Test System
The system is all built and ready to boot up. It is time to get some numbers, we all love numbers. We got a massive amount of hard drives, a heavy overclocked processor, and a RAID controller that all consumer quite a bit of power and generate even more heat. The Silverstone DS380 has three 120mm fans built-in and the airflow is further aided by the CPU cooler, a highly effective little piece of technology from Noctua.
The first thing we’ll be looking at is the power consumption. this is purely out of curiosity on how much a system like this draws as it doesn’t really have anything to do with the chassis. I have the system running through my power meter and will be recording the maximum power draw as well as usage and idle figures. These recordings have been made after a continues power-on cycle of 25hours.
The temperature is another thing we’d like to keep an eye on. Luckily all these hard drives report their temperature through S.M.A.R.T so we can easy get those. The same goes for our motherboard and CPU temperatures as they are default sensors. The operating system of choice doesn’t really matter here, but I picked windows for the easiest access to sensor-software.
Neither the case fans nor the CPU cooler is audible in this build, any noise heard will come hard drives. The airflow and temperatures can probably be brought further down with careful selected aftermarket fans, but it is in no way needed as the included fans do a great job and are barely audible.
What would you say is the shortest sata cable length to keep cable length at a minimum yet allow for air flow routing? I was thinking of using the right 90 degree connector on the backplane, not the 90 down connectors used on the HD, which would route the cable flat along the backplane toward the motherboard without the big loops. Thanks for the article. It has been 3 years but still relevant.
The parts I have so far are; 8 x 8TB WD Data Center drives, one SSD for cache drive, the DS380 case, a sfx 300 watt 80+ power supply, and assorted used other parts and cables if needed.
Do you have a suggestion for a motherboard considering I hope to run unRAID 6.4, NAS and File Server, NGINX, PLEX, and VMs all on this one box. I would like to keep the power consumption as low as possible considering the use of the type hard drive.. Yes I did the demo for FreeNAS and I did like it, but the memory and HD requirements I did not. I kinda like the unRaid idea of putting all of a file on one drive yet recoverable, and especially the ability to remove a disk and use it on another computer if needed. unRaid is now using xfs and I read although zfs is the new guy on the block, xfs is still really good.. Having NO experience with all this I may have other thoughts down the road but I have almost 6TB of data on two very aging HDs that have started to have SMART errors. Time to move my bottom side.
Thanks again,
Anne
The cable length is a difficult thing to answer as it depends on your components. Where they have their ports in relation to the drive’s/backplane’s connectors. My best tip would be: Take an old SATA cable and connect it at one end. Now run it the path you’ll want it to run (in an as empty case as possible). When you get to where you want to go, make a mark with a soft-tip pen on the cable. Add 1-2cm for extra routing as well as plugging and unplugging. Now you have the length you need by measuring that cable.
As for which motherboard, that’s always a difficult choice. Connection and calculation power is what you need to find. For basic file sharing, you don’t need a whole lot. But VMs do require a lot more power. The options are nearly endless, from low-powered APUs to high-powered Xeon SoC. Budget and needs are what will make your end decision. Of course, since you already have a PSU, that’s another factor you need to take into consideration along with peak-power draw from the drives.
I have no personal experience with unRaid, but it sounds like a good idea on a theoretical level.
So overall, a really difficult thing to answer. Oh, and there are more OS options too such as OpenMediaVault and Nas4Free besides FreeNAS. Of course, there’s also always the option to just do it all manually from a scratch OS, if you don’t need a fancy remote interface.