Dell Demension 4550 P4 - Unraid
#1
So I really want to try unraid but am hesitant to spend money building a new system when I have tons of parts laying around.

I have this old Dell dimension 4550 that's not being used. I'll need to upgrade the power supply but with some modifications to the case I could fit 10 drives in there. It's a P4, some where around 3Gz, with 1GB of DDR333. It has zero onboard sata slots but 4 free PCI slots.

Thoughts?
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#2
Up until recently I was running a my win2003 server on a P4 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, and an 80GB boot drive. I had a simple PCI bus Promise SATA raid controller (TX4310) running 4 drives in RAID 5 over a gigabit network.

Considering that the PCI bus and the card itself were the throttling points, it did a fairly decent job. On large file transfers I got about 25MB/s read and ~18 MB/s write. Reads and writes were faster to the boot drive, so the PC itself could handle a bit more.

I had no problems serving 1080p content to my Acer Revo R3610. But the server was never stressed with multiple connections.

I don't know what your speed expectations are, but as long as you don't see how fast some of the modern home based NAS devices are, you'll be fine. I saw and I had to upgrade -- very happy as a result.

Ciao.
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#3
Shouldn't you get 133MBps with PCI? Were you getting 25MBps because there were 4 drives on the PCI bus? If I added 10 drives would it be even slower?
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#4
Max bandwith is only theoretical. There is always some amount of overhead involved, so you'll never get the full speed. Plus, other devices share the same bus.

The CPU was never working hard, even when transferring data from/to the array. The limitation was the combination of the controller card and the bus. Possibly moreso the controller card, but I never investigated that. The drives were only running in SATA1, but even at that speed it would be enough to saturate the bus.

Those same drives are in my new NAS, and I'm easily getting double the speed under the same circumstances.

The number of drives had nothing to do with the speed. Like I said, reading and writing from the boot drive, connected to onboard IDE, was much faster than from the array in the same PC -- just stuck off an addon controller.

Now, UNRAID isn't conventional raid, so it may behave differently when it comes to speed. I've never played with it, and I'm in no position to comment on anything about it. I'm sure the internet has plenty to say, however.

Ciao.
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#5
Ok so it just so happens that I have a mobo here that I bought last year and didnt need but forgot to return.

It has...
-on board video
-4 sata II ports
-1 PCI-E 16 slot
-GB Lan

I can take the 2 x 512MB sticks of DDR 333 from the Dell.

Naturally, I have a few questions :-)

1. The bus speeds of everything kind of confused me. If I put DDR 333 memory in this machine is will slow the memory bus to 333Mhz, from the possible DDR2 800Mhz - Is this an issue? a GB is DDR2 is only $19 so its an easy fix.

2. This is a socket 775 and I dont have a CPU for it.
I can purchase a celeron for $18
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6819116496)
or an Intel Pentium E2180 for $40 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6819116494)

I'll save the $22 if the difference is negligible... Thoughts?

3. What PCI-E x16 card would be suggested? I'd like to have at least 10 total drives. I was looking at "Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port"


Thanks,

David
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#6
bump? :-)
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#7
1. u need to make sure the motherboard takes DDR2.

2. CPU power, get the $40 one

3. good one
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#8
eskro Wrote:1. u need to make sure the motherboard takes DDR2.

Thanks,

The motherboard will take DDR or DDR2. I have a GB of DDR on hand and was thinking about using it to save money.

David
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#9
Alright! I ordered all my parts. I cant wait to build this thing. I hope I didnt make a mistake but I bought one of those inexpensive arrowmax rackmount cases which included a 550W power supply.

David
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