178 chip)

 

Level 1 Test Info

 

Photos:

Antec200.jpg

back.jpg

build.jpg

closeup.jpg

otherside.jpg

running.jpg

 

 

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UPDATED: 1-14-2010 (some parts not pictured, yet)

 

Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 635 Propus 2.9GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core

CPU Cooling: COOLER MASTER RR-CCH-P912-GP 92mm

Video Card: N/A - On-Board Graphic.

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA785G-UD3H

Sata Controller: 3 x Rosewill RC-207 PCI Express x2

Power Supply: CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W

Memory: G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066

Sound Card: N/A - On-Board Audio

Other: Patriot Xporter XT Boost 4GB Flash Drive Model: PEF4GUSB (unRaid OS)

 

Harddrives:

1 X Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EADS 1.5TB (Parity Drive)

1 X Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

1 X Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

2 X Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS-22TMA 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

2 X Western Digital Caviar Green WD15EARS 1.5TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

2 X SEAGATE 500GB ST3500641AS SATA300 7200RPM 16B

 

Case:

COOLER MASTER Centurion 590 RC-590-KKN1-GP

3 x COOLER MASTER STB-3T4-E3-GP 4-in-3 HDD Cage

 

P1020442-1.jpg

P1020448-1.jpg

P1020449-1.jpg

  • Upvote 1
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This is my first unraid build. So far so good...

 

* Case: Antec 1200

* 4x drive cages (4-in-3):  CoolerMaster STB-3T4-E3-GP

* PSU: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750

* Motherboard: Supermicro X7SBE

* CPU: E6750, stock fan

* Memory: ECC 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 800 (Crucial CT2KIT25672AA800)

* 2x PCI-X controllers: AOC-SAT2-MV8

* nic: intel 1000 CT, PCI-E

* Parity hard drive: ST 1.5 TB 7200

* Cache drive:  WD 640 GB black

* Data drives:  x4 WD 1 TB green

                      x6 WD 1.5 TB green

                      x4 WD 640 GB black

* USB flash (boot device): Patriot mini 4GB, FAT32, unRAID 4.5beta6

 

Xmas in October:  :P

680914254_Hb9qZ-L.jpg

 

PSU and motherboard installed:

680915084_Z4jx7-L.jpg

 

CoolerMaster cage:

680914529_ys9sB-L.jpg

 

16 drives are in:

681411398_3526U-XL.jpg

 

The final product:

680915682_jZzDJ-XL.jpg

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My Norco 4020 was also way too loud for my home theater rack, thus pimped mine too:

 

Figured it might be worth $12 for each of the 3 XLF 140mm fans since they claim <16dB.  Simply epoxied them together, with a strip of aluminum across the top.  Two strips of wood, held in place with screws through the case side, to keep the fan assembly in place. 

 

Your Norco looks like it has a lot of commonality with my Chenbro RM41416b 4U case. 

 

How many active drives are you running in there now?  I ask because I'm wondering how effective your cooling solution actually is.  I used 5 80mm Noctual fans across that center divider because there was already hardware and plug-in shells for each fan.  The fans it came with were much higher RPM and quite noisy.  With 13 drives (1.5T and 2T) installed, 11 in the canisters and two (cache and parity) in the top positions, I'm finding that during a parity calc  (any event that keeps all drives running for extended periods of time) the temperature of some of the drives gets into the low 50's C.  Normally they run in the high 30's.

 

It seems that three 120mm fans may marginally produce more air flow than five 80mm, depeding on their ratings  So I'm wondering how many active drives you are running and how the drive temperatures maintain under an all-running scenario?

 

--Bill

 

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've been inspired by some of the builds in here to re-build my array. Ordered an Antec 1200 case on Thursday, received on Friday and rebuilt on Sunday. Certainly not as neat as some in here but compared to the preious build I'm very pleased.

 

I'm using a combination of two "Icy dock 4 in 3" (currently with 5 discs and three spare slots) and the standard Antec caddies (full up with 6 discs). Interestingly the discs in the Icy docks are running about 5 degrees warmer. Current set-up therefore has 11 discs and capacity for 14. Capacity currently 6.6Tb (4 of the discs are 500Gb). Parity is 1.5Tb so the spare slots will be filled with 1.5Tb drives and the 500Gb drives will ultimately be filled with 1.5Tb or 2Tb drives, depending on the price differential in the UK at the time. Where possible I have used shrink tube to reduce possibility of cables coming lose over time.

 

Took some stick from the Mrs for building it in the dining room but new it was worth while when I went to move it back to it's normal 'home' - It's pretty heavy and I wouldn't have wanted to carry it too far!!

 

;D

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  • 2 weeks later...

I give you "albert", from unstein = un[RAID] + [Franken]stein.

 

The case is a TeraTower, formerly an external USB enclosure. I bought it just before I started with unRAID but it didn't work as intended for me, and I've been annoyed for years that I spent money on it when I knew I should have gone for a stand-alone solution straight away. Recently, the kids and I needed a DIY project for a long weekend  ;D. I had various computer parts lying around and a bit of a space issue on my primary unRAID server and we ended up with the first version of this after a day or so of handling and choosing components, and some somewhat drawn-out problem solving ;). I've since replaced the power supply with the one in the picture and done various other adjustments, in part to prolong the experience with the kids. The basic specs are

 

Case: TeraTower

MB: EG31MF-S2, rev2.0

CPU: Celeron E1200

RAM: 4GB

HDDs: 5 + parity + cache, all SATA

Extra SATA controllers: 2 x SA3132

 

The MB is bolted on to the side of the case, with the two being separated by the sheet of foam that either this or some other MB came with. The little display on the front hinged door is a thermometer that we put in. Access to the inside is through the side plate the MB is on, and can be done without disconnecting any wires. The PSU is attached with double-sticking tape. The SA3132s just sit in their respective PCIe ports, with the metal brackets on the cards taken off. (I still need an idea for how to properly attach the cards to the MB ...) The HDDs are cooled by the slow-moving, front-to-back fan you can see at the back of the case: it's so slow that you can only barely feel the exhaust. Even so, there're no heat issues, even in 30C+ ambient temperatures.

 

The machine performs pretty well: it parity checks in the 60-70MB/sec range and handles, e.g., S3 without problems. Oddly enough, I've grown quite fond of it ...

 

albert3.jpg

 

albert2.jpg

 

albert1.jpg

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Thanks for the comments. My wife, in particular, seems to enjoy them ;) Personally, I'm conflicted whether something that sits straight and flush, and uses zip ties can be called untidy ... ah, who am I kidding, I've been grinning non-stop since the comments started coming!

 

As for insulation, yes, I probably need to get proper risers in there.

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