Build check

I am thinking about a new unraid build, moving my drives from the old to the setup.

As far as I can find the below is an energy efficient setup with enough horsepower to run unraid and plugins as well as beiing pretty quiet:

CASE:                Fractal Design Define XL USB 3.0 Black Pearl

4in1:                  SuperMicro Mobile Rack CSE-M14T

BOARD:              Supermicro X7SPA-HF-D525

MEM:                  Kingston KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G

CACHEDRIVE:      SSD Samsung 830 series 256GB Basic KIT

FLASHDRIVE:      Kingston MobileLite G2

The case will hold my current drives in its internal bays, expansion would need to be in a 5in3 (sofar I have a 16tb setup with 45% used so I am not -that- worried about extensions beyond the case within a few years).

Any comments and/or ideas are welcome !

I would suggest going with an bit beefier CPU such as an Intel i3/i5 series. They get similar idle power consumption to that ATOM CPU yet they offer exponentially more power should you need it.

I would suggest going with an bit beefier CPU such as an Intel i3/i5 series. They get similar idle power consumption to that ATOM CPU yet they offer exponentially more power should you need it.

What would you suggest specifically ?

I did some google'ing and while it is preyy easy to find that Atom is regarded as low in power use it is kind of hard to find some place that compares them against each other..

The x9scm or newer. But that adds about $100 to your cost. But some say will consume similar power at low use and idle and give you lots of "Horse Power" when needed.

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Also. I wouldn't waste your money on a ssd for cache as any 7200 rpm drive will saturate a Gigabit network with ease.

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Also. I wouldn't waste your money on a ssd for cache as any 7200 rpm drive will saturate a Gigabit

There's more to an ssd then cache drive in unraid. If youre downloading and have to par and unrar, an ssd is a good choice, if you install your apps like sabnzb on it.

The ssd is for the combination of speed and power usage, a 7200rpm will give speed but will use a lot more power and give off more heat.

That as well

Also. I wouldn't waste your money on a ssd for cache as any 7200 rpm drive will saturate a Gigabit network with ease.

Well with a 2nd generation Hitachi 1 TB 7200 RPM i see peaks of only 74 MB/sec with OP suggested ATOM based mainbord.

The graph in the web gui suggests it is using 30% cpu.

the TOP commando shows me the shfs and smbd using over 90% together with this transfer rate.

If i had to redo it i might consider a i3 indeed. If Helmonder wants this mainbord and he lives in NL as well, we could work out a deal perhaps.

All other things i tested thus far seem to work fine with this mainbord, PWM fancontrol works great for example

Also. I wouldn't waste your money on a ssd for cache as any 7200 rpm drive will saturate a Gigabit network with ease.

Well with a 2nd generation Hitachi 1 TB 7200 RPM i see peaks of only 74 MB/sec with OP suggested ATOM based mainbord.

 

The graph in the web gui suggests it is using 30% cpu.

the TOP commando shows me the shfs and smbd using over 90% together with this transfer rate.

 

If i had to redo it i might consider a i3 indeed. If Helmonder wants this mainbord and he lives in NL as well, we could work out a deal perhaps.

 

All other things i tested thus far seem to work fine with this mainbord, PWM fancontrol works great for example

Mmmm... all things consider I will go for a different board... The Atom is actually more powerfull (a bit) then my current old Athlon X2 according to speed compare tests, however I want to run this board for a couple of years and my guess is that cpu usage of plugins will get higher and I might have less then an optimal situation in a year or so.. I'll start searching for an i3 or i7 based board !

OK.... Have done some digging, what about if I change motherboard and processor to the following:

MOTHERBOARD    Supermicro X9SCM-F

CPU                      Intel® Core™ i3-2120T Processor (3M Cache, 2.60 GHz)

Build gets EUR 100 more expensive but I might be better of in future (just remember I also have to change the memory)

MEMORY                KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G

I'll up the mem specs to 8Gigs also (two 4gb strips)

That brings my new proposed build up to:

CASE:                Fractal Design Define XL USB 3.0 Black Pearl                            EUR 122

4in1:                  Supermicro CSE-M14T-B                                                        EUR 102

BOARD:              Supermicro X9SCM-F                                                            EUR 186

CPU:                  Intel® Core™ i3-2120T Processor (3M Cache, 2.60 GHz)          EUR 111

CPU COOLER:      Cooler Master Hyper 612S                                                      EUR  38

MEM:                  Kingston ValueRAM KVR1333D3E9S/4GEC  (x2)                      EUR  68

CACHEDRIVE:    SSD Samsung 830 series 256GB Basic KIT                              EUR 169

FLASHDRIVE:      Kingston MobileLite G2 /4GB                                                  EUR  10

CPUBENCHMARK gives this CPU a rating of 4219

My current Athlon sits at 785

ATOM D525 sits at 715

Looks like this would keep me covered for a couple of years :-)

Ordered it !  Will keep you posted on progress !

Added the Supermicro 4in1 to sit on top of the 5in3 so I have a nice place for my ssd ..

Ordered it !  Will keep you posted on progress !

You wont be dissapointed i've built an X7SPA-HF-D525 system a few weeks ago, but i was dissapointed by its performance. I've replaced the board with an X9SCM-F and an i3-2120T yesterday, and now the thing is FAST, with plenty of headroom

It's a bit of a shame i now have a brand spanking new X7SPA-HD-D525 board lying around though... but at least my unraid system is giving me the performance i kinda expected in the first place.

That's cool... You actually allready build the combo I have just ordered :-)  I think the D525 would have sufficed for todays use but I really feel I need headroom if I want this thing to hang around for 3+ years..

Yeah... it did cost me a lot of money, buying another board after i just bought the X7SPA. I wish i knew upfront that the X7SPA should be regarded as a low end solution, but i found it was used commonly here on the forum and got good reviews, so i thought it was sufficient. Luckily you don't have to find out the hard way.

Add a small case to the D525, put openelec on a usb stick and use it as a htpc to stream off your unraid..

Maybe i'll try something like that, but i'm not sure the built in graphics is good enough for handling 1920x1080p... it is merely a small server board.

the SM d525 has horrid graphics. but it is an excellent severboard. It just cant handle any heavy transcoading plugins. use it to build a backup server, firewall, domain controller or something..  i have 4 of those boards and i love them..  (OK 2 of mine are the D510's)

toss an m1015 on it for a 14 drive server.. or, add an expander to the m1015 and you can put 24 drives on it for a pure storage box. low power norco filler.. although i admit i might want an I3 for 24 drives myself if i was buying new parts and it was in my budget. but the D525 would work fine if you have it. I still plan to do this one day with one of my ATOM boards. It will be able to handle the load just fine. (I do have a D510 running a 16 drive RAID6 at full gigabit speeds)

network speeds will still be limited by the network and not the drives.

the only reason you feel it is not fast is probably because the plug-ins/add-ons you chose.

you could also use it for a low power desktop too. web surfing and office type apps.  you might get a video card to work in the pcie slot. i have never tried it. Im sure ipmi will die if you do.

Long story short, Using the x7spa as an unraid server is what ive been trying for the past 3 weeks, and even without plugins, baremetal, its just too slow for todays large file, gigabit needs. Mine was equipped with a SAS2LP controller and 6 4TB disks. Tried everything. It WORKS, but just about that and nothing more. It is just good enough for BASIC unraid needs. Dont expect more.

Now, same gb network, same client pc's, and a x9scm with an i3, same SAS2LP card, and all my troubles are gone. This thing delivers. What a difference.

I suspect something else then. not to hijack this thread, but i am getting max bandwidth on all of my D510's and D525's.

This includes a 4 drive baremetal unraid with a mechanical laptop cache drive. That writes at about 90-120MB/s to cache and reads at about 90-110MB/s off the data drives. 

My D510 with the RAID6 gets about 200MB/s read/write over the wire when I link the NIC's together..

none of the builds max out the CPU unless I am doing Par/RAR operations.

It might be something else in your build? your ram or something else. perhaps a little tweaking was needed. also different betas might perform severely different as we hop kernel versions.

I'll agree it is low end CPU, but that was it role. low-powered no frills server good for most basic server tasks. and yes you are correct that the I3 is what knocked it off the "good and cheap low end CPU" market. the next gen of Atom should be a very interesting animal.

People with HP N40L's that have even less horsepower are getting pretty good results also...

RAID6 is NOT unraid... unRaid is more cpu intensive. Writing to the cache disk, an ssd was 80MB/s max, to a cached user share, so on the same ssd!!!! just 50MB/s, so almost half as fast. tried different betas and relase candidates, tried jumbo frames, different memory, external and onboard SATA ports, nothing. Friend of mine, also here on the forum "downloadski" has the same board and exactly the same problems. It just wont perform fast enough with unraid, if you want more than just the bare essentials. If your on a 10/100 mbit network im sure it will do just fine...

Now with the i3 there is no difference between writing to the ssd directly or to a cached user share, both will be over 110MB/s... and were talking the SAME network and peripherals, the only thing that has changed is the unraid hardware...

RAID6 is NOT unraid... unRaid is more cpu intensive. Writing to the cache disk, an ssd was 80MB/s max, to a cached user share, so on the same ssd!!!! just 50MB/s, so almost half as fast. tried different betas and relase candidates, tried jumbo frames, different memory, external and onboard SATA ports, nothing. Friend of mine, also here on the forum "downloadski" has the same board and exactly the same problems. It just wont perform fast enough with unraid, if you want more than just the bare essentials. If your on a 10/100 mbit network im sure it will do just fine...

 

Now with the i3 there is no difference between writing to the ssd directly or to a cached user share, both will be over 110MB/s... and were talking the SAME network and peripherals, the only thing that has changed is the unraid hardware...

This forum really is great... I was at the brink (litteraly allmost pressed the button) to order the D525... Thing is .. ofcourse most of us try to create a build as cheap as you can away with, truth is however that this setup would need to keep running for 3+ years and the extra EUR 100 to get it right is just not so much of a problem...

Really a shame that you we're the first on this, take comfort in having "saved" me ;-)

The comment on the D525 beiing able to just do the basic unraid stuff might even be true but the most users of unraid I see play around with plugins so you need the extra horsepower...

It's here !  All complete to start building ... !