Setting up a file server, need equipment/raid help

Blue Fox said:
Why would you need molex --> SATA adapters? The backplane in the case takes 10 molex connectors. You don't even need the HX620. I would get a 450VX (or 550VX) instead mainly because it is single rail. You'll overload the HX620 with more than about a dozen drives, so stick with single rail power supplies. In my experience, you'll need about 1.4A per drive on the 12v line for them to spin-up if you don't use staggered startup.
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This is why I am double checking everything :p. I have switched and changed parts and ideas more times than I'd like to admit in the past 2 days. I guess I was thinking that the HDD's were still going to be powered via SATA power cable as opposed to the backplane.

Another question is if I decide to add another 4 - 8 drives over the next year is this still the same PSU that you'd recommend? Sorry for not mentioning that earlier. And as far as the staggered startup how many drives do you need to have before you need to move to this?

Thanks again to everyone that has helped so far :).
 
i love mymovie with HTPC client on VMC and addin on my WHS.

i have close to 300 dvds on it with folder duplication on my movies :)
 
Danny Bui said:
Considering that the Norco case has room for 21 drives and since you are probably planning to use all 21 drives, just go with a larger PSU now like the Corsair 750TX or PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750.

@ Bluefox
The Corsair 620HX is a single rail PSU. The multiple rail listing is false and was a mistake that was too costly to fix, according to Corsair's rep here on the forum.
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Ah, well, it is still overkill. I was able to run a Q6600 at 3.6ghz, an HD4850, water cooling, and 22 hard drives off my 610w PC P&C power supply, so the 450VX or 550VX would be plenty. If you are desperate for modular, there is the 520HX too (safe to say that newegg incorrectly lists it as multi-rail too?).
 
Blue Fox said:
Ah, well, it is still overkill. I was able to run a Q6600 at 3.6ghz, an HD4850, water cooling, and 22 hard drives off my 610w PC P&C power supply, so the 450VX or 550VX would be plenty. If you are desperate for modular, there is the 520HX too (safe to say that newegg incorrectly lists it as multi-rail too?).
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Yup, the 520HX is also a single rail design

Anyway, 450VX for 22 hard drives? Too close for comfort for me. I still don't think either of those 750W PSUs are overkill. I'd err on the side of caution for this. With those 750W PSUs he'll be close to optimal efficiency, temperature and quiet range of those PSUs. If you're wondering WTF I'm talking about, just quoting this guy here:
Paul_Johnson said:
4) Power supplies last longer if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

5) power supplies are quieter if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.

6) Power supplies are cooler if you stay in the 40% to 60% range of their output.
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Well, with my E2180, 22 drives, and a Matrox video card, I was pulling ~300w at the wall.
 
Blue Fox said:
Well, with my E2180, 22 drives, and a Matrox video card, I was pulling ~300w at the wall.
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Using a Kill-A-Watt or UPS? Because Kill-A-Watts, UPS and other power reading devices aren't that accurate:
Paul_Johnson said:
Yes and a quick search would turn up this topic a million times over. Here is the recap:

1) APFC can fool Kill-A-Watts into giving you abnormally low readings (some times giving better than 100% efficiency)

2) Power supplies derate with temperature anywhere from 2w/c above a nominal rated at value to 10w/c.

3) Kill-A-Watt's and most power meters sample too slowly to catch transient loads (the Transient load from our tests is 117w and is COMPLETELY missed by Kill-A-Watts).

The power meters in UPS software are just as bad. You have to spend some change before you get anywhere near an accurate power meter when your PSU has APFC.
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I run a 750w PCP&P Silencer in my MediaServer
You might could get away with less but I err on the side of caution.
 
Norco RPC-4020 server case
PSU*
Abit IC7-G
P4 2.8C
1GB Corsair XMS PC3200
(1) 1TB WD green HDD (OS)
(8) 1TB WD green (storage)
Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (SATA x 8 card)
LITE-ON Slim 8X DVD Burner
Microsoft Windows Home Server
Click to expand...

this is a great thread and i must admit that im slighlty jealous of the op's build (thinks i need more storage space) however considering the amount of money your investing would it not possibly be an idea to remove the hot and power hungry p4 and replace it with a 7300 or something similar in a p35 epu board? should only run you and extra $150 dollars or so_Or even an intel ATOM maybe?

also would it not be better to run a wd black as the os drive so th eos can run on a faster drive (only speculation as i ponder my build)
 
How do you control staggered spinup in this system? I know my raid controller does that in my systems but without such a controller I am guessing that all of them will start spinning up on system power up. Until I told the raid controllers to use staggered spinup it was causing my power supply to turn back off about two seconds after I switched the system on, and that was with a 700 watt supply.
 
A typical and modern HDD is 20W (PEAK) on spinnup. The seagates are a bit higher ( 2amps). Therefore 20 drives * 25W = 500W max a startup on the 12V rail. If you go with WD's, it would only be 400W.

jcolby...you left out a lot of information on your system. Right now it is like saying "I put my keys in my car and it didn't work. How did you get yours to work?"
 
jcolby said:
How do you control staggered spinup in this system? I know my raid controller does that in my systems but without such a controller I am guessing that all of them will start spinning up on system power up. Until I told the raid controllers to use staggered spinup it was causing my power supply to turn back off about two seconds after I switched the system on, and that was with a 700 watt supply.
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You probably had a multi-rail power supply. I had the same problem at one point. Your power supply may provide enough amps on the 12V rails, but all the molex/SATA connectors share the same rail and you can't use any of the others. I haven't seen any other way to do staggered startup other than a RAID card. Doesn't really need to be included in the BIOS because most boards don't have support for more than 10 drives (highest I've seen is 12 SATA connectors).
Trepidati0n said:
A typical and modern HDD is 20W (PEAK) on spinnup. The seagates are a bit higher ( 2amps). Therefore 20 drives * 25W = 500W max a startup on the 12V rail. If you go with WD's, it would only be 400W.

jcolby...you left out a lot of information on your system. Right now it is like saying "I put my keys in my car and it didn't work. How did you get yours to work?"
Click to expand...
When I tested my Seagate 7200.10s, they took ~1.35A on the 12V rail to spin up.
 
Sorry. AMD motherboard, low end quad core, low end ATI video. Thermaltake toughpower 700W power supply. This is a SQL Server machine.

I was successfully running an 8 disk array with old Seagate dot10 320s on an Areca 1220. I was not using staggered spinup at that time.

I was upgrading the system and put a second raid controller in (a Promise) and started adding 4 newer Seagate dot10 500g drives. I could get up to 3 of them to run but when I added the 4th the system would shut down. I tried turning on staggered spinup in the Areca, though I left it on the lowest setting (.75 seconds I think). IIRC for some reason (I don't remember the details) I did not set staggered spinup on the Promise controller.

I eventually mounted a second power supply in it and ran the extra drives off that second supply.

I have just recently replaced the two controllers with a single 16 port Areca, set the spinup to 2.5 seconds and am back to using that single power supply. I credit the ability to use the single supply to increasing the staggered spinup time, but I have no definitive proof of that.

I eventually pulled the 8 dot10 320s and replaced that with 6 new Western Digital WD6400AAKS, so I am now running (4) 500g Seagates and (6) 640g drives. I believe the 500s have the same current specs as the older 300g drives had, but the newer 640s use less power IIRC.

None of which has anything to do with my question, which is... if he is going to run (eventually) 20 drives, how will he control staggered spinup? That is a lot of disks to try to start all at once. I can't say it won't work on any given PS, I am just saying that I had problems with fewer (but older) drives until I used staggered spinup.
 
That Thermaltake Toughpower has four 12V rails...

I have a Seasonic 550W with two 12V rails in mine, but reviews and OCP tests show the rails aren't actually enforced.
 
Blue Fox,

It was a multi-rail supply. I assumed (we all know what THAT means!) that since each rail was specced at ~18 amps, I could distribute the disks across all of the connectors coming out of the supply (which I did) and it would work (it didn't). I still don't understand how you can have X 12v rails and have all of the molex connectors come off of a single rail. Seems pretty stupid to me!!!

But that is EXACTLY the answer I got from Thermaltake when I asked them. They told me that the PS was designed to drive power sucking video cards, not disk drives. It just never occurred to me that the cables feeding the disk drives wouldn't be distributed across the rails, that just seems like an obvious thing to do.

I ended up just throwing in a second power supply. However once I increased the staggered spinup rate to 2.5 seconds, the single supply worked just fine.
 
I am sorry but I would never use WHS just like I would never use software raid10 or raid10 in general. You lose too much space and you can be screwed if the wrong two drives fail. I feel that raid6 is much safer than raid10 since you have parity to work with where as you will get corruption if the still living drive in a raid10 rebuild has unreadable sectors, etc...

With a small number of drives (maybe 8 or 10) it might make sense to go WHS vs buying an expensive raid controller (for some) but in a 20 drive array WHS doesn't make sense to me.

The biggest/foremost reason I would never use WHS is simply because its MS. I am sorry but I don't like MS OS's nor the NTFS filesystem. 80% of the systems at my house run linux and the only time I ever use windows (once or twice in a month) is to play a game that doesn't run on linux. I feel that windows does not belong if you plan to use the system as a server.

Hell, my system isn't even a 'server' considering its mainly just for my own use and I play games/watch media/etc on the same system that my raid array is on. I do have a samba server so others at my house or my family can access my machine but for the most part 99% of its use is just mine and done locally.

I have never lost data due to a stupid mistake (formatting, deleting files, etc... IE: user error) and don't think I will in the future. The only thing I could think of that would cause me to lose data is the raid controller screwing up and corrupting the array. I am not too worried about losing data due to a drive failure since there are two sets of parity which should help with read erorrs during a rebuild.

Sure raid is not a backup like so many have said but considering I have only lost data (allbeit a small amount) when drives have started to fail. Considering the fact that raid should prevent that issue I don't foresee myself losing data on this array so raid is good enough for me!

Also the performance with a hardware raid controller will always be better than WHS. This doesn't matter to some people but I like the fact that when doing checksum/hashes of my files on my array I am CPU limited where as WHS would be disk limited and go 1/4th of the speed.
 
i think the best part of WHS isnt the folder duplication but rather the ability to easily expand the size of the volume and the ability to have automatic backup and an easy restore process
 
Adidas4275 said:
i think the best part of WHS isnt the folder duplication but rather the ability to easily expand the size of the volume and the ability to have automatic backup and an easy restore process
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And you dont have to worry about RAID controller corruption, or a failed rebuild.
Also speed doesnt really matter because unlike your environment where the 99% of the data is used locally, this is going to be a server accessed over the network so essentially that becomes the bottleneck.
 
Well it's coming down to the end of this thread... almost* :p.

I have my finger on the Submit Order button at NewEgg's site and am going to throw out the final build list

Need to buy = -------
Already own = -------

*Norco RPC-4020 server case - (Currently out of stock :(, called and was told a few will be back in stock in about 3 - 5 days)
PC Power & Cooling Silencer S75CF 750watt PSU (Got it for $70 after MIR on NewEgg :D)
Abit IC7-G
P4 2.8C
1GB Corsair XMS PC3200
(1) 1TB drive (OS)
(8) 1TB drives (storage)
Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 (SATA x 8 card)
LITE-ON Slim 8X DVD Burner
Microsoft Windows Home Server
Slimline SATA Cable

I am switching back and forth between different HDD models though. I was initially looking at WD 1TB green drives but seeing that they are 5400rpm drives I thought that I might be better off switching to 7200rpm solutions.

I have narrowed it down to either:
Samsungs HD103UJ for $99.99 w/ 3yr warranty
or
WD's WD1001FALS (Black) for $119.99 w/ 5yr warranty

So I'm a bit torn.

Any input?
 
Sounds like a good setup. I have no experience with those WD's, but the Samsung's are known for running quiet/cool. They're also cheaper so that's a win/win. Less warranty, sure, but in 3 years you may have outgrown them and replaced them with 3TB drives anyways. :-D
 
Yakyb said:
this is a great thread and i must admit that im slighlty jealous of the op's build (thinks i need more storage space) however considering the amount of money your investing would it not possibly be an idea to remove the hot and power hungry p4 and replace it with a 7300 or something similar in a p35 epu board? should only run you and extra $150 dollars or so_Or even an intel ATOM maybe?
Click to expand...

If he is doing that he may as well go for a 45W AMD Dual Core, they go as low as $40 and as high as $63 for the best one(BOXED). Low power requirements, and with the price of DDR2, he could go for a whole CPU+MOBO+8GB RAM for under $220. I have had my newegg shopping cart with this setup for a few days, just can't quite work up to pressing buy(I have no need of the upgrade, my 939 setup is just fine as a fileserver, just tempted so I can run Untangle in a VM).

It really only becomes expensive if he wants PCI-X on his motherboard. Difficult to find non-Opteron/Xeon motherboards anymore that offer PCI-X.
 
For right now I am going to stick with the P4 system simply because I already own it and the IC7-G board and matched chip/ram are 100% rock solid and have been since they were first paired back in '03 :p. I may very well do an upgrade when I upgrade my desktop next year and do a shift of power from one unit to the next :p.
 
The only other note on differences between the Samsung and WD black drives is that the WD drives require less power to run whether it be idle/load/sleep then when compared to the Samsung drives.
 
I run WD green drives with no issues, speed isn't a big deal with WHS. This isn't a RAID 5 array on a $1000 controller. Low operating costs are a plus.
 
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