Project: Galaxy 4.0

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I don't think that CMOS battery would/could interfere with your SATA card. It's profile is well below that of the PCI slot. I'd be a little more worried about the NB fan cable and connector interfering with the first PCI slot.
EDIT: Ah, didn't catch the fact that the card(s) have the longer connector.

And I agree that the cheaper hardware is definitely a good move. There's really no need to go for server-grade hardware here.

 
Thanks guys.


I just ordered the board and controller from ewiz. I will order the 4th controller once I can assess the situation with these 3.

I'm actually excited :) I'm excited to free up a board + video card in the process too (I will also be using a lower powered passively cooled video card, so theres a little savings on the power and noise).
 
Ockie said:
Now I am facing the decision to go with 4 8 porters or buy one 8 porter and 1 4 porter and do what my buddy suggests. I think I should buy one 8 porter now and do a trial fitting, if it looks to be too risky or too much work, then I'll go with the 4 porter route.
Click to expand...
Great call on that one - if the 8 port fits then it's business as usual, if not, you save money on the 4th controller with nearly zero drawbacks. You can't lose - it's almost like you planned this all along or something.

I know what you can do with the $600 you save - go out and buy the new Koolance water cooled 1200W PSU! Then report back on how noisy it is.
 
It's too bad they don't make 5-in-3 bays with a port multiplier integrated. It'd really let them be more mainstream items; as it is they take too many cables. For really big projects, SAS expanders are already out there, but I want to see this stuff filter down to the consumer level. Even if the enclosures are $200 instead of $120, the simplification in cabling it'd allow would be pretty amazing. Think of using six ports instead of 30 for your box :D

How are the current enclosures working out? Are they quiet enough for your tastes, and do they keep the drives cool?
 
Nicepants42 said:
You can't lose - it's almost like you planned this all along or something.
Click to expand...

Well you know, my bag is full of surprises ;)

unhappy_mage said:
It's too bad they don't make 5-in-3 bays with a port multiplier integrated. It'd really let them be more mainstream items; as it is they take too many cables. For really big projects, SAS expanders are already out there, but I want to see this stuff filter down to the consumer level. Even if the enclosures are $200 instead of $120, the simplification in cabling it'd allow would be pretty amazing. Think of using six ports instead of 30 for your box :D
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They do make them, they are multilane boxes, however they are usually for OEM integrators and they tend to sell them with the rackmount cases. But yes, I'd die to have them instead of 30 multiple cables. The only problem with the multlane cables are that they only hold 4 drives, so you need to cut down on the drive capacity.... but still a much better approach.

I tried hunting anything using multilane down but I had no luck, only breakout cables as you so described are available.

unhappy_mage said:
How are the current enclosures working out? Are they quiet enough for your tastes, and do they keep the drives cool?
Click to expand...

They are puuuuuurrrrfect. They are quiet, not as super silent as I wished (I still need to do the fan swap) but they are doing an excellent job in cooling and from driving me up the wall. The supermicro cages I had before was insane.

The nice thing about these cages are that they make several variants of them, 1 drive, 3 drive, 4 drive, and 5 drive. What makes it so nice is that that 3,4,5 drive units are interchangeable... meaning that my desktop (which has 2 x 3in2's) can easily swap drives with the server.
 
Ockie said:
They do make them, they are multilane boxes, however they are usually for OEM integrators and they tend to sell them with the rackmount cases. But yes, I'd die to have them instead of 30 multiple cables. The only problem with the multlane cables are that they only hold 4 drives, so you need to cut down on the drive capacity.... but still a much better approach.

I tried hunting anything using multilane down but I had no luck, only breakout cables as you so described are available.
Click to expand...

Is the only manufacturer of multi-lane connectors Highpoint? They are the only one's I've seen on Newegg (granted, they don't have everything, but it sure seems like they have everything).
 
protias said:
Is the only manufacturer of multi-lane connectors Highpoint? They are the only one's I've seen on Newegg (granted, they don't have everything, but it sure seems like they have everything).
Click to expand...

Many of the large vendors produce multilane products. Highpoint just happens to be the lowest priced one, usually they are $600 and up.
 
Ockie said:
They do make them, they are multilane boxes, however they are usually for OEM integrators and they tend to sell them with the rackmount cases. But yes, I'd die to have them instead of 30 multiple cables. The only problem with the multlane cables are that they only hold 4 drives, so you need to cut down on the drive capacity.... but still a much better approach.

I tried hunting anything using multilane down but I had no luck, only breakout cables as you so described are available.
Click to expand...

Well, multilane would be okay, but what I'd rather have is this grafted onto whichever 5-in-3 maker gets there first. That way it's not a multilane cable (those are expensive, compared to standard sata cables, and the extra bandwidth isn't needed for home users) and it holds 5 drives instead of 4. $200 would be an entirely reasonable price for that box, I think. Currently 5-in-3s are ~$120, and one can buy 1-to-5 port multipliers for $80, so given that you need to include way fewer sata cables with such a box (1 instead of 6 that one gets by buying the two devices separately), you need to make a smaller number of PCBs (one instead of two, albeit more complicated), and it's one integrated device. That'd be a deal maker device if someone released it - I'll take four, please :D
 
unhappy_mage said:
Well, multilane would be okay, but what I'd rather have is this grafted onto whichever 5-in-3 maker gets there first. That way it's not a multilane cable (those are expensive, compared to standard sata cables, and the extra bandwidth isn't needed for home users) and it holds 5 drives instead of 4. $200 would be an entirely reasonable price for that box, I think. Currently 5-in-3s are ~$120, and one can buy 1-to-5 port multipliers for $80, so given that you need to include way fewer sata cables with such a box (1 instead of 6 that one gets by buying the two devices separately), you need to make a smaller number of PCBs (one instead of two, albeit more complicated), and it's one integrated device. That'd be a deal maker device if someone released it - I'll take four, please :D
Click to expand...

That would be perfect in this case, they could just make a module unit that plugs into the back of the unit... kinda like a vampire passthrough.

Only thing is I believe you have to choose a raid option (unless if you use JBOD), but the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages.. in my case I wouldn't even need a SATA controller... I would have enough for the motherboards headers alone!
 
I am sure you will be pleased with the board. IT runs nice and solid just doesn't like running memory at 1t. Also being that you don't like noise you may want to look into switching out the chipset cooler.
 
Cpt Twitchy said:
I am sure you will be pleased with the board. IT runs nice and solid just doesn't like running memory at 1t. Also being that you don't like noise you may want to look into switching out the chipset cooler.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is one thing that caught my attention. I think I will replace the chipset cooler :) Thanks for the recomendation :)
 
unhappy_mage said:
Well, multilane would be okay, but what I'd rather have is this grafted onto whichever 5-in-3 maker gets there first. That way it's not a multilane cable (those are expensive, compared to standard sata cables, and the extra bandwidth isn't needed for home users) and it holds 5 drives instead of 4. $200 would be an entirely reasonable price for that box, I think. Currently 5-in-3s are ~$120, and one can buy 1-to-5 port multipliers for $80, so given that you need to include way fewer sata cables with such a box (1 instead of 6 that one gets by buying the two devices separately), you need to make a smaller number of PCBs (one instead of two, albeit more complicated), and it's one integrated device. That'd be a deal maker device if someone released it - I'll take four, please :D
Click to expand...

hot shit nice find!
 
Just another Update:

The motherboard and controller arrived. Everything is working as expected, however, due to the cross platform upgrade, I had numerous errors and problems with video, drivers, and components... it was the previous installation interfering with this current board, even though I removed all the drivers, cleaned the system it started acting all weird and flaky, crashed and locked up. So I had to reformat. Lucky for me I already backed up the old data before doing this move. Good news is that this thing is now up and stable and runs like a tank. Perfect install *knocks on wood*.

Bad thing, I have to reset all the permissions for all the drives!! :eek: Oh well, this is what I enjoy doing :cool:


Anyways, and the really great news to top the day off for me was the fact that the CMOS battery CLEARS the drive controllers!! This is awesome, about a 2mm clearance too, so no modifications needs to be done. With this said, I ordered the last controller this morning.

Also, with this additional controllers, I could run the rest of the wiring and do some wire cleanup, and man does it look seksy now...



Time for me to shut up and let the pictures commence...


They arrived!


This board comes with the coolest Neoprene zipped sleeve for all the accessories... cool beans (I'm a sucker for little neat accessories):


Controller fits!!!


2mm or less clearance... awesome... no modification needed:








Top Down Showing clearance for the other cards:


Board Profile:


Board is IN!!!


How's that for 30 drive wire management? And it's not done yet (still a some more cleaning up to do)
 
Ockie said:
Bad thing, I have to reset all the permissions for all the drives!! :eek: Oh well, this is what I enjoy doing :cool:
Click to expand...
It would be a whole lot easier if you just RAIDed it :p I'm just jesting you ;)

Ockie said:
Anyways, and the really great news to top the day off for me was the fact that the CMOS battery CLEARS the drive controllers!! This is awesome, about a 2mm clearance too, so no modifications needs to be done. With this said, I ordered the last controller this morning.

Also, with this additional controllers, I could run the rest of the wiring and do some wire cleanup, and man does it look seksy now...



Time for me to shut up and let the pictures commence...


They arrived!
MG]http://img252.imageshack.us/img252/9355/dsc05581af2.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

This board comes with the coolest Neoprene zipped sleeve for all the accessories... cool beans (I'm a sucker for little neat accessories):
MG]http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/2286/dsc05582rn8.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Controller fits!!!
IMG]http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/9176/dsc05571vr9.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

2mm or less clearance... awesome... no modification needed:
IMG]http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/2200/dsc05572ph2.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

IMG]http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/830/dsc05574jc0.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

IMG]http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/4187/dsc05576ox6.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

IMG]http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/3922/dsc05578pn5.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Top Down Showing clearance for the other cards:
IMG]http://img154.imageshack.us/img154/6711/dsc05577py9.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Board Profile:
IMG]http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/5831/dsc05573cx3.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

Board is IN!!!
IMG]http://img178.imageshack.us/img178/4633/dsc05586mu5.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

How's that for 30 drive wire management? And it's not done yet (still a some more cleaning up to do)
MG]http://img247.imageshack.us/img247/2213/dsc05587hx9.jpg[/IMG][/URL]
Click to expand...
Wire management is pretty damn good for 30 drives :eek: :)

Also, I don't recall if you said what kind of hard drive controllers you are using. :confused:
 
protias said:
Wire management is pretty damn good for 30 drives :eek: :)

Also, I don't recall if you said what kind of hard drive controllers you are using. :confused:
Click to expand...

Thanks.

If you looked at the pictures, you will see it's a Supermicro card SAT2-MV8 ;) It's a very generic SATAII controller, it doesn't have a BIOS and is non bootable... so it's just a controller.
 
That's pretty sexy indeed.

Just how many TB of data storage do you have in your house?
 
Ockie said:
Thanks.

If you looked at the pictures, you will see it's a Supermicro card SAT2-MV8 ;) It's a very generic SATAII controller, it doesn't have a BIOS and is non bootable... so it's just a controller.
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I'm booting off of mine... >.>

They are nice generic controllers though.
 
rogue_jedi said:
I'm booting off of mine... >.>

They are nice generic controllers though.
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Which revision do you have? The older revisions do not have this ability.


Here is a comment I found about the old revision: "Note: This device lacks a bootable ROM. An additional bootable device is required to start your system.". Interestingly enough, I did notice that this new controller does have an extra boot check features during startup, so this is probably part of the whole new revision. Physically this latest controller I got has a small physical diffrence too from the other two (the SATA ports have a plastic housing around them, the older revision did not)... this was a PITA with latching cables as the new housing does not support latching cables....grrr.
 
lspci says this:

0000:01:02.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09)
0000:01:03.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09)

I'm not sure what the revision # written on the card is, the box they're in is a little buried ;)

But yeah, mine have a BIOS rom on them. They recognize drives at startup.
 
rogue_jedi said:
lspci says this:

0000:01:02.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09)
0000:01:03.0 SCSI storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV88SX6081 8-port SATA II PCI-X Controller (rev 09)

I'm not sure what the revision # written on the card is, the box they're in is a little buried ;)

But yeah, mine have a BIOS rom on them. They recognize drives at startup.
Click to expand...

Yeah only the new one does this on mine, so must be a new feature. I could really care less for the feature, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have it.
 
Tip for people reading the thread:

Go to userscripts.org and get the script "Endless VBulletin Forum Pages"......very handy :)

there's one for phpBB, too :)
 
Ockie, those sata dumb controllers interest me, could you run HDTach on one and post the results....Nice looking cabling, love your machine as always...
 
gjvrieze said:
Ockie, those sata dumb controllers interest me, could you run HDTach on one and post the results....Nice looking cabling, love your machine as always...
Click to expand...

They perform exactly how you'd expect from any sata 2.0 controller. No difference in seek time, ~280MB/s burst, STRs as fast as the disk in question goes. Sun uses the same chipset in their 4500s. What did you expect to discover from HDTach?
 
I was curious; the 32bit pci bus must become highly saturated with 8 drives moving 70MB/sec.....
 
LightningCrash said:
Tip for people reading the thread:

Go to userscripts.org and get the script "Endless VBulletin Forum Pages"......very handy :)

there's one for phpBB, too :)
Click to expand...

Hmm this is cool, thanks for the tip!

gjvrieze said:
Ockie, those sata dumb controllers interest me, could you run HDTach on one and post the results....Nice looking cabling, love your machine as always...
Click to expand...

I could if you really wanted to. Just FYI, these controllers are the exact same as the Highpoint 1820A controllers but without the raid functions. They perform the same and even have the same PCB layout and chip.

Nicepants42 said:
Glad to see that battery isn't getting in the way, Ockie. Cables look very under control.
Click to expand...

Cables will be more under control when I am done with it :)

gjvrieze said:
I was curious; the 32bit pci bus must become highly saturated with 8 drives moving 70MB/sec.....
Click to expand...

Well it can only saturate as far as the gigabit ethernet can go. I'm sure if I'm pulling a lot more data at once from it I would be able to completely saturate it... however, everything is limited to the gigabit ethernet speed.
 
Ockie, how much power does this thing consume? If you had to upgrade the power in your house, where would you turn? I ask because I have 1 system (500W, but probably only using half of that) and it is stressing the electrical box in my parents 30 year old house :(
 
if you really think that, then you must have some f'ed up wiring, i have a 1000watt ups with a server, some networking equip, my desktop with 6 drives, external cdrom/hdd, w/ my webcam server/laptop , 32" tv, dual 19" graphics crt's and a 5.1 surround sound system running of a 20amp'r never pops, barely if ever warm to the touch
 
protias said:
Ockie, how much power does this thing consume? If you had to upgrade the power in your house, where would you turn? I ask because I have 1 system (500W, but probably only using half of that) and it is stressing the electrical box in my parents 30 year old house :(
Click to expand...

I think it's because your home is older and probably more than a few outlets are shared on the same circuits.

Personally, I prefer to wire my computer room with each outlet being a dedicated circuit, that solves a lot of problems. I have in the past cut straight to 20amp circuits too, you know, for future sake :)

If you have problems that are so sensitive, i suggest perhaps hiring an electrician to come out and check out your wiring, perhaps run a new circuit to your room to solve that issue.... I know it would drive me nuts.


As for the power consumption, I have no idea, I used to have a Kill-A-Watt meter a few years ago but I gave it away to another forum user so they can do a review for me on some computing possibilities.... which never ended up happening :( Anyways, i need to get another one.
 
heh, for future upgrades.... So when is Galaxy 5.0 coming out? :p

Anyway, I did some testing, the 1 machine having problems was turned off and I had 3 other machines running on another outlet in my room, no buzz. So it is either the PSU, power jack, or power line to my room. I have a new PSU, so more testing will come soon. Just thought I'd update here. Can a PSU cause some kind of feedback to the electrical box? :confused:
 
protias said:
heh, for future upgrades.... So when is Galaxy 5.0 coming out? :p

Anyway, I did some testing, the 1 machine having problems was turned off and I had 3 other machines running on another outlet in my room, no buzz. So it is either the PSU, power jack, or power line to my room. I have a new PSU, so more testing will come soon. Just thought I'd update here. Can a PSU cause some kind of feedback to the electrical box? :confused:
Click to expand...

A PSU can trip a breaker if that is what you are asking.


Galaxy 5 is a long ways away as of right now, I simply have plenty of physical space that I can expand to, and with the 1tb drives coming out, hard for me to reason of a physical capacity upgrade :) this box with tb drives can hold 30tb's :eek:
 
I measure my power consumption on my UPS, it gives me a wattage meter. I have the server with 11hdds, 2 19in Samsung LCDs, and a Logitech Wireless combo on it and working the cpu to max, and writing/reading to all the drives, i am pulling 315w, this on a PC Power & Cooling Silence 750w with 83% efficiency. Ockie's Seasonic S12s are supposed to be pretty good on power too....
 
gjvrieze said:
I measure my power consumption on my UPS, it gives me a wattage meter. I have the server with 11hdds, 2 19in Samsung LCDs, and a Logitech Wireless combo on it and working the cpu to max, and writing/reading to all the drives, i am pulling 315w, this on a PC Power & Cooling Silence 750w with 83% efficiency. Ockie's Seasonic S12s are supposed to be pretty good on power too....
Click to expand...

Yeah, they are incredible PSU's, I'm sold on them for sure. They have good efficiency and they are silent...litterally. I'm very happy with these PSU's.


I will be taking final pictures most probably this weekend, so stay tuned.
 
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