System Reviews

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tmacka88

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Thought I would make a review of my system and how each components perform to help people decide on what to or not to buy. Would be good to see an actual sub-forum Reviews category.

First off, Ill start with my case and work my way through.

1. Case - Coolermaster CM 690
http://www.coolermaster.com/product.php?product_id=2908
Picked it up for $60AUD second hand only a few months old which was great.
This case is awesome for a NAS setup as standard it hold 6 HDD bays with no tools needed to install & another HDD dock on top if you need to quickly add drives. It has 3 Fans standard (they are quite loud but seem to be productive in keeping cool). Other than that theres not to much you can really talk about for a case.

2. Motherboard - Asus P5G41T-M LX
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_775/P5G41TM_LX/
Quite a good motherboard for the price. Got it for around $70AUD off ebay brand new. Has 4xSATA with a 775LGA. It took me a while to find a MB that had as many SATA ports, 775LGA and DDR3 as these features were more common in newer MB's such as 1156 and 1155LGB MB's. So for the price I can't complain.

3. CPU - Intel Core2Duo 2.66GHz
Now this CPU works fine with FreeNAS as it is not to demanding unless using it continuously for transferring data. The only down side using a older CPU is the restriction on the MB's available with feature that you may want such as SATA3 or 6 or more SATA ports etc.

4. Intel Pro 1000/MT Dual port Gigabit PCI-x (meaning 64bit but it is backward compatible to PCI which is 32 bit)
Got it for around $30. Im getting around 100MB/s through the NIC not using Link Aggregation. I also have a built in Gigabit NIC and another dell gigabit PCI NIC both of these don't perform as well as the Intel Pro PCI-x NIC. Highly recommended. The only trouble you may face with this is that you may not be able to fit the card into a PCI slot as it hangs out past the PCI slot and on my MB I have a heat sink right behind it which blocks it from going into both of my PCI slots. I fixed this by buying a PCI extender cable of ebay for $6 and fitted the card to a PCI expansion slot on the side of the case.

5. Cooler Master 4-in-3 Hard Drive Device Module
http://www.coolermaster.com/product.php?product_id=2542
I got this for $30 delivers second hand off ebay. Im just putting it in now so haven't tested it yet but it is a good way to expand for more HDD space now my case can hold 11HDD's internally and another in the dock and another externally through the eSATA port on the top.

6. Syba 4-port SATA II PCI-e Software RAID Controller, SIL3124 Chipset
http://www.sybausa.com/productSearch.php?searchKeyWord=SY-PEX40008
Got it off Amazon for $70 posted to Australia which was cheap compared to other postage cost. I only recently put this in so haven't given it a good test but had a quick play with it. I connected up 3xHDD's setup in RAIDz and transferred a few mores across, it had large bursts probably get near 90-100MB/s but it didn't seem it could sustain this speed. It turned out to average around 45MB/s. Which isn't too bad but I would still like to see the same performance of 80-100MB/s. Im thinking of getting a dell SAS controller in which I saw in another thread they didn't seem to be too expensive around 100-150 second hand. I haven't had much experience and know little about the SAS controllers so not sure if they work with any MB or just Dell server MB's i don't know. Hopefully some could put a review on hear about them with the requirements and performance etc.

Now that pretty much it.

Cheers

Hear are a few pics of my system.

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