What did I buy?
2 x 3TB WD Red NAS drives1 x 2 Port SATA Controller
3 x Cat6a ethernet cables
2 x 8GB ECC DDR3 RAM
The NAS drives will obviously going into the bays available at the front of the server so I can set up my NAS. As I only have two drives at the moment this means the array will only have 3TB usable space due to the parity disk. Realistically that is all I need to start with as my media collection is only about that large at the moment. The SATA controller card I bought because the internal SATA connector only runs at SATA I speeds while this PCI card runs at SATA III. This will be used to connect up my cache devices if I ever get around to implementing that.
The requirements for running unRAID are pretty minimal compared to FreeNAS with unRAID only requiring about 1GB of RAM if you have the intention of running it as a pure NAS system. However once you start playing around with containers and virtualising machines you will understandably get tight on resources. With that in mind I decided it would be best to upgrade to 16GB RAM which is the most this machine will accept. This didn't come cheap at about €160 for the two stick set - ECC RAM is bloody expensive.
Lastly I decided to invest in some decent cat6a cables for connecting up my server and desktop to the network. I've been running on cat5e cables for quite a long time because in all honesty I just had no requirement for the additional benefits in cat6 cables. Now that I will be regularly transferring files to and from the NAS I felt the requirement for additional cable bandwidth.
Glad you continued posting after your initial entry about booting unRAID 6 on the HP microserver. A couple of things. Category 5e cable works just as well as Category 6 or 6a with gigabit Ethernet. The extra analogue capability of the 6a cable is simply not used. The integrated SATA controller has two 6 Gb/s SATA III ports and two 3 Gb/s SATA II ports, according to HP's specs. I'm not sure why but that's more than enough for mechanical disks. There's also a fifth SATA port for the optical bay but it doesn't seem to specify how fast it is.
ReplyDeleteHey John,
DeleteThanks for the comment! Apologies for the delay in replying. I figured there was no need to improve the ethernet cables but my thinking was that I might as well remove any potential bottleneck. I figured it was worth the minor cost even if the additional capabilities are never utilised.
The optical drive SATA port runs at SATA I speeds, hence the reason for buying the additional SATA controller. That way I can have 4 drives in the bay slots and the cache drive hooked into the second SATA controller. However, I seem to be having some issues with this at the moment - I think the SATA controller / SSD / SATA cable may be dying (I haven't investigated). Every once in a while when I SSH into the server to do some CLI work (Deleting shares, moving files etc) it will tell me I do not have permission even when signed in as root. This only happens on the shares that are allowed to use the cache. A reboot fixes this albeit temporarily.