ubern00b
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Posts posted by ubern00b
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*wave* me again
Just wanted to check if you think this is a safe buy or not? Seems quite cheap considering it is the same card as the LSI branded one. I assume you would just crossflash this with the LSI firmware and you would have an LSI card for half the price?
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Yea I have been looking at some other solutions, trying to keet the m-ITX and low power CPU thing going and of course, the cheaper the better. It really doesn't need anything fancy at all but it seems to get an 8 lane or 16 lane PCI-E slot you have to go up quite a few models. I really liked the idea of an AMD AM1 solution, under £100 for RAM/CPU/Mobo, quad core 2.2GHZ, 8GB RAM and all under 25W. The chipset just doesn't support more than 4 PCI-E lanes though, so I need to look at another platform, or take the chance. Decisions decisions
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Soooo, everywhere I turn I get more obstacles in my path. Do you have any experience of running the LSI 9211-8i in a 4 lane PCI-E slot? The motherboards I am looking at have 16x physical slots but only support 4 lanes. The LSI card is an 8 lane card. In the GPU world it just means you have less bandwidth but I don't want to go down the route of buying all the gear just to find the card doesn't detect or is unstable.
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see post 4 - several to choose from - 6th one down is where i got mine using the link
Was in a rush yesterday, wasn't thinking. Thank you very much. I think this is the route I shall go down. Thank you both for your help, I very much look forward to getting this all up and running
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I would stay well clear of the SYBA card they are awful cards - tried a couple 8 port and 4 port - windows/linux etc could not see them
i would add a little more and get the LSI card from china for £55 (take a couple of weeks to arrive) and buy two good quality SAS cables and run all your 8 bays of the the LSI
As its an HBA it will present all 8 drives to the os - out of the box
Do you have a model number for that card by chance?
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From the looks of it, the eSATA ports are controlled by the Intel chipset.
Sorry, that means no PM functionality.
That said, if you're not using the PCI-e slot, you could install a card that does.
That would require you to use the HDMI or DisplayPort connectors on the system for video.
As for USB, yea, we don't really recommend it for long term storage. it isn't 100% stable/reliable for doing so.
That said, you absolutely can use it. And many have, without any issues.
As for the IcyBox enclosure, I couldn't really comment, but it looks decent. Not really overwhelming good reviews for it, so YMMV.
For some reason I had it in my head (even though I quoted the manufacturers site/specs for my board) that I Have 1 x PCI-E x16 and 1 x PCI-E x4 slot on my mobo, which I don't! I have a GTX970 in the slot so that ends that. I really should pay more attention.
i think you may be missing the obvious that IcyBox must have a port mulitpier in their box to present the disks to the host machine - or you have to raid them to present one "disk" to the host - doubt its that though
But there is another basic way you could set this up
get a sas hba like the LSI 9211-8i - run the cables to the existing box you have the disks in and power them from the old psu or get power extension cables as well - so your old pc box is just an enclosure
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-LSI-Internal-SAS-SATA-9211-8i-6Gbps-8-Ports-HBA-PCI-E-RAID-Controller-Card- i got 2 of these and they are new cards
plus a couple of long forward breakout cables and you are sorted with the benefit of more bandwidth etc
I may be missing the obvious for sure! I was not aware the PM could exist in the enclosure, I thought the port/chipset had to be aware. The box I quoted definitely doesn't present one "disk" to the host as there is another "RAID" model that does this and this is not what I was looking at doing. I have relied on hardware RAID in various forms before and I don't like being "tied-in". I like the methodology of unRAID/Drivepool where by if you lose data on 1 (or 2 etc) disk(s) you don't lose the entire array. I plan to just dump a dir listing to a text file of each drive and in the event I lose any I can simply find the data I lost again.
So, I can either get the Icybox and give it a whirl and hope for the best, or I can still go down the original route I had planned which was to build a new NAS. Something I put together months ago so the prices will have changed but you'll get the general idea:
Case: Silverstone DS380B 8 Bay NAS Chassis (£116.51)PSU: Silverstone Strider SST-ST30SF SFX Series - 300 Watt '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply (£41.99)Motherboard: ASRock AM1B-ITX (£31.51)Processor: AMD APU Athlon 5350 Quad Core Processor (£31.89)CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Alpine M1 (£5.35)RAM: Team Group Elite Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (£29.99)SATA Card: Syba SATA III 4 Port PCI-e 2.0 x2 Card with Low Profile Bracket (£33.79)Total: £265So, not really far off the cost of the Icybox anyway and probably a better all round solution? -
And then during my research I discover a post like this. Not a good endorsement of eSata lol. Kind of answers one of my questions at least, 5 seems to be the magic number when it comes to eSata and port multipliers. So, my quest for 8 drives ends there? The Icybox definitely only has 1 eSata port so I fail to see how it actually is able to present those drives as JBOD using eSata.
So that drops me down to USB3.0. Should I be looking at another solution entirely if I want an easy life, rather than go USB3.0? The array will consist of 6 x 4TB Seagate drives and I will more than likely combine this with SnapRAID for some parity. None of the data is important and I could stand to lose any of it so I may not bother but its an option I may pursue.
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Hi all
Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully lend me your expertise. I recently discovered this great application that does exactly what I have been looking for and since then have been putting together a plan to migrate from my ageing HP N54L Microserver running unRAID to something else.
I have a gaming rig/HTPC that sits under the stairs and is more than powerful enough to handle anything I throw at it. It sits idle 95% of the time and is always on so I was wanting to consolidate the Microserver and this rig into one. The motherboard in the HTPC is an MSI Z97i Gaming AC which has 2 x eSata ports. I am trying to find out if these support port multipliers or not. I have read on a forum that NO Intel Sata supports PM but I have not seen anything concrete on this so I am hoping you guys can clarify.
Takes me to my next point. If it doesn't I will need an add-in card. Seen one or two but they seem to support a max of 5 drives per port? The specification seems to support up to 15 disks, I only need 8!
The reason I need 8 is because I plan on using an IcyBox IB-3680SU3. This supports 8 disks via either USB3.0 or eSata. It only has a single eSata port so if I want to address all 8 disks I need a port capable of doing so. I have read on these forums that USB3.0 is not the way to go for long term storage and which is why I am looking at eSata instead. Does anyone have experience with this unit, good or bad?
Anyway, that's my chain of thought pretty much written down. Look forward to hearing your thoughts
Icy Box IB-3810U3 JBOD + Drivepool
in Hardware
Posted
Hey AlexL
I have this enclosure too. Working great for me so far, just a little noisy as you have found out! Thanks for the info on the fans, I will be buying the same ones and doing some surgery. Just a question for you though.
Are both fans 3pin? I was wondering if they were PWM and maybe that's why the 80mm wasn't spinning up? Or maybe it's just a higher voltage needed to get it spinning?
I assume the enclosure does not mind if a fan is not plugged into the PSU fan header? Did you simply split the 140mm fan header to both fans?
Thanks!