Ready for some HD upgrades after 10 years running UnRaid


Recommended Posts

4 hours ago, SSD said:

Crunch and fold? Can you elaborate a little?

 

 

I believe he is referring to "crunching numbers" as in computational math, and "folding" like Fold@home for finding the cure for cancer.  i may be wrong, but thats my guess.  i mean what else are you going to do with 144 cpus?  

Link to comment
10 hours ago, HK-Steve said:

Have been looking at gear today to replace my outdated rigs..

 

Intel S2600CP2J Motherboard Dual E5-2670 SR0KX 64GB PC3-12800R @600USD seems a good deal.

http://natex.us/intel-s2600cp2j-motherboard-dual-e5-2670-sr0kx-64gb-pc3-12800r/

Anyone used such a board combination??

 

More to come, am looking at an i7 setup to compare at the moment

 

 

I have this board in an intel chassis for my main server.  the onboard raid controller is just a crap LSI (i read its a software emulated raid controller??).  get a dedicated raid controller.  

ive had an intel 1156 server, then to a dell poweredge t610, then onto this board with 2x2630L.  by far the most quiet setup ive ever had.  one thing to note though, if you get it with a intel chassis like i did, the fans may ramp up to max and stay that way.  simply power down the whole thing and remove power from both PSU's.  start it up again and it will go back to being quiet (if you set it up that way in the bios).  also goes without saying, update the bios to the latest.  i noticed weird behavior on it on earlier bios revisions.  intel boards are really strange now having to update through their efi command shell, but the scripts work well enough to make it less of a hassle.  the intel management application is pretty cool too if you have snmp alerts set up on your network. 

 

i have yet to try unraid with it so i dont know how well it plays with that.  

Link to comment
4 hours ago, charleslam said:

 

 

I believe he is referring to "crunching numbers" as in computational math, and "folding" like Fold@home for finding the cure for cancer.  i may be wrong, but thats my guess.  i mean what else are you going to do with 144 cpus?  

Correct, Folding@home and many other projects using Boinc, all trying to find cures

Link to comment
4 hours ago, charleslam said:

 

 

I have this board in an intel chassis for my main server.  the onboard raid controller is just a crap LSI (i read its a software emulated raid controller??).  get a dedicated raid controller.  

ive had an intel 1156 server, then to a dell poweredge t610, then onto this board with 2x2630L.  by far the most quiet setup ive ever had.  one thing to note though, if you get it with a intel chassis like i did, the fans may ramp up to max and stay that way.  simply power down the whole thing and remove power from both PSU's.  start it up again and it will go back to being quiet (if you set it up that way in the bios).  also goes without saying, update the bios to the latest.  i noticed weird behavior on it on earlier bios revisions.  intel boards are really strange now having to update through their efi command shell, but the scripts work well enough to make it less of a hassle.  the intel management application is pretty cool too if you have snmp alerts set up on your network. 

 

i have yet to try unraid with it so i dont know how well it plays with that.  

Thanks for your experience with this board and the advice on small issues.

 

Much appreciated

Link to comment

Found a good deal on the following.

 

Intel Core i7 i7-6700K (4 x 4.0 GHz) Processor

16 GB DDR4 2400 MHz (2x 8 GB)

ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming ATX Mainboard

 

I could not find any bad news with any of these, Unless someone has other comments, I will move forward on Monday and start building.

 

Thanks

Steve

Link to comment
12 hours ago, charleslam said:

how many VM's you looking at doing with this one?

 

I currently run no Dockers or VM's, Do not really plan to, as I know zero about VM's at the moment. I know what they are though...

I really do not plan to at all, but maybe the Plex Docker later.

 

But I have a HP Server running Plex Server currently.

 

Thanks

Steve

Link to comment

Hard to spec a server with no clear requirements. Suggest you think about plans for next couple years. I didn't really plan to, but recently implemented my regular workstation as a VM on my unRAID server, and love it. Others use unRAID to replace a media server. If you'd like to do both, you'd need ability to have two VMs each passing through video. My server only supports one - so if I could, I'd prefer to be able to have two passthroughs. Know the possible and then know what you'd like your server to be able to do, and use that as your requirements. If you find one of your requirements is driving you out of your price range, you can reassess if that is really a need worth the investment.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, HK-Steve said:

Question about dual parity drives, What is the advantage disadvantage??

single parity allows you to recover from one drive failure, dual allows you to recover from two e.g. two fail at the same time, or one fails and 2nd fails while first is being rebuilt.

 

I think the consensus on the forum is that if you have more than 10 drives, dual parity is a must.  Or, you could take your chances and if you've never or rarely have two drives fail at the same time (I've only had two 'fail' at the same time and that was when I built my unraid server and actually did some rigourous drive testing, was moving drives around and had one drive I already knew was dodgy) then single parity should be sufficient.

Link to comment
34 minutes ago, DZMM said:

single parity allows you to recover from one drive failure, dual allows you to recover from two e.g. two fail at the same time, or one fails and 2nd fails while first is being rebuilt.

 

I think the consensus on the forum is that if you have more than 10 drives, dual parity is a must.  Or, you could take your chances and if you've never or rarely have two drives fail at the same time (I've only had two 'fail' at the same time and that was when I built my unraid server and actually did some rigourous drive testing, was moving drives around and had one drive I already knew was dodgy) then single parity should be sufficient.

 

Thanks DZMM,

As I am building a brand new tower to replace a Tower with failing hard drives after 10 years running.. I am leaning now to 2x parity drives now.

 

Much appreciated..

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Dual parity is a subject in and of itself, but my first recommendation is to build with at least 8TB drives - I feel it is easier to manage a smaller number of large drives.  If you still wind up with a lot of drives then dual parity is worth discussing.

 

Thanks tdallen,

I am using 8Tb drives, will be 14 minimum or more later, but only 6 data plus a parity to start with.

Then build the Tower bigger as funds allow.

 

So should I start with dual parity? or this is something I can do later as I add more drives in the next stage of adding disks??

 

Thanks again.

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, HK-Steve said:

 

Thanks tdallen,

I am using 8Tb drives, will be 14 minimum or more later, but only 6 data plus a parity to start with.

Then build the Tower bigger as funds allow.

 

So should I start with dual parity? or this is something I can do later as I add more drives in the next stage of adding disks??

 

Thanks again.

Personally, with so many old drives in your system I think you should go dual parity to start with.  A 8TB seems to go for £160/$200 - how long would it take you to recover from two of your drives failing?   More than a day's worth of hassle at least - I'm sure a day of your time is worth more than that.  In the future as you replace the 2TBs and have fewer, newer drives in your system then single would be a safer option and you could move the second parity to the array.

 

It's all about personal choice and risk levels.  e.g. I've been using single parity for just over a year with a 5 disk array.  Just this week I installed a 8TB parity (why my interest was piqued by this thread) and increased my array to 6 disks.   Only one of my drives is older than 15 months (5 years old like yours) and it's the only one I'm expecting to die, so I've been getting by with single parity.  However, I think next year when I add my next couple of drives I think I'll go dual as the chances of a dual failure (more drives and existing drives getting older) will increase and I don't want to waste my 'valuable' time trying to recover data.

Link to comment
10 minutes ago, DZMM said:

Personally, with so many old drives in your system I think you should go dual parity to start with.  A 8TB seems to go for £160/$200 - how long would it take you to recover from two of your drives failing?   More than a day's worth of hassle at least - I'm sure a day of your time is worth more than that.  In the future as you replace the 2TBs and have fewer, newer drives in your system then single would be a safer option and you could move the second parity to the array.

 

It's all about personal choice and risk levels.  e.g. I've been using single parity for just over a year with a 5 disk array.  Just this week I installed a 8TB parity (why my interest was piqued by this thread) and increased my array to 6 disks.   Only one of my drives is older than 15 months (5 years old like yours) and it's the only one I'm expecting to die, so I've been getting by with single parity.  However, I think next year when I add my next couple of drives I think I'll go dual as the chances of a dual failure (more drives and existing drives getting older) will increase and I don't want to waste my 'valuable' time trying to recover data.

 

Sorry, I should have said, I am building a brand new Tower with 8Tb drives. So starting fresh, then copy everything from my Tower1 which is slowly dying...

 

Most of my Tower1 hard drives have a run time of over 5 years, 10 years since the first build... Yeah, I pound my Towers very hard every day..

 

Appreciate your experience and advice, Dual parity here I come...

Cheers

Link to comment

Hey Guy's,

Finished building and got running my Tower3 now. The new Tower.

I have the following so far, with a LSI SAS 9211-8i on the way to me. 

 

6x WD Red 8Tb hard drives all on the motherboard for now.

Intel Core i7 i7-6700K (4 x 4.0 GHz) Processor

16 GB DDR4 2400 MHz (2x 8 GB)

ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming ATX Mainboard.

Runs really nicely. Nice and fast... yay..

 

I have a WD Blue 500Gb SSD ready for cache later.

 

Currently I am copying my Tower2 data to Tower3. Will take a few days..xD

Once Tower2 is empty, I want to convert to XPS.

Then copy data off Tower1 which is the failing tower, to Tower2.

 

What is the best practice to do this? as the data is already copied. 

Can I just change the files system type of each drive and it will convert??

 

I read through the wiki on the conversion, but wanted to be sure I understood it properly.

 

Much appreciated.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, tdallen said:

Changing the format of a drive is destructive - all data on it will be wiped out.  But yes, it is easy - steps 5,6,7 or 17 and 18 in the Wiki show you two steps (stop the array, change the format, start the array, Format).

 

Perfect, confirmed what I thought. Thanks.

 

All data has been copied so I am good to go once finished copying.

 

Much appreciated..again..:D

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.