Unfortunately, this is also not true. http://www.necam.com/Docs/?id=54157ff5-5de8-4966-a99d-341cf2cb27d3 That is a blatant advertisement for NEC storage. Pure advertising BS. Again, not true. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/data-corruption-is-worse-than-you-know/191 and if the blog post above is ...

As far as I'm aware the cache on modern hard drives does have ECC.

Well, this can make a rant, but RAIDZ eliminates most of RAID weaknesses (write hole issue, silent data corruption). Neither of these are the problem that ZFS proponents make them out to be. Good RAIDs don't have the write hole issue. This includes mdadam, GEOM, Intel FakeRAID and good hardware RAI...

Yes, Windows software RAID 1 is just fine. So is RAID 0 if you want that, but it is not bootable. Windows software RAID 5 is really slow at writes because it does not do full stripe writes. It's not bad on reads, so it can be OK for a media volume that does not get updated often. Intel's fakeRAID is...

susdu wrote:How many fans can I ran from a single header? Current wise

Depends on the MB. It's usually specified somewhere in the manual.

There are PWM splitters that use a standard 4-pin molex (PATA hard drive power) connector so you don't have to worry about how much the MB can supply.

Jakoob wrote: How did you solve the sound? When using DVI -> HDMI converter I guess, there is no sound.

DVI and HDMI are electrically identical so you can have sound on DVI. Lots of video cards support sound on DVI, but you would have to try it to be sure.

I know you said you want to use your TV's remote for volume, but really how much do you use your TV's remote? I use mine for one thing and one thing only, turning it on and off and that is only because my TV does not support CEC . Everything runs through my receiver so its remote/phone app/web page ...

andyb wrote: That,s good to know, its just a shame they (good quality NIC's) are so expensive.

Well true "server grade" NICs are expensive, but you can get decent ones for not too much. An Intel Desktop CT adapter is around $35-40 (CAD) here and performs great. It is what I am using in my main fileserver.

Since I have the Atom on the workbench, here is why I do not recommend using a PCI NIC, but also showing how a good NIC can help when your CPU is really slow. D510MO with Intel Pro 1000/MT in the PCI slot D510 Clock Copy Speed 1670 MHz 75 MB/sec 208 MHz 35 MB/sec It reduced the max speed by 20 MB/se...

That's a very interesting test RE: the actual CPU speed required to top out the 120MB/s LAN throughput rate, and exactly answers my original question, obviously results will vary by OS, HDD and LAN controller, but 900MHz is still a very low requirement in this day and age. Just remember it's 900MHz...

I was trying out Ubuntu 14.04 on a D510MO board so I thought I try the same speed test. Unfortunately the CPU speed setting does not appear to work fully, I could only set the max or min speed, nothing in between. Might try it on FreeBSD again, I know it can set the CPU clock properly. D510 Clock Co...

A person could start with a too-powerful CPU and tweakable BIOS and work backwards, under-clocking and disabling cores until they could no longer saturate gigabit ethernet. This is actually pretty easy to test with the right system. My GA-C1007UN (Celeron 1007U, 2 X 1.5 GHz Ivy Bridge) can set the ...

I tried assembling a ZFS test system years ago and gave up. OpenSolaris was too picky about hardware and what I had on hand was unsupported. FreeBSD is the way to go if you want ZFS. Much better hardware support. The big attraction for me then was end-to-end check summing. Supposedly bit rot is imp...

HFat wrote:Does ZFS really have a solution besides dual parity, something you don't need ZFS for?

ZFS does have triple parity (RAID-Z3) with newer versions, which does seem fairly unique. Not sure if it would be particularity useful outside of huge arrays.

I wondered about this. Pardon my ignorance, but my take was that read errors can kill the array during the rebuild, not during normal operation. Because all the data on non-failed drives has to be read to reconstruct the failed drive. Read errors can crop up during normal operation if that area of ...

HFAT is exactly right, in the real world the error rates are much lower and not random. For example that calculator says that my 4 X 2 TB Greens in RAID 5 would have a crazy 52% chance of failing during a rebuild. However I have the array on an LSI 9260 which does a patrol read once a week, essentia...

I am confused, do you mean that if I just have my 6x existing drives (old 2TB drives) attached to my existing raid card with all of them set to JBOD I should be OK.? with my current controller.? If so that will save me £56. What I mean is this: No matter which controller you end up using, make sure...

Just to add, there is probably nothing wrong with using the Highpoint card as just an HBA in Linux/BSD with softraid if you keep your backup drives all on the MB. With most MBs this would give you 5 backup drives (6 - boot drive), which hopefully would be enough. Just don't put all your eggs in one ...

http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/HDD-Controllers/SATA-Cards/4-Port-PCI-Express-SATA-6Gbps-RAID-Controller-Card~PEXSAT34RH It uses a Marvell controller, and I have used a few "Startech" products in the past, they are cheap, but appear to be well made decent products with vanilla drivers and non...

As for not using my RAID card in the future for single drives - that's not very realistic It is quite realistic if you value your data. You can believe me or not, I'm just some name on the internet. I have been dealing with storage systems for over 20 years now. Everything from old MFM drives to hi...

@washu - you are more knowledgeable re: linux than I ... assuming it supported Andy's raid card, could a live CD/USB distro be used to adequately network file copy speeds? In principle yes, but Linux might "bypass" the card making the test invalid compared to a newer Windows version. While a Highpo...

HFat wrote: And it should be possible to non-destructively test the actual performance of a drive which is normally connected to a RAID card by connecting it directly to any non-ancient mobo.

You couldn't fully test the drive this way, as you would want to test write speeds as well which would be destructive.

RAID-5 array scores a write speed of 125 MB/s, whilst a single drive scores a write speed of 80 MB/s. While 125 MB/sec isn't horrible given that we are concerned about Gig networking, it is still really bad compared to how much that card goes for. For less money you could have had a new MB+CPU+RAM ...

Coming right back to CPU requirements. If I turned my RAID card into a simple host adapter and used Linux to run a pair of RAID-5 Array's what kind of CPU horsepower would I need.? Also what kind of throughput would I get (if we assume that my RAID card has infinite bandwidth). Really you don't nee...

Also your explanation of my RAID card being rubbish for RAID-5 does not explain why my write speeds for single drives are so poor. It does explain it, I was just trying to be polite. Highpoint cards are garbage no matter what you are doing with them. Try your drives on an Intel controller or modern...

Highpoint RocketRAID 2320. Not going to sugar coat it: Your RAID card sucks. Outside of highpoint being solidly in the lower tier of RAID controllers, the card simply does not have the required hardware to get good RAID 5 speeds. Good RAID 5 or 6 on a hardware RAID card almost always needs cache, w...

Maybe I should try SMB2 anyway. I don't particularly care for maximum throughput optimizations but does SMB2 also improve performance in other respects (responsiveness, small files)? SMB2 helps for small files as it can overlap commands and batch multiple commands together. You still are unlikely t...

The CPU is actually not the most important part for getting good speeds out of SMB/CIFS. The important requirements are: 1. You must be using SMB 2.0 or higher on BOTH the server and client. This means Windows Vista+ or Samba 3.6+. If you are using Samba SMB 2.0 must also be enabled, it is often tur...

gietrzy wrote: Have a question: what is CPU C state? Which one to choose in bios?

C-States are power saving modes that your CPU can go into when it is idle. Unless they cause problems you should have them all turned on.

Woops, sorry, you're quite right. Sorry. My TV can handle RGB so I need to go from a VGA connector to RGB SCART (but I still need a graphics driver which can output 576 interlaced at 25 frames per second) For SCART you also need to give it composite sync. VGA is normally separate sync. Some video c...