Widescreen Gaming Forum

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

Sorry Mesh.

In my experience, the drives live longer when in an external enclosure. Because when you need to maintenance the server, you aren't spinning the drives up and down. The only problem I've had is with the current brand of enclosures I have....but that is another matter.

The external case for the drives provide excellent cooling, and keeps the overall server temperature down. Below is a printout from my Intel 3065 w/4G of RAM and 3.41 TB of usable storage. Power is another concern that all the attempts before at a cheap storage array have failed me. In typical situations (like when not doing anything) you are fine, but when you start copying files, starting up stuff, performing blah, the voltages are going to fluctuate. Usually it isn't horrible, but it depends on the efficiency of your PSU and at what % load it becomes efficient. Then you have to find one that isn't just 60A +5V because you really need +12V for drives. It is much easier to just have two PSU's @ 500W and a lower efficiency because they are easier to come by and there are mods like this that would allow you to place both PSU's into a single case.

Storage:




Temperature of the server

I've seen those 'use 2 psu as one' deals before, even those 5 1/4 bay gpu psus. I've never trusted either because my electrical instincts tell me one way or another 1 of the 2 will at some point try to 'charge' the other and cause major damage.

External enclosures are nice, when they work. None I've had so far have, performance is (censored), heavily dependant on the chipset, especially usb versions. And esata is about as stable as a mammoth sanding on 1 leg on the edge of the grand canyon.

Now, I'm past the buying stage, I'm currently in the built stage.

Case will have 1 120mm per 4 drives, the mobo is an atom 330 board with ~50w max.

I'm trying to see if a 350W phantom would work, gonna temp it with my 620w corsair while I wait for the power adapters show up and see startup and max loads on 5v and 12v rails.

Both psus are about highest efficiency there is atm so I'm pretty sure the 350w would suffice given that there's no high end gpu to drain everything.

Total is about 200w shared on the 5+12v lines which fit the total watt and total amps on the phantoms rails. Mobo+boot drive shouldn't be enough to overload it. No optical which is a plus in power concerns.

Oh and external cases with sata multiplier lanes and etc. were one of the option I looked at before. I gave up however given that the total cost would have been more than I could spend to build a 10tb+ rig using 1.5tb drives. And using fast spinning loud fans to boot.

Ah, I should have mentioned that I'm using an infiniband/esata setup. So it's line speed with direct onboard sata. I get 60-99MB/s on a raid-resync.

I hate to blow y'all outta the water, but... YOUR DOING IT WRONG.

I have an 8 drive enclosure (I'll borrow the neighbor's camera and take photos) with a 500w supply (these are actually dirt cheap, $40), loaded to the brim.

RAID JBOD configs on both controllers:
250+250+400+500
250+250+400+500

Each resulting in a 1.27TB formatted usable space, on FW800 controllers.

If you're going to build... do it right. Buy an enclosure power supply, there's no cabling for motherboards on it, just drive molex connections. Then Go to IOI Technology, and get some of their FW800-to-Whatever controllers, and a $40 FW800 controller card for your PC. Done. I'm using a pair of IOI's FW800-to-Dual-ATA133 (FW-IDE02) adapters chained together, then linked to my computer, with 8 removable drive cages. The only issue is I'm using Visduh, and it shoots external transfer speeds in the head. So yeah... I might be looking to sell this should the event come that none of the Vista patches (minus SP1 which breaks my computer even more) fix my FW transfer speeds, then I'll be looking to sell the enclosure and controller card.

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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)

Figured I'd bump my thread to ask for help.
I built the server using:
Centurion 590 case + 2 4in3 modules
8x WD 500gb hard drives
1x WD 80gb boot drive
Intel Atom 330 motherboard
Highpoint rocketraid 454 pci controller.
Vista x64

80gb boot is off the motherboard controller, 8 500gb on the 454.

I've thoroughly tested drives with WD diagnostic with full test (~2h per drive). Same with ram with memtest. Both from a boot cd I had with a bunch of tools.

The problem I'm having is that as soon as I try to use the drive: make a partition etc. Windows is unable to shutdown, it just shuts off the monitor and sticks there, fans running and everything.

If I force a power off, it then blocks off at the boot logo anim, doesn't freeze, just never ends (even after 8h+ left it to boot and went to work).

Now, as long as I install and don't format/partition the drives, it can shutdown just fine. I'm at a loss why making a partition, even on just 2 of the 8 drives would halt it's shutdown and boot capacity though.

I've already reinstalled the OS 3 times, always block at the same point, I've updated bios and drivers to no avail.

I don't think it's a defective hardware part since problems start only after partitionning but my return window is closing shortly, if they let me return anything at all, seeing as hardware seems fine.

In case the pci controller did something odd when making the partitions I even tried putting 2 on the onboard controller (boot moved to SATA with an adapter I have), making the partitions there (raid 0 with 2x500gb dynamic disks). Shutdown, plug em into the 454 instead. Boot fine, but not shutdown.

Any insight someone might have on what the problem is would be appreciated.

Interesting

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115016 gave it 3/5
what is the powersupply in the computer? It could be a voltage problem, those drives pull a lot of amps

I've tried both a corsair HX620 and once I knew it took about 220w peak on boot, I put it on the 350w antec phantom I wanted to use for the build.

I've calculated the max amps on 5v and 12v and as far as I can tell either of these power supplys is more than enough.

I don't think it's a power issue since i should have problems at any time during the use of the rig, not just at shutdown and especially not only if I make partitions on the drives.

It shutdowns fine if everything is plugged in but no partitions are made to drives on the 454.

Good point, I must not have been thinking well...

Don't worry about it, I'm just just at the end of my wits with this, I gave up for a few days since I simply don't see any solution to this. I've tried all I could think of short of trying the card in another rig, but I don't want to screw up another rig I'll need to reinstall either.

Just curious, but does it exhibit the same behavior with linux or BSD? If not, it's not the controller or the drives, but some type of systems management or driver issue.

At least this would send you (or us) investigating in the right direction. A live CD would suffice.