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salted hash browns posted:I've been searching for a refurb desktop to power my home server + NAS. Anyone have any recommendations on where to search? The main issue I'm having is finding a desktop that has at least 3 open SATA connectors for disks. The go-to recommendation for a decent pre-built server is the Lenovo TS140. It has 5 SATA ports available although I think it only has mounting points for 3 3.5" drives.
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Megaman posted:Are the 8 SAS2 SAS only? Or can those be SATA as well? Because if not, this board also has only 6 SATA ports. I like SuperMicro boards; they're not cheap, but they're reliable and well supported by just about every server distro you can think of. Almost all of them support ECC. I'd just pick whatever one supports the CPU you want to drop in and any other features you'd like. The HBA on the X10SL7-F is convenient, but price the difference out between it vs some of the others + a M1015 and see which is the better deal. Other than that you can probably get away with the cheapest SuperMicro version, since a lot of the options are intended for heavy use scenarios (4x GigE ports, etc), though I'd suggest one with 4 DIMM slots, rather than 2. Not sure why two FreeNAS boot drives would mean no mouse/kb for you, and you should be managing it via IPMI anyhow (seriously, it's absolutely awesome and once you try it you'll never want to not use IPMI).
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DrDork posted:As GokieKS says, you can pretend they're just normal SATA ports if that's what you want out of them. Perfect, I t hink this is the board for me then, the last question though is what proc I should go with. Do you have any recommendations? I just use this for storage, but I do watch movies off of it. I do nothing crazy like transcoding or anything.
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Megaman posted:Perfect, I t hink this is the board for me then, the last question though is what proc I should go with. Do you have any recommendations? I just use this for storage, but I do watch movies off of it. I do nothing crazy like transcoding or anything. Don't you already have one from your ASRock board? Otherwise, it depends on how much you want to spend and what you want to do with it. Some i3's support ECC, and would be cheap and powerful enough to do basic storage. Xeon's are better if you ever want to consider running ESXi or some other VM-style hosting, and the older ones aren't particularly expensive, albeit they're much more power hungry than newer chips.
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DrDork posted:Don't you already have one from your ASRock board? Otherwise, it depends on how much you want to spend and what you want to do with it. Some i3's support ECC, and would be cheap and powerful enough to do basic storage. Xeon's are better if you ever want to consider running ESXi or some other VM-style hosting, and the older ones aren't particularly expensive, albeit they're much more power hungry than newer chips. The asrock comes with an Intel Avoton C2750 Octa-Core, which is not compatible with the supermicro, no?
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DrDork posted:The HBA on the X10SL7-F is convenient, but price the difference out between it vs some of the others + a M1015 and see which is the better deal. Seems like you really can't find LSI RAID cards pulled from IBM/Dell/etc. servers for as cheap as you used to be able to - unless you get lucky, you're looking at $90+. Add in cost of 2 SAS to SATA forward breakout cables (probably $10 each) compared to the SATA cables that most people already have, and the fact that you free up an extra PCIe slot, and I don't really see the point in not going that route if you know for sure you need that many SATA ports. As for CPU... you can probably get away with an ECC-supporting i3, but... I'd spend the extra bit of money and get a proper Xeon E3v3. If you have access to a Micro Center, they often have those for cheap in addition to the consumer Intel CPUs.
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I'm someone with an i3 on an ASRock board with a SAS controller and 8 drives that's migrating to my old, trusty Xeon E3-1230 Sandy Bridge from early 2011. But it's because I realized that after all the attempts to do consolidation and physical space compaction for a price premium it's hard to sanely cool a tight quarters system with 8 drives and a straightforward fat server (or fat workstation if you almost never restart your desktop) is just plain cost efficient for homes. If you're starting off on a custom NAS setup I'd advocate a TS140 and make sure you have the right number of drive sleds / bays for your expected expansion. I'm looking at eventually grabbing a Powervault MD1000 because hotswap drive bays rule. The Xeons at the Microcenter I had before weren't much cheaper than if I got them from Newegg or Amazon. However, their motherboard + CPU combos with enthusiast CPUs like the 4790k and the mini ITX ASUS board I got made it at least a $120 savings, so that won out over a Xeon for me in the end for a dedicated desktop setup that I didn't run server workloads on.
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My local MC seems to currently have the Xeon E3 1241v3 for $210 compared to $250+ on Newegg and Amazon, which is a not insubstantial ~13% off and also about the same as on their consumer Intel CPUs. Depending on whether Newegg or Amazon charges sale tax in you area that might be smaller, but they are consistently cheaper.
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Krailor posted:The go-to recommendation for a decent pre-built server is the Lenovo TS140. It has 5 SATA ports available although I think it only has mounting points for 3 3.5" drives. Awesome. This looks like the right direction, thanks!
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Megaman posted:The asrock comes with an Intel Avoton C2750 Octa-Core, which is not compatible with the supermicro, no? GokieKS posted:Seems like you really can't find LSI RAID cards pulled from IBM/Dell/etc. servers for as cheap as you used to be able to - unless you get lucky, you're looking at $90+. Add in cost of 2 SAS to SATA forward breakout cables (probably $10 each) compared to the SATA cables that most people already have, and the fact that you free up an extra PCIe slot, and I don't really see the point in not going that route if you know for sure you need that many SATA ports.
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GokieKS posted:As for CPU... you can probably get away with an ECC-supporting i3, but... I'd spend the extra bit of money and get a proper Xeon E3v3. E3 silicon is the same as desktop i7 silicon, but with different fuse bits programmed. i3 is a different die, but only because it's dual core. The ECC controller is almost certainly exactly the same as the E3's. There is nothing but market segmentation games preventing Intel from turning on all the Xeon features on every i3, i5, and i7. If you don't need four cores an ECC capable i3 is a great way to go IMO
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BobHoward posted:E3 silicon is the same as desktop i7 silicon, but with different fuse bits programmed. i3 is a different die, but only because it's dual core. The ECC controller is almost certainly exactly the same as the E3's. I wasn't recommending the Xeon because I think the ECC support being better, but rather the extra cores/performance and VT-d support if he ever decides to make it a multi-purpose box with virtualization. In the end the price difference between an i3 and a low-end E3 is a small enough percentage of the cost of the whole system that I'd rather have the peace of mind that the CPU will be up to the task of anything if the use case changes. DrDork posted:The upside of a physical HBA is the ability to pull it out and plunk it in another server if you ever bother to upgrade. It's true that the M1015 is now usually $90-$100, but there are other ones that'll work just fine for a home server for less, like the Dell PERC H200 or H310 which you can usually find in the $65 range on eBay. They're both based on the LSI 2008, so with a BIOS flash will work just fine with FreeNAS/NAS4Free, etc. Dell PERC cards must've dropped in price recently then - when I bought my M1115, the M1015 were consistently the most expensive since it was the most well known, but the M1115 and the Dell/Lenovo options weren't much cheaper - $80+.
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GokieKS posted:Dell PERC cards must've dropped in price recently then - when I bought my M1115, the M1015 were consistently the most expensive since it was the most well known, but the M1115 and the Dell/Lenovo options weren't much cheaper - $80+.
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I'm curious, haven't bought a hdd controller card in ages, does LSI just own the market at a certain price point? What about Adaptec?
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priznat posted:I'm curious, haven't bought a hdd controller card in ages, does LSI just own the market at a certain price point? What about Adaptec? Recommendation of LSI-based cards are specifically for ZFS and other software-based systems rather than for HDD controllers in general. With ZFS being a software RAID solution, you want the controller to act as a simple HBA (host bust adapter) rather than RAID controller. And LSI 2008-based cards like the IBM M1x15, Dell PERC H200, etc. can be flashed to "IT" firmware that makes them a HBA, and be found cheaply from people who pull them from servers (< $100 vs. $200+ that a proper LSI branded card might go for). GokieKS fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Nov 7, 2015 |
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They also (in their used/refurbed section) manage to be the cheapest option for HBA on hardware that's trustworthy enough to actually store data on. Sure, Syba and others make cheaper RAID cards...but I wouldn't put anything on them that I didn't fully intend to lose at some point.
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priznat posted:I'm curious, haven't bought a hdd controller card in ages, does LSI just own the market at a certain price point? What about Adaptec? I bought my IBM card especially for ZFS support, the flashing of it was a bit weird with an UEFI bios but in the end it worked. The card is running almost a year now and has been rock solid. It has 8 drives hanging off it. If you are looking for a SAS card, IBM/LSI one's are really great.
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Thanks, good infos! LSI's parent co (avago) is my company's main competitor so I feel I should not buy one if possible ![]()
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I got a Dell HBA because M1015 and similar cards all shot up in price to the absurd $100+ mark, and it's been just fine for me. The steps to flash are a tad different than the M1015 but after having used an M1015 and the Dell PERC I had flashed there's really nothing different in the end. I got both of these cards for about $50.
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priznat posted:Thanks, good infos! Hey if it works...... maybe you should tell your company that they are missing sales? WTF is up with Bonzibuddy?
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:WTF is up with Bonzibuddy? Avatar of the year right here.
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So my first 3TB Seagate dropped out of my pool today. It is one of the infamous ST3001 versions. So not trusting the other ones, I've bought a HGST 4 3TB NAS pack...... Crap, there goes money I had not calculated on spending this month.
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:So my first 3TB Seagate dropped out of my pool today. It is one of the infamous ST3001 versions. I lost four out of four of these pieces of shit. Truly our generation's DeathStars. Luckily the three warranty replacements I got have been okay so far.
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Mr Crucial posted:I lost four out of four of these pieces of shit. Truly our generation's DeathStars. Luckily the three warranty replacements I got have been okay so far. Yeah that is what I am afraid off. I just decided to write them off. I heard good things about HGST drives so we'll see.
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H2SO4 posted:Goddammit. Now I'm not sure what to do. It looks like I can control the p410s from ESX just fine, but the LED thing has me a bit worried. However, I don't know if it's the card or the backplane being stupid. I'd rather not drop $300 on more RAID cards just to find out they have the same problem. Agrikk posted:I have two p410 cards running on a Supermicro board. To configure the cards before an OS is installed you'll need to use the "offline Array configuration utility" which is a downloadable CD image. Recently just put together a Supermicro motherboard with one p410, ESXi install, whitebox. I've gotten the hpssacli tool installed and I can use it to get information on the controller, however the controller isn't showing any drives connected. This is my first attempt at a DIY whitebox ESXi so I've got a bit of a hodgepodge of parts. With SAS, I was under the impression that going from SFF-8087 to 4x SFF-8482 (with http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...ailpage_o01_s00) should work. My firmware is currently at 5.70 so I'm going to upgrade to the latest (I believe 6.64a, or something) before swapping the drives out, is this something I can do via the "Offline Array Configuration Utility" or will I have to create a linux boot USB just to do a firmware update? I tried to do a PCI-e passthrough of the controller to a Windows VM but the installer .exe for firmware update that HP supplies erred out on me. Should I just do a bootable windows USB and use the update exe?
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The power supply in my HP N40L seems to have up and died after 3 1/2 years. I pulled it out and with just a basic load PSU tester it does nothing at all. Based on the ridiculous prices for them I went ahead and ordered a 160Watt Pico-PSU and some splitters for the molex connectors. Hopefully that will be sufficient!
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If you could post how this works out, my friend is thinking about doing the same. So after a day of switching drives and resilvering my NAS is now running on three HGST drives. ZFS really is awesome.
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My HDD SMART warning is going off, so I want to replace it. Its just 750g. It's only used for media, so speed isn't a huge concern. Just stability. I've got 2 backups of everything, but this is the main storage in the computer. Would this be a solid choice? Or is there something better reliability wise? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0..._hps_bw_g147_i2
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I have a 4TB Red running XPEnology on a Gen8 Microserver. I don't think anything has changed recently and maybe I just haven't been using it under these circumstances before, although I'm 99% certain I have downloaded while watching since I've gotten Couchpotato notifications during movies, but; I can play 3 movies on 3 different devices. (Plex on Samsung Smart TV, RPi2 running OpenElec and a Sumvision Cyclone 4) Last night I was playing a 1080p film on the RPi2 while another different one was running fine downstairs on the Sumvision but midway through I start downloading something on NZBGet (on the XPEnology Gen8 of course) at about 7-8MB/s and both films start dropping frames like crazy. Anytime I download anything above 3.0MB/s it seems to instantly start dropping frames and returns to normal when I pause the download. The SMART information all comes back OK and the CPU and Disk utilization goes up to about 20-30% during the downloading and playing but drops down to like 5% when it's just playing. Is it too much to expect to be able to play 2-3 movies while downloading on the same drive? I don't know why it suddenly would've become a problem now. The drive is only a few months old although there was an improper shutdown about a week ago.. can't think of anything else that would've changed. The NAS is behind a devolo 1200 HomePlug but the speed are still 200-300mbit, which should be more than enough for streaming 3 movies and downloading even if it isn't ideal.
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deong posted:My HDD SMART warning is going off, so I want to replace it. Its just 750g. It's only used for media, so speed isn't a huge concern. Just stability. I've got 2 backups of everything, but this is the main storage in the computer.
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uhhhhahhhhohahhh posted:Is it too much to expect to be able to play 2-3 movies while downloading on the same drive? I don't know how much RAM you've got in there, but if it's 2GB or whatever the stock setup for a Gen8 is, you might be able to bump that up and smooth things out. Or toss a SSD in there. Or download to a separate drive. Etc.
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DrDork posted:Spinning drives are not a big fan of simultaneous read/write jobs (or simultaneous jobs at all, really), and unless you're seeing a lot of reallocated/bad sectors in the SMART data, it's unlikely that this is new behavior due to a simple improper shutdown. Yeah it's only 2GB but it never got over 30% utilisation. If its only just started happening could it be due to fragmentation? I'm down to only 1.2TB free, 2.37TB used. If I had a separate drive for downloads, wouldn't the same thing happen after post processing when it starts writing it to the storage drive? I'd have done SSD only if they weren't so expensive at large sizes still, hate mechanical disks.
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uhhhhahhhhohahhh posted:Yeah it's only 2GB but it never got over 30% utilisation. If its only just started happening could it be due to fragmentation? I'm down to only 1.2TB free, 2.37TB used. Using a separate drive for torrent downloads helps because torrenting causes the system to make tons of rather small writes as the download progresses, which mechanical drives are not great at. Doing the copy write to the storage drive at the end is less stressful, since it's just one large sequential write. Either way, combining read/write operations on the same spinning disk is asking for shit performance, and there's not a lot you can do about it except, well, not do that by utilizing multiple drives, or at least a SSD cache.
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I'm thinking about building a thing: Silverstone DS380 8-bay hotswap Mini-ITX Case ASRock E3C224D4I-14S board (8-channel LSI 2308 onboard, 3x SFF-8087) Flex ATX power supply Custom Flex ATX to SFX power supply adapter bracket The reasoning behind this build is thusly: Lots of people who want small form-factor NASes are looking at the ASRock Atom boards like the C2750D4I and its 2550-based little brother: ![]() At first glance these look like pretty nice boards: Mini-ITX, Avoton, ECC support, four full-sized DIMM slots and a massive 12 SATA ports. Unfortunately, this board has a major issue. The twelve SATA ports on the D4I boards come from three different controllers. One is the on-package Avoton controller, the other two are consumer-grade Marvells. I'm not a fan of Marvell hardware in general, and the idea of trying to run a large contiguous disk pool across three separate and indeed completely different controllers (the two Marvells are different models) makes very little sense to me, where there is a workable alternative. Enter the alternative: ![]() The ASRock Rack E3C224D4I-14S. An 'Extended-ITX' version of the regular E3C224D4I, this board is longer than the Mini-ITX specification by about an inch and a half, and that space is very profitably filled by including on the board an 8-channel LSI 2308 controller providing 8 SAS ports via two SFF-8087 multilane connectors, in addition to the C224 chipset's four SATA lanes, also available through an SFF-8087 port. At ~$260, this board is a bargain considering that a standalone controller like an M1015 or 9201-8i will run you at least $100 used, $200+ new. Additionally, having the 8 SAS ports onboard saves the single PCIe x8 slot, which I plan on using for a 10GbE NIC at some point in the future, when 10GBASE-T switch prices come down out of the stratosphere. Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this motherboard: It won't fit in the Silverstone case. That extra inch and a half intrudes into the mounting area for the SFX power supply by about an inch, making it impossible to actually mount the board and the power supply in the case at the same time, without some extraordinary measures. Enter extraordinary measures: ![]() I designed this bracket in FreeCAD. It mounts using the standard SFX mounting holes, and to it mounts a Flex-ATX power supply. This lifts the Flex-ATX power supply above the board, providing around 20mm of clearance underneath it where the edge of the board can sit comfortably (I hope). The new power supply stays mostly within the space that would be occupied by the SFX part, meaning that it shouldn't interfere with the PCI slot or any of the board features. The only place where it runs out of that space is in length: a Flex-ATX power supply is about 25mm longer than an SFX, but based on the images I can find it looks like there's a fair bit of unused space in that direction and it shouldn't be an issue. I've sent the bracket design to ProtoCase and am waiting on a quote. It won't be cheap just to buy one of them, but I'm hoping I can find some other people who want to build this system and set up a group buy to bring down the cost. If you're interested in this let me know. e: Skandranon posted:You can probably find a machine shop locally that will do that for you cheaply. Or try a local college that has a machine shop course, they need things to do. I haven't found a machine shop around here that does low-volume fabrication, but I'm still looking. I didn't think about the school angle, I'll look into that one. Thanks. fatman1683 fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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fatman1683 posted:I'm thinking about building a thing: You can probably find a machine shop locally that will do that for you cheaply. Or try a local college that has a machine shop course, they need things to do.
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Yeah, that support lip is the only thing that makes that piece more complex than "cut it out and spend some time on a drill press". However, I think this solution is cool as hell and hope you can make it work.
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What's the lip for? Remove that and it's just a CNCd plate. Alternatively have your hole CNCd out and leave the lip as something that gets folded out of the plate. At the moment it looks like the part needs welding or machining.
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Thanks Ants posted:What's the lip for? Remove that and it's just a CNCd plate. Alternatively have your hole CNCd out and leave the lip as something that gets folded out of the plate. At the moment it looks like the part needs welding or machining. Supporting the weight of the power supply. The case itself has a similar lip. I thought about doing a bend there, but my OCD got the better of me since that edge could not then be recessed like the rest of it. vvv I'm not a MechEng or anything, I don't know if the power supply's weight actually needs that lip to support it, but given how thin the upper section is (to get the maximum separation between the power supply and the board), I was worried about sagging, so I added the lip to allow the lower portion of the bracket to do more of the work. If anyone has actual engineering creds and wants to chime in, I'd really love some informed feedback on that. fatman1683 fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Nov 16, 2015 |
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Thanks Ants posted:What's the lip for? Remove that and it's just a CNCd plate. Alternatively have your hole CNCd out and leave the lip as something that gets folded out of the plate. At the moment it looks like the part needs welding or machining. Yeah, does it need to be as long as it is? If you shortened it a bit, it could just be folded out from the edge of the power supply hole. I'm guessing it's there just to provide a bit of a lip for the PS to rest on / line up with while screwing it in?
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If you need that lip for support I'd say either fold out part from the power supply hole or make a removable bracket that slots in like those stamped slotted sheet metal shelves.![]() ![]()
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