Widescreen Gaming Forum

Custom built?. It isn't horribly expensive. Could have any physical arrangement. Use bigger fans for higher CFM with lower DB perhaps 140mm or more if you can get em.

I'm trying to avoid buying gear to replace some I've already got lying around with no use.

I've got an antec P180, Thermaltake Tsunami Dream, Antec Performance 1080 or something, an old p2 box in the corner and a lian li PC-S80. I've got at least 5 motherboards not in use, 4 with cpus/ram, 1 without.

Main problem is with 8-10 drives, the cases I have, even if they have the space for em, I'm doubtful if they can keep em cool enough.

I've calculated 500, 750, 1tb and 1.5tb options. For the hdds best bang for buck are the 500 and I get to use strong pata connectors that don't need me to use caddys or bays to protect em.

Even if I went with tb sata drives cooling would still pose a problem, before I bought a NAS, I already had the 4 drives for it. I put those in the Tsunami and the single intake fan didn't bring enough air, it was too obstructed.

Options I've taken note of so far:
- P180 or PC-S80 or Tsunami
- coolermaster 4in3 module for 4 hdd in 3 5 1/4 bays.
- P180 4 hdd in it's lower section with case 120mm 35mm deep fan.
PC-S80 4 hdd next to boot drive, 2x 120 intake in front of em, low flow most likely not enough.
Tsunami 4 hdd next to boot, single 120mm intake, proven not enough with previous 4 sata in same spot.

- boot drive
P180 laptop 160gb in a silverstone 3.5in to 2.5in dock.
PC-S80 old 100gb WD in first of 5 lower spots.
Tsunami either of the above in 1 of 5 hdd spots or floppy bay.

- opteron165,4gb ddr a8nsli (in P180)
or
- xp3200+,1gb ddr,a7n8x (in PC-S80)

- 2x promise TX2 ide pci controllers with 2 ports/4 channels each
or
- 1 highpoint rocketraid 4 ports/8 channels.

The controller choice is because I'd use windows based raid so I can make a 4tb server. The highpoint has max of 2tb per array and I don't know if it can act as a simple controller without raid and let me use 8 drives from it in a windows array.

If I keep using my existing motherboard/cpu/ram options, I can use the 2 TX2 with 2 pci slots.

However, I wanted to reduce the power/heat by fetching an atom 330 board with a stick of 1-2gb ddr2, it only has 1 pci slot so the highpoint is required to work for it to be useful.

Of course if I do that and the highpoint works, my 2 existing cpu/ram/mobo combos go to the clutter pile.

I'd also like to avoid buying new fans because I already have a pile of 120mm, from 110cfm silverstone to 30cfm silenx.

If I am to buy more new parts I've looked at:
- coolermaster centurion 590
- 2x 4in3 modules to convert all 9 5 1/4 bays as 12 3 1/2 hdd bays.
- atom 330 intel mobo
- 1x 2gb ddr-667
- 80gb PATA WD boot drive
- 8x 500gb PATA WD or 4x WD caviar black 1tb with kingwin aluminum tray/caddies.

I've spent just about all of today searching parts and cart is at 3000$ total atm. I won't be checking out until I've trimmed down options.

Sorry for ranting but I'd like to get this done :).

I've gone over the 3 cases again and seems the tsunami is still the best option, it even beats a new centurion 590 in spots available.
P180:
4 hdd in 3 5 1/4 bays
1 optical or 2 hhd in 4th bay
4 hdd native lower section
2 hdd native mid section
1 floppy/hdd with dock
13 hdd total.

PC-S80:
4 hdd in 3 5 1/4 bays, if it fits.
1 optical or 2 hhd in 4th bay if my 2 hdd per bay adapters fit.
5 hdd native lower section
11 hdd total, advantage here is the native spots have heatsinks for 5 drives. and sound dampening if I use tb+40mm fan/trays.

Tsunami:
4 hdd in 3 5 1/4 bays
1 optical or 2 hhd in 4th bay if my 2 hdd per bay adapters fit.
5 hdd native lower section
2 hdd in floppy/builtin section, less cooling, 1 boot drive should be fine here though.
13 total, advantage is aluminum case, disadvantage is single intake/exhaust.

The P180 is a (censored) to run cables in, even with the low count of a regular system, I'd have a hard time wiring all these drives in it, even if only need to do it once.

The PC-S80 is a real nice case and I originally got it for a gaming pc with sound dampening, turned out undoable unless I mod the native hdd bays out of the way for video cards.

The Tsunami was a gaming rig, replaced by P180 then CM690 first for cooling then tired of hard cable routing. Still a nice case, and would be a waste of vinyl decals I placed on it's side and sound dampening I installed.

Well, right now at least seems I've removed the get new case aspect, provided a bit more work to use an existing one.

Quick, moderately unrelated question.

Can FreeNAS work actively as a NAS using two separate networking cards talking to two different systems?

Yes, you can install as many network cards as you want and assign them all to different network addresses.

_________________
Current build: Intel i5-4670k | 32GB DDR3 | RAID0 2x250GB 850EVOs | nVidia GTX980Ti (MSI G1 Gaming Edition) | SoundBlaster Zx | Dell 2405FPW (Landscape, primary) & HP w2338h (Portrait)

[quote]Quick, moderately unrelated question.

Can FreeNAS work actively as a NAS using two separate networking cards talking to two different systems?

Yes, you can install as many network cards as you want and assign them all to different network addresses.Thank you very much :)

Linux doesn't perform well with single connection, gigabit speeds. You have to tune up the kernel

Suggestions:
http://bornl33t.net/node/4

As far as storage go: I've got plenty of storage experience and my problem is that the PSU is a drive killer. http://bornl33t.net/node/8 http://bornl33t.net/node/9

Using the infiniband cables is really nice, but you could do it with Mini-SAS too

another gotcha is don't get a Marvell-chipset based card if you do end up using linux and the drivers aren't stable.

[quote][quote]Quick, moderately unrelated question.

Can FreeNAS work actively as a NAS using two separate networking cards talking to two different systems?

Yes, you can install as many network cards as you want and assign them all to different network addresses.Thank you very much :)

this won't work as expected though as the routing table will prefer,arp, and transmit on only one nic. you would be better off using the "bonding' driver to make an aggrate NIC. This won't give you 2Gb/s on a single connection, but it will allow you to do 2 full speed 1Gb/s to seperate hosts

Which is what I am assuming you were worried about anyway.

this won't work as expected though as the routing table will prefer,arp, and transmit on only one nic. you would be better off using the "bonding' driver to make an aggrate NIC. This won't give you 2Gb/s on a single connection, but it will allow you to do 2 full speed 1Gb/s to seperate hosts

Which is what I am assuming you were worried about anyway.

Basically.

[quote][quote][quote]Quick, moderately unrelated question.

Can FreeNAS work actively as a NAS using two separate networking cards talking to two different systems?

Yes, you can install as many network cards as you want and assign them all to different network addresses.Thank you very much :)

this won't work as expected though as the routing table will prefer,arp, and transmit on only one nic. you would be better off using the "bonding' driver to make an aggrate NIC. This won't give you 2Gb/s on a single connection, but it will allow you to do 2 full speed 1Gb/s to seperate hosts

Which is what I am assuming you were worried about anyway.

You can get "bonding" drivers for FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD) quite easily I assume, I mean it's a ripoff of BSD, but it's OpenSource like linux so there's got to be support for this tactic somewhere. Also, you can use iptables to masquerade your second nic's output to appear as if it's coming from the first nic, and have i would assume an internal connection proxy to multiplex the connection out. This'll give you the desired 2GB/s out, but only 1GB/s in. (Both cards will be out, 1 masquerading as the other so everything reaching the destination is accepted as if it's from 1 host nic, but only 1 card will be in.) It's complicated, yes, but the end result is worth it I assume.

_________________
Current build: Intel i5-4670k | 32GB DDR3 | RAID0 2x250GB 850EVOs | nVidia GTX980Ti (MSI G1 Gaming Edition) | SoundBlaster Zx | Dell 2405FPW (Landscape, primary) & HP w2338h (Portrait)

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bonding

For a great explination for bonding and the different modes, if the switch supports it, LACP is the way to go, otherwise, RR or Transmit Balancing are the way to go. Using IPtables would be an "expensive move", and I think you'll like the bonding driver for the simplicity of it.

I'm a linux guy and don't dabble in the BSD world much, but I'd assume they have a driver similar to this one.

Manually bringing up the link


But most start-up scripts support automatically configuration so you don't have to do this.

The biggest difference if that bonding is layer2 and Iptables is layer2/3 with a heavy processing engine.[/code]

Hey, I think I lost something, anyone seen the thread topic around? can't seem to find it in this page.