New Build - Will it work? (UK spec)

Hi all,

I've been lurking around the forums for the past 2-3 months and am finally decided and ready to run with UnRaid. I have looked at the wiki recommended builds for the UK and the motherboards seem to be discontinued or difficult to get a hold of from a reliable supplier.

With this problem I have looked around and am planning to go for the following:

3xSamsung F4 2TB drives (from different suppliers)

Asus M4A87TD EVO 870 (it has two pci-e slots so later on can expand with suitable cards)

AMD Athlon II X2 240e 2.8GHz (have this lying around so may as well use it)

I will also stick in a cheap 128mb pci graphics card to help set up

2GB RAM - probably Kingston

Corsair CX-400 400W (from the recommended specs)

Antec 1200 case (airflow and expansion benefits)

I plan on running with the drives above to start with and in a few months I will start expanding and look to buy some hotswap enclosures from xcase.

What do people think?

Is the motherboard likely to be OK?

That energy efficient processor isn't going to be a problem is it?

What about the Samsung F4s - haven't seen anything to indicate they will or won't work with UnRaid. I really don't want to be messing around with firmware updates or jumpers. I just want a drive that works.

Anything else that I may need to consider?

Please help me out on this as I want to place the order ASAP.

Cheers.

BTW open to suggestions on USB stick to use if it makes a diff.

Be careful with those Samsung F4s -- I don't think we've had a definitive answer about whether they need to be jumpered. I Googled around for a bit yesterday and no-one seemed to know. You may want to keep Googling for a while or ask Samsung.

Have a look at "My Rig" in my sig for another Antec 1200 build. I'm also in the UK: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2031.msg34915#msg34915

Good luck!

If you're feeling adventurous go ahead and pick up two or three, then run a few experiments and tests for the benefit of the community. 

Based on the experience of some other folks using the F4's in other types of NAS boxes, they are encountering the same types of problems that were present with the WD EARS drives.  Basically, for the F4's to work, they need to be aligned.  There is no jumper workaround like on the WD EARS.  Also, Samsung does not yet provide a utility to align the drives, like WD did for the EARS drives (WD Align).

So you can get them to work, but you will need a 3rd party drive management software that will let you align the drives to get them to work.  You can't just take them out of the box, install/remove a jumper and then expect them to work in unRAID.

KYThrill, thanks for sharing that info. It sure is getting more difficult to find a hasslefree drive.

Currently, unRAID explicitly looks for the partition to start at sector 63. If the alignment software only formats and partitions the drive, then it's of no use. It would produce a completely incompatible drive (partition not at sector 63). That leaves only the unaligned usage for significantly slower performance like an unaligned EARS (upto 300% in some benchmarked situations).

Hopefully within one of the unRAID 5.0 beta releases Limetech will put in place the ability to use the new alignment for the newer drives.

KYThrill, thanks for sharing that info. It sure is getting more difficult to find a hasslefree drive.

 

Currently, unRAID explicitly looks for the partition to start at sector 63. If the alignment software only formats and partitions the drive, then it's of no use. It would produce a completely incompatible drive (partition not at sector 63). That leaves only the unaligned usage for significantly slower performance like an unaligned EARS (upto 300% in some benchmarked situations).

 

Hopefully within one of the unRAID 5.0 beta releases Limetech will put in place the ability to use the new alignment for the newer drives.

Well, the report I saw confirmed the F4, like the EARS started at sector 64.  They didn't state what software the used to align the drive, just that it had no GUI and had to be done through command line (fdisk I guess).  But they did state that they realigned a single partition to sector 63, which is what the WD align, or jumper 7&8 did (actually I don't think the jumper aligned anything, just subtracted 1 from each sector and made the first sector unusable).

However, I saw another report today of a guy who had imported the drive early from Japan for use in a Windows 7 machine, which supports 4k sectors.  He reported the opposite, that out of the box, it was aligned to Sector 63, and he had to realign it to 2048 to take advantage of Windows 7 4k support.

So this early in the game, there may be a couple different flavors of this floating around out there.  Some with emulation enabled by default and others with emulation disabled by default.  I guess that could make sense too.  The imported drive was an OEM (thus no warrantyfrom Samsung).  I guess if an OEM is planning to use these drives native in windows 7, they would want emulation disabled.  Another OEM may want it enabled.  The result being you don't know what you will end up getting unless your reseller specifically states (and many probably don't even know it matters).

Some user feedback on the F4...

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=59946

It looks like there are two models of the new Samsung F4EG.  There is a HD204UI and HD204UI/Z4.  No one is exactly certain what the difference is, but the current belief is that the Z4 means it is native 4k with no 512k emulation.