Pimp Your Rig

[yumbrad]

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.

[razmajazz]

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.


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.


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.


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.


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



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.

[heffe2001]

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).

[Joe L.]

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.

[heffe2001]

Yeah, I made that mistake years ago on a 'hotswap' chassis that was plugged into a non-swap controller, it wasn't pretty.  Even with the ability to swap drives hot, I always shut the system down, too many bad things happen when you mess with stuff with electricity flowing .

[curtis-r]

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.

[lewcass]

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

Code:

#!/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:

[kapperz]

Processor: AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM3 45W Single-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
2 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 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

[luca]

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: 


PSU and motherboard installed:


CoolerMaster cage:


16 drives are in:


The final product:

[agw]

Nice wiring luca.

[luca]

Nice wiring luca.

Thanks. I just wish that the PSU had longer motherboard and CPU power wires. 

Luca

[jupilerman]

I was playing with vmware for 2 weeks now.
I manage it to work fine so it's time for some change inside the unRAID : new MB.
I took the oportunity to take some picture of my rig.

[bblue]

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

[batfink]

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!!

 

[starcat]

A note to all 4020/4220 users: the second row of Molex power connectors on the backplane is intended to be used *only* with a second redundant power supply or an alternate power supply. You don't need to connect it using Y-adapters to a single PS!