Need advice configuring server hardware (RAID and CPU settings)

[felixrosbergen]

Hi All,

I have the Gigabyte EP45-UD3P Main board for my server.

LINK TO BOARD

I have an Intel E8500 (3.16ghz Dual Core) in there and 2GB ram for the moment since the Hauppage 500 tuner card doesnt work if there's more ram in the system (unresolvable driver issue apparently).

As far as i know this board sort of 2 raid controllers and i can't figure out the best way to configure it.

The server is currently nto running any raid, but i want to change to RAID 1 for the system drives ( 2 * 500GB) and possibly raid 5 for the mass storage (video, music, etc).

There is the South bridge (Intel ICH 10R) with 6 SATA connectors. Will this support 2 arrays at the same time? i.e. the RAID 1 system array and the raid 5 mass storage? From my math this woudl max out the 6 ports (2 drivers for RAID1 and 4 drives for RAID5) on that bridge for drives, leaving no ports for DVD writer and connection for e-sata.

Then there is the "GIGABYTE SATA2 chip" which has 2 connections are supposedly also supports RAID 0,1 and JBOD. (purple connectors in the picture).

What I am pondering is which is the better chip to use or whether to run the RAID1 system array on the "GIGABYTE SATA2 chip" and the storage array on the South Bridge. However...if the South bridge is the 'better' controller i may want to put the system array there since i don't know for sure if I will do do an araay for the mass data ( may just do regular backups to external drive). Woudl running each array on a seperate chip improve the overall performance of the system?

Currently the box is running Windows Home Server and the simple act of enabling SATA or even enabling the RAID functions in the bios make it impossible to install WHS (this is apparently a known issue).

I'm planning to switch to Windows Server 2003 now which shoudl support these chips i hope.

Another question is what happens in you get a controller/mainboard failure? is the array lost at that point? Can i get the exact same mainboard and somehow move the drives and not loose my data?

After some initial issues with this board (problems getting it to start initially) I love this board, due to it's use of more copper it seems impossible to overheat this thing. I ran an hour long burn in test yesterday with all the case fans turned off and only the CPU fan running...no matter what i did i could't get the temperature above 48C which is pretty good i think. Under normal loads (which is mostly idle) the CPU reports 25C and the heatsinks on the CPU, capacitors and Chipset coolers ( this board has big heatsinks instead of fans on the chipset) actually feel cool to the touch. During the burn in the hardly warmed up.

After getting the drive configuration sorter out i need to start looking at ways to make this thing consume less power. I regreat having purchased the E8500 now since under typical loads (SageTV recording and comskip proccesing of 2 recordings) the CPI load barely registers. Maybe a lower speed CPU would consuming less power? I'm hoping to essntialy 'underclock' this thing to make it more efficient.

Currently it's eating 85watts idle and typical loads. During the burn-in test it went up to 115watts. Since it's on 24/7 every watt helps...

 

[PAPutzback]

If you check out the forums at MSDN you'd probably be told not to use any raid in the system whatsoever. If you do use raid you'll run into a headache when you try to expand it.

Now if I could afford 6 2 terabyte drives I might go with raid 5 on your 6 port controller. Then the OS on a 500 to 750gb drive on the second controller leaving one sata port for a DVDrom. But once the OS is loaded you shouldn't need a Optical device. You might look at putting a removable drive bay in a 5 1/4 slot for backing up the system or key data like family pictures to keep offsite.

Just remember though if you are going for low power than drives in raid will really use up some juice because every time you use data you'll be spinning up multiple drives.

 

[electron]

I personally never worry about the OS drive. Once I have a system up and running, I schedule Acronis to take an image on a weekly (and/or daily, depending on the role) basis. I have a dedicated partition for the OS (usually 10 gig or so), so it doesn't take much to backup/restore. You could do something similar, so you don't have to deal with RAID for just the OS drive (plus it drops the total power consumption a few Watts).

As for data, I would consider something like the Drobo, which is better than RAID5.

 

[sic0048]

I have the same MB in my new setup. I am running RAID 1 on the GIGABYTE SATA2 chip without any problems (2x500gb Seagate HD). I did this to ensure I could use the 6 oher SATA ports anyway I wanted to. I actually don't have any other drives hooked up yet to the Southbridge. But hopefully that will change soon.

If you do decide to use the Gigbyte SATA2 chip, just make sure you go into BIOS and change the hierarchy of the boot driver and RAID chips. It is set to the Southchip by default. So if you want to boot from the SATA2 chip, you have to change the BIOS. It's easy to do, just check the MB manual for the exact setting.

 

[felixrosbergen]

For the GIGABYTE SATA2 chip it sais to set it to RAID/IDE whereas the South Bridge is RIAD/AHCI, does that make any difference?

I'm looking to order 2 of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822136294

I reconize Electron's comment about not worrying about the OS partiation, but my main concern is a drive failure while i am away on a 1 or 2 week business trip and having to take a dramatic WAF hit if she has no music, sagetv, etc for a week or more.

I know I'll be taking a power hit on it when swapping a single 500GB Geen Power for 2 non Green Power..not sure what the real difference woudl be? like 8 watts or something?

Since it woudl become a 500GB RAID 1 array with a primary purpose of OS and some other stuff I'm not terribly concerned about expanding it at a later time. I will probably partition it and then if the OS needs more space i can always resize the paritions right? Does that all work on a raid the same as normal? i.e. use Parition Magic to resize partitions?

What settings can i use to underclock my CPU and will it make a significant power difference? It seems like i have no need whatsoever for the 3.16ghz power in there at the moment...it seems that the Intel speedstep and other power tools take it down to 2ghz when it's not heavilly loaded...but I wonder if i can drop it more somehow.

 

[TheSpoon]

For the GIGABYTE SATA2 chip it sais to set it to RAID/IDE whereas the South Bridge is RIAD/AHCI, does that make any difference?

I believe AHCI just allows more advance features such as hot-swapping of drives.

I know I'll be taking a power hit on it when swapping a single 500GB Geen Power for 2 non Green Power..not sure what the real difference woudl be? like 8 watts or something?

The difference between the drives you listed and the 500GB green drives are 3W during read/write and 5W during idle. That's quite a difference if they sit idle most of the time.

Since it woudl become a 500GB RAID 1 array with a primary purpose of OS and some other stuff I'm not terribly concerned about expanding it at a later time. I will probably partition it and then if the OS needs more space i can always resize the paritions right? Does that all work on a raid the same as normal? i.e. use Parition Magic to resize partitions?

It's been awhile since I've used raid drives, and I don't know how good Partition Magic has gotten but I believe you'd have to Fail all the partitions on one drive, repartition to your new values, then boot to a recovery disk and rebuild the partitions on the first drive. I don't think this can be done with Partition Magic, but it's been a bit since I've used it.

What settings can i use to underclock my CPU and will it make a significant power difference? It seems like i have no need whatsoever for the 3.16ghz power in there at the moment...it seems that the Intel speedstep and other power tools take it down to 2ghz when it's not heavilly loaded...but I wonder if i can drop it more somehow.

Underclocking can make a pretty big difference. As for settings every motherboard/ram/cpu combo is going to be a little different. Your best bet is probably to just trial and error. Start by going into the BIOS and dropping the voltages, reboot the machine, run it for a bit (can rerun a burn-in test if you wish) and see if it crashes. If not, go back into the BIOS and drop the voltages some more, then retry.

Hope that helps.

-=Nelson=-

 

[sic0048]

I think the built in power contol featues of that board are very good. As you mentioned, it will underclock itself automatically based on current CPU requirements. I think it will be fine to simply leave those power management features turned on and not worry about underclocking. You could probably eak out a slightly lower power consumption number with straight underclocking, but with the built in software, you get the best of both worlds: Low power consumption with CPU power on demand.

I'm going with the software solution rather than doing a hard-set underclocking frequency.

 

[felixrosbergen]

Just FYI, i checked the mobo manual and according to it both the RAID controller are supposed to support 'hot plug' which i guess is chinlish or japish for 'hot swap'.

Got the RE3 drives on order...hopefully they will be here by the weekedn so i can build the array and such. Plan to unplug one of the drive right after OS install to see how the array handles itself. From discussions on the IRC chat i know drives can fail in different ways, but at least if i handles a simple unplug i'll feel a little better.

Next step is the video capture..i have a hauppage 500 in there which has been working well, but i'm ready to record some ClearQAM HD (from comcast)..anybody have experiecne with the Hauppage 2250? Looks like a newer card...it's seems out of stock which i'm not sure if thats a good thing or not.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16815116037

 

[PAPutzback]

I love both of my silicondust HDHRs. I can record 4 channels of HD. It handles both either QAM or ATSC. Or I can tell the server to only use two channels and assign individual tuners to separate PCs.