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Long time lurker first time Cuber

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More pictures!

I build the arcylic hard drive cage and on one end it is epoxyd to the metal back cover with the hardware is independent raid card on the opposite end. I know the raid card isn't the fastest, but it insulates me from any niggles on the software side as it just shows up as one drive to the OS.

As you can see it is a tight fit. With all the heat concerns I can tell you it does run hot with the CPU fan ramped up. I'm working on getting OSX to report some actual temps, but have been unsuccessful this far. I have fakesmc and hwmonitor, but all I see is my SSD temp.

This thing on the other hand, screams!! It's so much faster than using my HP n40l and my laptop for transcoding. On PLEx I used to get a 3-5x transcode rate which is now 43x. Also using it as a time machine server is much much faster as well. I'll do some HD speed tests on that hardware card tonight.
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Wow, you sure have crammed in alot of hard drives into the machine, first time I have seen that done before, congratulations.

Couple of questions:

  1. How is the RAID card connected to the motherboard ?
  2. How fast is the RAID, black magic speed test ?
  3. Why did you go to a raid solution ?
  4. How big is that rad volume ? and What do you need all that disk space for ?
  5. Is the EVO SSD connected to raid or directly to the MB ?
  6. What are you booting from, assume the EVO SSD ?
  7. How are the temperatures under load e.g. CPU Test ?

Kiwi
 
1. The raid controller is a self contained card which takes up to 5 sata drives and then connects to the motherboard with a sata connection. You set the type of raid on the card and press a button to initialize.
2. You can see the speed results above. It's not insanely fast be definitely better than my previous windows 8 "storage spaces" solution.
3. I wanted to actually have a ZFS raid Z pool initially to prevent against HFS bit rot and raid 5 write hole error, but maczfs is a little cumbersome. I tried it first actually, but there's a known error in mavericks which screwed it up. Also, to get a time machine server to work on it I'd have to have an HFS sparcebundle. The hardware raid is faster than software (although I clearly have cycles to spare). Once I then decided hardware, the cheaper raid cards I found had bad reviews. Lastly, since it's a hackintosh this card makes it nice that it's not tied to the software at all. If my osx install breaks or I need to reinstall, I just connect the sata drive and all my data is there. It's all independent of OS.
4. I have 3, 3TB disks giving me ~6TB of space. I use it as my media server with PLEX for my living room and bedroom TVs and my wife and it's devices. Also it is a time machine server for our MacBooks and a central iTunes server for backups and music.
5. The sad is connected on its own
6. Boot drive is the ssd.
7. I haven't been able to get any temps besides the one reported from my SSD which shows 48 under load. I'm sure the CPU temp is much higher.
 
1. The raid controller is a self contained card which takes up to 5 sata drives and then connects to the motherboard with a sata connection. You set the type of raid on the card and press a button to initialize.
2. You can see the speed results above. It's not insanely fast be definitely better than my previous windows 8 "storage spaces" solution.
3. I wanted to actually have a ZFS raid Z pool initially to prevent against HFS bit rot and raid 5 write hole error, but maczfs is a little cumbersome. I tried it first actually, but there's a known error in mavericks which screwed it up. Also, to get a time machine server to work on it I'd have to have an HFS sparcebundle. The hardware raid is faster than software (although I clearly have cycles to spare). Once I then decided hardware, the cheaper raid cards I found had bad reviews. Lastly, since it's a hackintosh this card makes it nice that it's not tied to the software at all. If my osx install breaks or I need to reinstall, I just connect the sata drive and all my data is there. It's all independent of OS.
4. I have 3, 3TB disks giving me ~6TB of space. I use it as my media server with PLEX for my living room and bedroom TVs and my wife and it's devices. Also it is a time machine server for our MacBooks and a central iTunes server for backups and music.
5. The sad is connected on its own
6. Boot drive is the ssd.
7. I haven't been able to get any temps besides the one reported from my SSD which shows 48 under load. I'm sure the CPU temp is much higher.
The card is interesting I haven't seen anything like that before, do you have a link.

I have been looking at and tried a few ZFS options on Mac in the past. With questionable support going forward it is hard to invest in ZFS on Mac, especially since it is my data. So decided to build a FreeNAS box with 5 x 2TB drives and formatted as ZFS1 volume. I can get close to saturating my gigabit ethernet, so pretty happy with performance. It does mean another machine but want too expensive. FreeNAS is well supported so feel I can rely on it in the long run.
 
The card I purchased is from Datoptic. The model number is SPM393. The reviews are few and far between but amazon.com had some reasonable reviews. FreeNAS is a great solution too.
 
Blimey, well done on getting all those drives in there.

Have you run it yet inside the metal case/acrylic outer? I am guessing it will be a little on the warm side.

You could always though run it "naked" in the acrylic case and perhaps think about cutting a hole in the case side to let it breath more freely. Maybe have it with the motherboard at the back of the acrylic case and have a hole in the acrylic directly over the CPU cooler?
 
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