Zeus V2 : U-NAS NSC-810A | X10SL7-F | E3-1265 V3

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Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
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I got one while buying a bunch of items. I think if you contact customer service before they ship your order, they will add the riser cable.


This is what I did. They will tell the factory in China to add those items to your order. A phone call or email will do.

Also, don't forget to buy ALL the extension cables for your motherboard and power supply. If your motherboard was like mine or @K D You'll end up needing extensions just to plug in the switches and power ports. Nothing was more frustrating than getting everything together and realizing "Shit don't fit right" and seeing you need an extra 2-3" cable.

Save yourself 2-3 days of wait time, order them NOW.
 
Jun 5, 2017
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This is what I did. They will tell the factory in China to add those items to your order. A phone call or email will do.

Also, don't forget to buy ALL the extension cables for your motherboard and power supply. If your motherboard was like mine or @K D You'll end up needing extensions just to plug in the switches and power ports. Nothing was more frustrating than getting everything together and realizing "Shit don't fit right" and seeing you need an extra 2-3" cable.

Save yourself 2-3 days of wait time, order them NOW.
I have to admit to being a bit of a noob when it comes to building hardware, having spent most of my career on the software side. So I have to ask: what extension cables do you suggest I get? I was looking at these:

StarTech ATX24POWEXT 8" Power Extension Cable for 24 pin ATX 2.01 Motherboards-Newegg.com
StarTech ATXP4EXT 8" 8in ATX12V 4 Pin P4 CPU Power Extension Cable Male to Female - Newegg.com

But I'm not sure if those are the right ones, if they are but I'd still be coming up short-handed, or if they're of any good quality. What about something like this, instead?

Thermaltake AC-036-CN1NAN-A1 0.98 ft. (All Cables) TtMod Sleeve Extension Power Supply Cable Kit ATX/EPS/8-pin PCI-E/6-pin PCI-E w/ Combs Orange/Black - Newegg.com

Or would that be overkill?

Thanks!
 
Jun 5, 2017
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@K D

Going back a bit, if I may, why did you choose to go with the Noctua cooler instead of the one included with your CPU? Is the latter too bulky for the U-NAS 810A case, perhaps?

Apologies if this seems like a silly question, I'm still pretty much a noob assembling hardware.
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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There was no specific reason. The stock cooler is sufficient and will work with this case as well. I just prefer Noctua coolers as they are usually quieter and perform better than the stock coolers.
 
Jun 5, 2017
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Ah, good to know, thanks! That'll allow me to delay buying that cooler until I determine it's actually necessary, and thus thin a bit my budget a little bit (e.g. I spent an unnecessary $30 more on a Xeon E3-1240 v6 when an E3-1230 v6 would have been perfectly fine for my home FreeNAS needs, as @Patrick very eloquently argues).
 
Jun 5, 2017
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@K D So I finally got around to assembling my U-NAS 810A box, and in fact I did need the extension cables, and just like you I had to route them through the back behind the back plate, and then through the left side (when looking at the box from the back) up on to the motherboard.

But, unfortunately, the Thermaltake cables that I bought:

Thermaltake AC-036-CN1NAN-A1 0.98 ft. (All Cables) TtMod Sleeve Extension Power Supply Cable Kit ATX/EPS/8-pin PCI-E/6-pin PCI-E w/ Combs Orange/Black - Newegg.com

are quite bulky, and they're making it a bit hard for me to close the box. I could maybe force it a bit, but I don't really want to. What extension cables did you get? They seem a lot slimmer than mine. Did your box close easily?
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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A quick update on this build. I replaced the board and cpu with an X11SSH-CTF and Xeon E3-1275 V6 with 64 GB RAM and added an Intel i340-T4 NIC. Also replaced all the drives with 8TB reds.


Running the stock fans at anything less than 100%, the drives idle at around 36degrees. Will swap out the fans with NF-A14s that I have in hand and if that doesnt improve the temperatures get a pair of iPPCs for the drive fans.
 
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Jun 5, 2017
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Hi @K D,

Thanks again for the reference to the cables! I'll compare them to similar ones I found on Amazon and get them ASAP, I still haven't closed my case because I really don't want to force the lid on it.

On a related note, did you get the red SATA cables with your Supermicro X11 boards? How do you compare them to the grey ones provided by U-NAS? Admitting again that I'm not too experienced with building hardware, the former are looking so much better to me. Which ones are you using? Which ones would you recommend?

And also regarding the board, what OS are you using it with? I'm on FreeNAS 11 on a USB flash drive plugged into the on-board USB slot, and I tried booting that in UEFI mode but didn't have much luck, had to switch back to BIOS boot. Any idea if the former is just unsupported on these boards? Or does it have to be enabled somewhere?
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
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I had previously USD the gray cables hat came with the UNAS. Now I am using supermicro sas 8643 to sata breakout cables for the backplane and a different short sata cable for the OS drive.

I am running esxi booting off a usb drive in internal header. The Bios has an option to use uefi or legacy or both. I set it to legacy only.
 

K D

Well-Known Member
Dec 24, 2016
1,439
320
83
30041
A quick update on this build. I replaced the board and cpu with an X11SSH-CTF and Xeon E3-1275 V6 with 64 GB RAM and added an Intel i340-T4 NIC. Also replaced all the drives with 8TB reds.


Running the stock fans at anything less than 100%, the drives idle at around 36degrees. Will swap out the fans with NF-A14s that I have in hand and if that doesnt improve the temperatures get a pair of iPPCs for the drive fans.
Aargh....

After getting the iPPC fans, I open up the case and remove the fans and do not notice till I place the new fans that the case as 120mm fans and I had ordered 140mm ones :mad::mad:. I didnt want to put up the stock fans again so installed a couple of iPPC 3000 fans that I was saving for another purpose that are an overkill for this one.

I had transplanted the X11 board into this case planning to run a Virtual pfsense to replace my USG. I just couldnt get pfsense to distribute IPs to differnt VLANS. The VM worked in my test env with a ubiquiti edgeswitch. The main network runs Unifi switches. So back to the drawing board again. Had to reset the entire unifi config and restore the controller from a backup. Then go around the house unplugging and replugging the various devices that refused to grab a new ip.

When I finally think everything is done and working as expected, all my sab downloads started failing and plex started behaving wierdly. Looks like one of the SSDs has issues. Moved the VMS to the second SSD and everything now works (fingers crossed).

Probably in the next few weeks, I will redo the whole thing - Figure out how to install 4 SSDs, Add another HBA and mirror the VM store so that I dont run into this issue again.