Socket 754 - Gigabyte K8VT800Pro up and running!

[Kaygee]

Bit of background info, decided to buy a nas device a while ago, looked at the prices and thought damn they are expensive! I've built many PC's from servers to carputers so decided to "roll my own". The primary purpose was to have a large secure storage area to be used to host my media collection:-  music, pictures and films. My Adaptec card wasn't much use with large SATA drives since 2TB is the largest partition it will support meaning I could have large or secure from my new 4 x 1TB drives but not both. 

 

A mate was chucking out a bunch of old H/W so I acquired three rack mount boxes. Two 1u boxes with 150W PSUs and only 1 slot. These wouldn't power the H/W I had in the config I wanted (Gigabit or raid). The 2u server case that was so loud it could be heard at the bottom of my garden, not house friendly.   

 

This bunch of H/W was discarded. During this time I was testing with a competitor product that supports H/W raid but doesn't have user shares and is still running 2.4.x kernel (meaning on-board Gigabit couldn't be used). Someone on my home automation site (Cinemar Solutions) mentioned UnRaid and they had been running it for a while and was very happy with it.

 

I d/l UnRaid and set about building my first UnRaid server, and it works like a charm.

 

All this despite it running on old hardware that was laying around my home office, not on the approved list. There wasn't even a Socket 754 M/B on the list of tested M/Bs!

 

However after a bit of poking around, UnRaid runs 2.6.x kernel which should work reasonably well with the onboard Gigabit card, I have several other gigabit cards (Realtek 8169, Intel Pro/1000T) to try should it not play nice. Board has a couple of onboard sata ports. I know I have a couple of SIL sata boards laying around in the spares draw. According to the manual the board boots from USB and a quick google says it works with other Unix variants. Seems like it has a chance of working. 

 

Need a CPU and cooler, after reading the PSU pages and my experience last week 1u PSUs decide to add a reasonable PSU to the list.

 

Gigabyte K8VT800.

AMD Sempron 3300+.

Alpine 64GT cooler.

1GB DDR Kingston PC3200 memory (2x512MB).

 

5200 FX Graphics card AGP 4x.

 

Intel pro 1000T PCI Gigabit card.

Gigabit Lan - Realtek on-board 8110S (very poor performance under 2.4.x kernel (not unraid but another product) but under 2.6.x kernel seems just fine).

 

Win Power 500W pPFC power supply. To be swapped with Antec Earthwatts 500 after testing.

 

SIL 3112 (4.2.84 bios) on PCI bus - 2 drives. 

PATA to SATA converter JM Micron version for Parity drive. 

3x Samsung 1TB HD103UJ HDD. Actually 4 in the case but only 3 in use due to licensing or lack there off.

 

Kingston Data Traveller II 256Mb USB key. Choose USB-HDD for 1st boot device and select Kingston in boot priority menu option as device 1.

 

Compucase Galaxy Mid Tower case. Testbed case honest just what was laying around the office.

2 x 8CM fans Arctic Cooling, 1 x HDD cooler (2 x 5cm superslim fans).

 

Side panel removed which has another 8CM fan (to be replaced with Arctic Cooling 8cm fan or maybe a 12CM).

 

Testing...

 

Started off small and simple.  Copied 4.5Gb to each data drive. Ran MD5 checksum. Passed.

Checked copy speed from XP client, W2003 server and W2008 server. All fine.

Ran streaming tests to D-link media player and E-Great NMT. MKV MR and Mrs Smith runs june fine. No pauses no stutters.

 

Removed Intel Pro/1000T, enabled Realtek 8110S, recognized fine, tested fine. Passed MD5 checksum tests. Streams fine to both media players. 

 

1.5 TB data copied to disk 1 + 2 yesterday, 800GB to one 700GB to the other. Checked copy sizes to bothe drives from the original drives, folder count and file counts. MD5 checks against half a dozen files on each drive. All passed with flying colours.

 

Average write speed of 25 MB/s accross 1.5TB of data. Very pleased. Given the SIL 3112 is SATA 1 and doesnt support NCQ I expect the SIL 3124 to perform much better.

 

Parity drive added. Parity checked kicked off last night. Passed parity check in just under 5 hours at over 56MB/s. Well chuffed given the old hardware this is currently running on.

 

Syslog

Sep  5 00:03:55 Tower kernel: md: sync done. time=17267sec rate=56568K/sec

Sep  5 00:03:55 Tower kernel: md: recovery thread sync completion status: 0

Sep  5 01:05:05 Tower emhttp: shcmd (27): /usr/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/hda >/dev/null

Sep  5 01:05:06 Tower emhttp: shcmd (28): /usr/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sda >/dev/null

Sep  5 01:05:07 Tower emhttp: shcmd (29): /usr/sbin/hdparm -y /dev/sdb >/dev/null

 

Web UI

(Last checked on 9/5/2009 12:03:55 AM, finding 0 errors.)

 

Environmental.

 

Drive temperatures rose to 26 deg C, from 22 deg C ambient during both data migration and parity check. Very pleased.  System draws 92W idle but should drop once AGP card is removed.

 

Noise, even with the case open it is quieter than my GB switch and external 8 bay e-sata case (icy-box stacker fans are noisy and need replacing).

 

Issues encountered during build.

 

CBM Flash Disk - 2GB would not boot this motherboard - boot error.  Replaced with Kingston DT II, worked first time.

VIA onboard sata contorller VT8237 would not recognize Samsung drives. Little bit of research showed VT8237 doesn't like SATA II devices.

1 x Samsung drive set to SATA I mode. No different. Device disabled.

Drives moved to Rosswill RC-209 - SIL3114 card. Same issue, hang on boot or device not recognized. 

Rosswill RC-209 can't be flashed (Holtek flash device not recognized by SIL flash utility). Card now in bin.

SIL 3112 card flashed to latest bios works faultlessly but only supports 2 sata devices.

PATA to SATA device installed onto IDE motherboard port for parity device.

 

   

Gripes.

Boot from USB is very slow. Will try some other USB keys to see if boot time can be improved.

Adaptec 2140SA raid card is now redundant. Shame this cant be used as a SATA card as 64MB on board cache makes it pretty damn fast.

 

This is a bog standard install straight out of the box, no optimizations, customizations or tweaking.

 

Next step - buy a license.

Transplant SIL3124 PCI card and E-SATA external case running 8 x 500GB Seagate SATA drives via PM.

Replace AGP card with cheapo PCI graphics card (power saving measure).

Buy a decent case.

 

Hit list for cases....

http://www.xcase.co.uk/3u-Rackmount-Cases-s/26.htm.

Chenbro 16 drive case. £299

 

http://www.xcase.co.uk/4u-Rackmount-Cases-s/27.htm

Norco 422? 20 bay SATA/SAS 4u rackmount case. £299

 

A mate just bought one of these and loves it. Running another Unix filer product ;-)

 

http://www.xcase.co.uk/category-s/43.htm

Jeantech Nitro 8 x 5.25 bays. With 3 x 2 stackers this gives me 12 drives. With my external e-sata case.  £25.00!!!

 

Build cost thus far : -

£65.63 or around $160 for the Americans. To put this into perspective that is less than I paid for the Adaptec raid card last year!

The case, HDD, MB, VGA, Memory and SATA cards, I already had either in use or in a draw gathering dust. CPU, cooler, PSU, 2 fans and a couple of PATA/SATA adapters were required to get the system up and running. 

 

Rgds

 

Kevin

[RobJ]

Howdy and thank you, very nice report, good honest perspective.  I've added this board to the Hardware Compatibility wiki page.

 

I can't say it falls into the category of boards to be recommended, but it certainly is an example of the relatively wide compatibility of unRAID, and its ability to utilize old hardware productively.  You like most of us almost immediately started looking into ways to upgrade it, but that in itself demonstrates one great capability of unRAID, the ability to start cheap, and improve the system on a relatively linear value-based growth model.

[Kaygee]

Thanks Rob,

 

A couple of updates to my original posting.

 

After 5 days of usage and no issues.

Added a pro licence.

 

Now running 4.5b6.

 

Added two Icydock 3 into 2 sata backplanes.

Added SIL3124 PCI card.

Added SIL3114 PCI card.

Added 4 500GB Seagate drives.

 

Pre_clear script run against the 5 new drives overnight. 14 hours to clear 1TB Samsung, 8 hours to clear 500GB Seagates. 

Added all five drives to the array, downtime 5 mins (thanks to Joe L and everyone else who worked on this script - you rock!).

 

Samsung drives sit at 25 deg C, Seagates 32 deg C at idle.

Rises to 30 deg C for the Samsungs and 35 deg C for the Seagates under load.

 

CPU sits at 32 deg C, MB records 25 deg C at idle.

CPU rises to 35 deg C at load, MB stays at 25 deg C.

 

Load testing is copying 1 x 4GB image and 1 x 7GB MKV to the array, viewing two movies via user share to NMT, no stuttering allowed. Copying is direct to disk not via user share.

 

Works really well.

 

Will wait for another three weeks and post another parity check.