Chris Pollard

I've not had any problems with my Icydock 5-in-3. My 4-in-3 died and caused several days of pain to recover the array. So much pain I'm going to replace the 5-in-3 with normal drive cages and fans. Cheaper and more reliable I hope.

You can get a fanless 8 port gig switch, that might suit better as anything with a fan in it will eventually become noisy.

unraid doesn't do transcoding or upnp out of the box so I don't know whether you will be able to play media from it on your ps3. Your mac's will be able to map a drive using smb and play media from there. Not sure I can offer any info on any of the other questions.

I have to agree with this.

Mac Mini's with plex. One is newish and one is a couple of years old, Neither have any problems playing 1080p. (The newish one over wireless n ) Expensive option but they are small, look nice in the living room and I have the option of using them for other stuff. When I bought the first one I looked at building my own HTPC and found that most of the cases were ugly and I needed to have a bevvy of usb dongles to get bluetooth, infrared and wireless. By the time I had a nice case and had bought all of the additional hardware needed it wasn't much cheaper than a mac mini which has everything built in and comes with a nice remote.

The last thing would have been a start.... Let me see if it comes up again running 4.5b6 I have a funny feeling this is Safari related. OK Confirmed this also happens in 4.5b6. Wireshark shows me sending http://tower/update.htm?startState=STARTED&cmdStop=Stop so this is definitely something Safari related. Apologies for jumping the gun

The last thing would have been a start.... Let me see if it comes up again running 4.5b6 I have a funny feeling this is Safari related.

Just to be clear this happens when my laptop resumes from suspend and I have http://tower/main.htm open in safari. Not 100% sure this is 4.5b7 related at this point however.

This version seems to be randomly stopping the array for me. Especially when resume from suspend with my browser on http://tower/main.html or when I connect via smb://tower for the first time. Running os-x 10.6 and Safari. Going to revert to 4.5beta6 and see if it continues to happen as its possible its something entirely client related. EDIT : Evenetually narrowed this down to Safari's "Top Sites" feature which preloads your top 12 websites in the background when you open it.

The GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 seems a popular choice. I bought a GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2H and I'm happy with it. You need to be aware of the potential HPA gotcha however. ( http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA ) and if you are just using the box for storage choose a low power CPU to save money on electricity.

more than likely the source. For the cost of a cable I didn't fancy doing much investigation. Path of least resistance and all that.

I've never had much luck using VGA for HD video. Terrible screen tearing during pan shots. Scouting around at the time revealed it might be a TV specific problem but it happened on both my Pioneer and Panasonic plasmas. Switching to HDMI on both sorted it out.

Have you tried connecting to the IP address? http://10.10.1.100

I couldn't find a retailer that had the c2see board in stock in the UK. Scan list it but they are out of stock no ETA. All of the other sites I use regularly don't stock it.

I keep all my disks too but I sure as hell don't want to be booting legacy machines to access the stuff on my stack of 10gb IDE drives or the stack of 120gb drives that replaced them Maybe a good policy would be to dump an array when you can buy 1 drive to replace it.

Old disks are a matter for debate also..... 6tb of 500gb disks.... 12 months time you'll probably be able to replace those with 3 drives (cheaply). So you have an age out process, either when you decide that a drive is too old to trust or when the power needed to run it is usurped by newer, higher capacity drives.

max file size would be 1.5tb since files can't span disks. and yes i'm sure the 2.5gb was meant to be 2.5tb

I don't disagree, the fact that you are on the edge of buying enterprise class hardware to support 20 disks means its almost certainly not going to be cheaper. Personally if I was building multiple small systems I probably wouldn't use unRAID to do it, much better just to use a normal linux distro imho. That way you could look at using distributed file systems, something I investigated before deciding to use unRAID myself. (learning curve too steep, not enough linux experience put me off) I've personally moved to unRAID for the same reason prostuff1 mentions, I like all my data in one place. Also it helps that I probably wont ever need more than 15 disks, since by the time I fill the 15, disks will be bigger and I can start ditching the smallest ones.

also licensing... 4 times more licences required.

I was thinking more of a shelf type arrangement. Mount the motherboard on a Shelf and the disks and PSU above stick some fans into the mix to keep everything cool, stick everything in a 42u rack front and back and you should be able to achieve some pretty good density. Moving from 20 to 5 disk systems you going to be spending more on Parity and networking. You'll definitely need to choose a low power CPU too or I imagine the power costs will ramp up too.

Have you considered building a custom case? Everything is pretty standardised so you could pick a motherboard form factor and build something from scratch to get high density and low cost expansion. Kinda like google do. Suppose feasibility depends on ability

Dremel and cut them off I imagine. I used Icy Dock 5-in-3's and I was able to take the side panels off the units which made them fit without any destructive modification. Not sure if thats possible in your case.

Righto. Thanks.

How does the duplicate handling work? Just checking file names? or some kind of hash check?

Just built my system using the MA74GN-S2H also, don't seem to be any issues with it. I bought the low power Athlon too so board + cpu + ram was under £90