|
fatman1683 posted:vvv I'm not a MechEng or anything, I don't know if the power supply's weight actually needs that lip to support it, but given how thin the upper section is (to get the maximum separation between the power supply and the board), I was worried about sagging, so I added the lip to allow the lower portion of the bracket to do more of the work. You're still going to have a rotational force applying around the point where the lip is, so you won't stop your top edge deforming. To avoid that you really need to support the far end of the PSU on something or suspend it from somewhere.
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2015 21:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 23:25 |
|
|
Might be more cost-effective to just make the base material thicker, but I'm no ME either.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2015 21:24
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:Might be more cost-effective to just make the base material thicker, but I'm no ME either. I specced it out at 16 gauge cold-rolled steel, if that's not enough I can go thicker but I don't know how thick is too thick. e: Just got my quote back from ProtoCase: ~$65 for the bracket in 16ga with the lip, $70 in setup. I think I'm going to order this as a prototype and see how it works. fatman1683 fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Nov 16, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2015 21:26
|
|
|
fatman1683 posted:I specced it out at 16 gauge cold-rolled steel, if that's not enough I can go thicker but I don't know how thick is too thick. It doesn't need to be perfect forever, you'll replace the whole PC well before any significant deformation happens.
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2015 21:37
|
|
|
DrDork posted:Yeah, if you never went much over 30%, fragmentation is unlikely to be an issue. NZBGet just updated and I tried 2 different 1080p .mkvs while downloading at max speed and it didn't drop any frames at all. Who knows?? Maybe there was something iffy in whatever last NZBGet version I was on or it's something to do with the nzbs being downloaded but I thought the articles were broken up in the same way, regardless of content??
|
|
#
?
Nov 16, 2015 22:27
|
|
|
You may have needed to do a lot of repairs with par files and that would warrant some extra CPU cranking away for that. All of these things would be easier to tell what's going on if you had some form of monitoring setup, but that's generally overkill for all but the most psycho of home setups. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of running an ELK and Grafana setup at home so I am a probably psycho crazy person that I am talking about.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 04:20
|
|
|
Mr Shiny Pants posted:If you could post how this works out, my friend is thinking about doing the same. My choice of a Pico-PSU was due to the small size and the lack of a fan. The PSU in the HP Microserver is very small and I think a Flex ATX PSU will fit, but I figured it would be worth upgrading to something that may last longer than 3 years (I hope). I read someone's blog who replaced his Microserver's PSU with a 120 Watt Pico-PSU and it fit under the drive cage. The original PSU is 150 Watts and I have five disks, so I decided to go for the 160 Watt Pico-PSU. I knew that it is physically bigger than the 120, but it was hard to tell how much bigger from the measurements they provide. Unfortunately, it's too big to fit under the drive cage:  Even though it wouldn't fit in the actual ATX connector area, after briefly considering desoldering the atx plug and resoldering it at an angle, I decided to just get an ATX power extension and use it that way. The case has a fair amount of room for extra crap to be shoved in where the PSU used to be. In addition to the 160 Watt Pico-PSU + 192Watt power brick bundle, I got a short Molex Y adapter, two longer Molex Y adapters, a SATA power extension, and an ATX power extension. I don't like to use so many extensions and splitters, but there's no real options with the Pico-PSU since it only comes with one Molex and one SATA power connector. The Microserver needs 4 Molex power connectors for the backplane on the drive cage and then power to whatever you have in the top bay (if anything, I have a fifth HD). So I put the power connector for the external brick through the old PSU area into the back of the Microserver and screwed it in (just halfway but it won't be under much stress):  I put the molex splitters on and tucked them into the previous PSU area. I ran the SATA power through to the 5th bay. I tucked the Pico-PSU into left side where the old PSU's end was:  I managed to keep it all inside the case and clear of the door hinge so despite all of the extra wires it fits neatly in the case. I double checked the connections and then plugged in the 192 Watt transformer in (it's kind of huge) and it fired up with no problem. I'm not too worried about heat in the nest of cables because the system regularly draws very little power. Overspeccing it should keep the components on the Pico-PSU cool but allow it headroom for disk spin up. I'm going to keep checking on it with a non contact thermometer for a while just to be sure nothing's getting too hot but so far the Pico-PSU PCB doesn't seem to have any components over 90' F, which is cooler than the CPU heatsink. The Pico-PSU and transformer were about $80 (they have free shipping on the manufacturer's site if you're buying over $50) and then the extensions and splitters were maybe another $30 (which I got on amazon, mainly due to the fast shipping). It's definitely cheaper than an "official" Microserver PSU but more expensive than a generic Flex ATX one. Whether it is worth spending so much on the Pico-PSU is a question I won't be able to answer until it's successfully run for a few years. I don't have any upgrade plans for the NAS at the moment so we'll see how it goes. I definitely wasn't expecting the original PSU to die so quickly, but at least it didn't damage anything in the system when it did.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 10:44
|
|
|
fatman1683 posted:I'm thinking about building a thing: I know you've already received a ton of suggestions, but $135 for something that simple seems like a big chunk of money. Maybe separating out the large flat piece and the small shelf piece would help. Use the same stock material thickness for both, and in the large parent piece, just cut a slot that the shelf could be pressed into. Create a .001" interference and have them press the shelf into the parent piece. That way the shop isn't having to hog out a ton of material, and it would be a simple water jet, laser or machining operation. That might reduce your costs significantly. I would also make it out of 1/16" or 1/8" aluminum, probably something like 6061 as it's readily available. It's light and strong. Where are you located? If it happens to be in the Seattle area, I might have some suggested shops you could try getting quotes from.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 16:19
|
|
|
No, thats about right for a custom, machined part. American made stuff cost money. Dont you know we are all trying to get rich?
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 16:28
|
|
|
Comatoast posted:No, thats about right for a custom, machined part. American made stuff cost money. Dont you know we are all trying to get rich? Some parts are cheaper than others, and if he can reduce the design to "drill holes here, cut here" it can be done much more cheaply. Hell, if he does it with aluminum he can probably use a hack-saw and do it himself in an hour or two.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 17:00
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:Some parts are cheaper than others, and if he can reduce the design to "drill holes here, cut here" it can be done much more cheaply. Hell, if he does it with aluminum he can probably use a hack-saw and do it himself in an hour or two. Yeah, once you make that a two-dimensional piece you can do that with hand tools and time. Or power tools and less time.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 18:22
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:Some parts are cheaper than others, and if he can reduce the design to "drill holes here, cut here" it can be done much more cheaply. Hell, if he does it with aluminum he can probably use a hack-saw and do it himself in an hour or two. The first version I sent ProtoCase, which didn't have the lip and was specced to 18ga steel, was still over $100. I knew this wasn't going to be cheap going in, and I'm actually pretty happy with the price. On this version I've told ProtoCase that the lip is to be welded, haven't discussed seam vs spot welding yet. I put in the order deposit yesterday and I'm waiting to hear from one of their engineers to help me finalize the design. The case and power supply should arrive this week so I can do some final measurements.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 19:12
|
|
|
I recently decided to do some maintainance on my server, as it needed updates and such - and after that was done, I moved every type of easily-segmented data into its own of folder with compression enabled for where it made sense (documents and such). One (to me, at least) unexpected outcome of this was that my quite-fragmented pool (about 40% according to the space-map fragmentation report (which does apparently not equate to 40% actual fragmentation)) is now at 15% - so one trick you can use if you're downloading linux isos to your zpool is that you can setup a dataset (with recordsize matching the amount of memory caching your torrent client does, optionally) where it your client downloads everything to, then have it move completed stuff to wherever it needs to go. That way you avoid having to use a scratch-disk.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 19:22
|
|
|
IIRC the ZFS fragmentation number is how fragmented the free space is.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 19:42
|
|
|
Rexxed posted:Snip Thanks for this, I will forward your experiences to my friend. Does it make less noise now? That was one the things that really turned me off from my Microserver, the constant humming. My TS140 makes less noise even though it has more moving fans.
|
|
#
?
Nov 17, 2015 20:33
|
|
|
Mr Shiny Pants posted:Thanks for this, I will forward your experiences to my friend. Yeah, it's a lot less noisy. The 120mm fan in the back and the drives are the only moving parts now. I have to get about a foot away to hear the fan, which is just a low wooshy air noise, the drives can be a little bit more audible but only when they're doing stuff. The 40mm fan(s) in the PSU, even though they're fairly slow, were definitely the most audible thing in the system just because they're high pitched.
|
|
#
?
Nov 18, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
I think this is the right thread for this? I just bought all the parts I need for a new system, and I'll be building it on Sunday. Yay! However, it leaves me with a mystery - what to do with my old computer? It's an i5-760, 8gb ram, this motherboard... it streams media over plex just fine, so I realized... NAS? I'm a photographer and media junkie and I'm out of space, so I was probably a few months away from a NAS solution anything. Will this work? Does it have enough power behind it? If so... how do I start? Guitarchitect fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Nov 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 04:04
|
|
|
Guitarchitect posted:I think this is the right thread for this? If you have some money to spare, buy all the RAM (16GB is plenty ) it can hold, some drives to get you the space you need and load up Freenas and you are good to go. If you feel more adventurous, Linux and ZFS on Linux will also do well.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 09:30
|
|
|
So, uh, I just discovered the existence of the Seagate Archive 8tb. If you need lots of room and don't care about random write speed - which I think describes a good chunk of the posters in this thread, and almost all of those in the Backup thread - is there a reason to buy anything else?
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 13:25
|
|
|
They're not well supported on Linux or FreeBSD due to the kernel/filesystems not really having proper handling for them. With a copy on write filesystem (ZFS, for example), you'll start to see serious performance degradation after you've written the drive's total space one time. They're great if you explicitly intend to never write more than 8TB in total to them over the drive's lifetime. Read speed isn't unreasonable on them, just writes.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 14:03
|
|
|
 Seriously? How is that even possible/thought it was a good idea in R&D?
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 18:10
|
|
|
They're meant for stuff that is written once and rarely/never updated. There are plenty of cases where that tradeoff is worth it for the increased storage or decreased price. If you were making a local backup server they'd be a great choice, or even a media server where you planned to never make significant changes to old data (or were willing to accept the poor performance when doing so). For a general purpose NAS, especially one you abuse with workloads like torrenting Linux ISOs which is already awful for ZFS even on faster drives, they're a terrible choice. Also they're not targeted at consumers, generally the people looking at buying them understand the tradeoffs the drives are making to get that density.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 18:27
|
|
|
eightysixed posted:Seriously? How is that even possible/thought it was a good idea in R&D?
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 18:32
|
|
|
Fine. Fair points  Now I'll probably buy one
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 18:40
|
|
|
You could probably use them just fine for torrents as long as you downloaded to a different, temporary drive and only transferred the completed download to the Archive. (Random reads appear fine so seeding shouldn't be an issue.) I don't know if/which torrent clients can automate this process, though. I also wonder if the Smart Response tech in the newest Intel chipsets (basically, turn any SSD into a cache for any HDD) could be effective at turning these into price-unbeatable general purpose drives, with the help of the cheapest SSD you can find.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 19:14
|
|
|
NihilCredo posted:You could probably use them just fine for torrents as long as you downloaded to a different, temporary drive and only transferred the completed download to the Archive. (Random reads appear fine so seeding shouldn't be an issue.) I don't know if/which torrent clients can automate this process, though. Deluge can do that - download to one location and move to another. I keep my incoming on just a single old SATA disk.
|
|
#
?
Nov 20, 2015 19:59
|
|
|
Anyone have knowledge of SATA expansion cards? I've been running a SATA II card in my media server for 4-5 years which has served me well. Recently though it's been bothering me since all my disks are in a Raid 6 and the one on this card is restricted to 3Gbps while the rest are connected at 6GbpS. I think I'd get better performance if it were at 6Gbps so I've started shopping around. I've found the SYBA SI-PEX40071 which seems like a decent option, any suggestions on another to look at? I've currently got the SYBA SY-PEX40008
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 14:56
|
|
|
Ashex posted:Anyone have knowledge of SATA expansion cards? I've been running a SATA II card in my media server for 4-5 years which has served me well. Recently though it's been bothering me since all my disks are in a Raid 6 and the one on this card is restricted to 3Gbps while the rest are connected at 6GbpS. I think I'd get better performance if it were at 6Gbps so I've started shopping around. Are you sure that's your bottleneck? There's a decent chance you are more limited by your parity calculations.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 19:04
|
|
|
Ashex posted:Anyone have knowledge of SATA expansion cards? I've been running a SATA II card in my media server for 4-5 years which has served me well. Recently though it's been bothering me since all my disks are in a Raid 6 and the one on this card is restricted to 3Gbps while the rest are connected at 6GbpS. I think I'd get better performance if it were at 6Gbps so I've started shopping around. Remember that 3Gbps is still ~375MB/s, so unless you're using all SSDs, that's not going to be the bottleneck.
|
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2015 22:45
|
|
|
Skandranon posted:Are you sure that's your bottleneck? There's a decent chance you are more limited by your parity calculations. Not at all just a suspicion. What would limit the parity calculations? Ashex fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Nov 22, 2015 |
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 03:16
|
|
|
Whatever's providing the parity. If it's hardware RAID, the card. If it's software RAID, the CPU. Checksumming data is a hell of a drug.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 03:55
|
|
|
It could very well be the SATA controller, just not because it's a SATA 3Gbps one instead of 6Gbps. Cheap adapter cards are not something that's really designed for software RAID, and I certainly wouldn't trust using one instead of a proper HBA.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 06:17
|
|
|
GokieKS posted:It could very well be the SATA controller, just not because it's a SATA 3Gbps one instead of 6Gbps. Cheap adapter cards are not something that's really designed for software RAID, and I certainly wouldn't trust using one instead of a proper HBA. I doubt the card is doing anything but providing the SATA port, cheap cards don't even try to offer RAID6. Assuming you are doing some version of software RAID6, it is your CPU combined with the speeds of the remaining drives that is the main bottleneck. To do the parity, it has to compute 2 different parity pieces and then write all 6 (4 data 2 parity) to disk.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
Mr Shiny Pants posted:If you have some money to spare, buy all the RAM (16GB is plenty ) it can hold, some drives to get you the space you need and load up Freenas and you are good to go. Hm - I doubt I could even get RAM for this motherboard anymore. After seeing how small NASes are in a computer store, I have to say, it's hard to rationalize holding onto this obnoxiously loud mini tower! I'm going to pull out the graphics card to see if I can make it quieter, but I have to say, all those little 2-bay NASes are quite attractive. If I want a NAS where I can archive photography jobs (as a mirrored backup), and store (and stream via Plex) media, what should I be looking at? Bonus points if I can run bit torrent on it and have it act as my plex server! This is all a bit theoretical since my mini tower will have space for 6 3.5" drives... but it'd be nice to not have my computer on all the time and still be able to watch media/play music and have things downloading!
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2015 02:02
|
|
|
Guitarchitect posted:Hm - I doubt I could even get RAM for this motherboard anymore. Throw six drives in a Node 304 case with an SSD and you've got a pretty quiet setup. Mine works really well for me:  I've swapped the fan for a Noctua NF-A14, hanging drive for a ssd, and the sata cables were recently changed to 20cm ones.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2015 07:54
|
|
|
If this is the wrong spot, sorry. This is the closest I've seen to a dedicated HDD thread, like how there's one for SSDs. I've got a hodgepodge JBOD setup for home storage made up of several old 500GB and 1TB HDDs that I'm looking to consolidate into a single or pair of drive(s). What should I be looking for in a drive? The data would be updated a lot and read a lot, but I'm talking things like video. Most of the drives I have now were cheap WD Greens in an enclosure I found for dirt cheap, so I really don't have an idea of good HDDs or prices.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2015 22:22
|
|
|
PerrineClostermann posted:If this is the wrong spot, sorry. This is the closest I've seen to a dedicated HDD thread, like how there's one for SSDs. What OS are you running? I would recommend stepping up to WD Reds, they're like WD Green but tuned specifically for NAS purposes. How much data are you looking at storing and how much growth do you expect?
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2015 22:53
|
|
|
Ashex posted:What OS are you running? I would recommend stepping up to WD Reds, they're like WD Green but tuned specifically for NAS purposes. How much data are you looking at storing and how much growth do you expect? Right now the whole setup is on my personal computer running Windows 8.1. If my WD External was functioning properly, I'd have 9TB of space in total, but the damned thing has been in a half-dead state for the last two years. Taking into account probable duplication across a few drives out of sheer laziness, I probably have a total of 4-5 TB of data, about half of which would be on the old drives I'd want to replace. Over the last year it seems like I've grown my data by 2TB-ish. I'm currently working with 750GB of free space across it all. 2x 500gb 2x 1TB 2x 2TB That, combined with a pair of SSDs, means I'm stuck working with several drives permanently in enclosures. I'm not sure what the 500 GBs are, I used them in previous computers. The 1TB+ drives are WD Greens and seem to work fine for my purposes. How fast is network storage compared to native? HDDs don't get absurdly fast so I imagine it wouldn't be too big of a difference.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2015 23:21
|
|
|
PerrineClostermann posted:Right now the whole setup is on my personal computer running Windows 8.1. If my WD External was functioning properly, I'd have 9TB of space in total, but the damned thing has been in a half-dead state for the last two years. Taking into account probable duplication across a few drives out of sheer laziness, I probably have a total of 4-5 TB of data, about half of which would be on the old drives I'd want to replace. Over the last year it seems like I've grown my data by 2TB-ish. I'm currently working with 750GB of free space across it all. Well, you could easily form a mirror of 2x4tb drives (4tb total space, tolerate 1 drive failure), there are some good Black Friday sales for them all over. If you want to anticipate some growth, you could do a simple 3x4tb RAID5 array (8tb total space, tolerate 1 drive failure). The RAID5 will be slower than mirrored, though if you really want speed you should use SSDs for your scratch space and the large drives for archival purposes. Setting up that split will probably make your life a lot easier.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2015 00:11
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 23:25 |
|
|
Skandranon posted:Well, you could easily form a mirror of 2x4tb drives (4tb total space, tolerate 1 drive failure), there are some good Black Friday sales for them all over. If you want to anticipate some growth, you could do a simple 3x4tb RAID5 array (8tb total space, tolerate 1 drive failure). The RAID5 will be slower than mirrored, though if you really want speed you should use SSDs for your scratch space and the large drives for archival purposes. Setting up that split will probably make your life a lot easier. I'd recommend RAID6 with 4TB disks, basically anything over 2TB should be on that level to avoid screwing yourself with failures. With RAID6 you'd need 4x4TB for 8TB total space which tolerates 2 drive failures (simultaneous). The trade-off is reduced performance compared to raid 5 but for me the extra disk is worth it. As for performance with a NAS, your bottleneck will be network bandwidth. For LAN upgrade to gigabit, for wireless make sure you're on N with at least a 400Mbps router.
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2015 00:34
|
|