charlie22911

Something you have to keep in mind are the firmware features of those drives. WD Green drives have power saving features written in firmware so that settings like spindown cannot be overridden by the OS (IIRC). As a result, they can drop out of the array after a period of inactivity. Also keep in mind that various tiers (Green\Red\Black\Re in the WD world) often share hardware and differ mainly in firmware, so that more consumer oriented drives are missing things like TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) that are more common in prosumer\enterprise environments.

Right now I have the following planned for it: Hosting VMs (1 Windows 10 and 1 Debian based guest for now) Hosting several dedicated game servers Serving as a backup target for my two PCs and Laptop Media serving with on the fly transcoding Enabling me to digitally hoard data of dubious value I ordered the silent edition of the Define R5 which has acoustic dampening material inside to help with noise. The box will be sitting in a closet so some noise is not an issue. On a broader level I can agree with what you are saying, however LSI makes a quality product; their soft RAID implementation is far better than pretty much any integrated RAID solution I've encountered to date. But I digress, the main purpose of that card is to give this build room to grow; the motherboard has 8 SATA ports which aren't enough for my 8 HDD + 1 SSD cache layout. How are your drives holding up thermally? I don't plan to spin my drives down and I'm not sure how much airflow will get through such tightly packed drives.

Thanks for getting back to me. I actually came to the same conclusion via Google shortly after posting, my apologies; I'll turn this into a build log once I have the parts. Also a heads up to anyone wanting a cheap quality PCIe RAID controller, I found the LSI 9211 for $88 on amazon; same card is $248 on Newegg: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RL8I7M/ Keep in mind it doesn't include SATA breakout cables so you have to get those separately (unless you are using a backplane). So far here is the hardware I plan to build this unRAID 6 box with: Intel Core i7 6850k 6 Core CPU (Have on hand) ASUS X99A USB 3.1 4x 8GB Mushkin Enhanced Redline DDR4 2666 8x 4TB Western Digital RED Hard Drives (Have on hand) 128GB Samsung SSD (Cache, have on hand) LSI SAS9211-8i with 2x SAS to 8 port SATA breakout cables (In the mail) NVidia Geforce GT730 (Basic GUI stuff, Have on hand) NZXT Kraken x41 140mm closed loop liquid cooler Antec High Current Pro HCP-1200 (Have on hand) Fractal Design Define R5 Blackout Silent Feel free to drop some suggestions if you have them! EDIT: As for RAID type, I don't think I am going to utilize any sort of raid, the plan right now is to just do a BTRFS pool with two parity drives and 1 128GB SSD for cache in unRAID. I'm open to suggestions if there is a better way to approach this though!

Good day all, I've been watching LTT on YouTube for quite some time now, and a common theme in these videos (I'm looking at you unraid projects) is redundancy through RAID. Something that has been completely glossed over however is what to do should a drive fail, more to the point; how do you physically identifty a failed drive within a drive pool that lacks status indicators? As to why I am asking: I've got a spare 6850k around which I am in the planning stages of building an unraid box (build log to come once ready), I've got 8x 4TB WD Red HDDs on hand to go in my build.