Media Server #3

L

lone wolf

Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2003
Messages
705
I have been working on getting all of my media from 8 different pc's onto one pc and pretty much have it completed. I had a Areca 1210 running Raid 5 across 4 2tb HDD. then I had 4 2tb JBOD in the same box. I had ran out of room on that Raid set so I just bought 3 3tb Seagates and moved all items over to that.

So now I have 4 spare hard drives in my posssession. I'm thinking of using my spare Areca 1222 with 8 ports and do another Raid 5 set. Would it be a good thing to do this or just leave everthing on the 3 3tb drives with no Raid? My biggest thing is my music (6tb and growing, over 10k CD's) and now my movies (913) as of today.

If you can suggest a better SATA 3 controller that would be awesome, as my Areca is only 3gb/s whilst my drives are all 6gb/s

What would be the best route to go? This is just too much to start over with.

System is a AMD Phenom II X6 1075 @ 3ghz
motherboard - Asus M4A88 t-v EVO
8gb Ram @1333
Coolermaster 690 II Case
3 - 3tb HDD
8 - 2tb HDD
1 120gb SSD
Antec earthwatts 750 PSU

According to the Kill A Watt its idling at 154 watts. is that still too much?

Any advice on something a little better and less of a power hog is greatly appreciated!
 
Does the Phenom have that Cool'n'Quiet option in the BIOS? I find that saves some power and a lot of heat. I'm assuming it has no video card?
 
raid 6 for 2T drives or larger

3gb or 6gb wont matter for SATA drivers, SSD yes, SATA drives no.
 
I could not find a quiet and cool option in the bios.

so I should raid the hard drives in Raid 6? would that be the best way to go?
 
Or look into setting up snapshot raid with either snapraid or flexraid, if the data in your collection doesn't change much.
 
I have no idea about the power draw of your RAID card, but I'd think that the CPU and PSU are likely drawing some extra power.

This system will idle at 54W, hits 108W on bootup. Win7 on "power save" mode.
Asus M4A785-M
undervolted Sempron 140 unlocked to dual core 4400e (same power usage with 1 or 2 cores)
2x2GB RAM
FSP Arnium (SP?) 400W Gold power supply
1 - 2.5" OS drive
5 - 2TB Samsung drives
No DVD burner

In a comparison using only one 2.5" hard drive 2 sticks of RAM same FSP 400W PSU
Undervolted AMD 5000 and Gigabyte 780 board 40W idle, max on boot 78W
Undervolted Sempron 4400e and Asus M4A785-M 35W idle, max on boot 48W
Slightly undervolted B45 Phenom (unlocked 445) and Asus M4A785-M idle 43W, max on boot 77W
undervolted Intel i3-550 and Gigabyte H55M-S2H board idle 31W, max on boot 58W
Intel i3-2100 and Intel DH61WW board idle 18W, max on boot 48W :)

The last system has the most processing power and uses the least power at idle. Unfortunately it only has 4 SATA ports.

The FSP PSU saves about 8W over older Seasonic 330W units, 3W idle less than a newer Seasonic 300W Bronze on the i3-2100 with one drive.

Current server to be replaced Q6600 and Asus P5E HDMI (?), I think it uses a Corsair 430W PSU, 2 WD Black 1TB and 2 Green 750GB WD idles at 85W. WHS v1 OS, current uptime is 61 days, usually gets rebooted about twice a year, been in service since May 2009 as SageTV server.
 
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raid 6 just gives you 2 drive failure, if you have have one die the rebuld can be prtty intense on the drives and if your using standard desktop drives it could cause another to fail.
 
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