rainmaker002

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  1. Great answer, thank you. Sold. Two more spinoffs: i) the motherboard listed below seems to be micro-atx, but the case is mini-ITX. Are they in fact compatible? ii) I do not have the technical knowledge to do this, but I am usually a decent learner so I'll ask the question: would an i5 with 16GB of ram be sufficient to virtualize a Windows 7 environment? The only thing that I will be missing with Unraid vs. QNAP is built in google drive syncing (which I rely on). Could I run Windows and Google Drive in a VM? Have I mentioned how great it is that people go out of their way on this forum to help out?
  2. Thanks! Some great tips in here. I was toying with getting a QNAP TS-451 to avoid the hassle of building my own system, but after weighing all the pros and cons I think I would miss moving away from Unraid too much. I have gotten used to it, and the earlier reviews for the TS-451 don't seem to make any great guarantees about Plex transcoding performance which is important to me. I can save a couple hundred bucks by going with 3 x 3TB drives (as opposed to 2 x 6TB) and honestly, expansion size isn't that important to me anymore. I do not store a ton of content. Just for arguments sake, is there a case similar to the PC-Q25B that is even smaller but maintains the hot-swap bays and perhaps uses a mini-itx motherboard that anyone can recommend? As I mentioned I do not see myself putting in more than 4 hard drives, ever. So, the PC-Q25B is even bigger than I'd really like (though at first glance it might be the best I can hope for). I'd love something with the footprint of one of those pre-builts like the QNAP device.
  3. Unfortunately I do not have much time to tinker these days so do not keep up on hardware developments. I am running my unraid with 7 hdd's of various sizes in a large tower with a P4 3.2Ghz Northwood- so very oldschool. I assume that it is on borrowed life, but regardless what I am hoping to accomplish is to prepare an entirely new build in a smaller form factor with less hard drives (and noise, and power, etc.). We're moving into a new home and there isn't a great closet space like our current home, so this may be sitting near our home theatre. Ideally I'd throw in 3 x 4TB WD Red drives with 8TB of total space. That will be more than sufficient for our needs. So, the question becomes what kind of case/motherboard/cpu should I use. I'd like to transcode 1080p via plex which I can't do now. I do use sab/sickbeard/transmission too. I'm guessing my minimum CPU would be an i5 and that 4 gigs of ram would be sufficient but welcome the feedback. Where I'd really like some recommendations are on the case- does anyone have a good case they can suggest to fit 4 hard drives with a decent amount of room to work? Thanks!
  4. I don't suppose this is still alive? Would love a google drive solution (especially given the recent increase in storage allotment).
  5. The price for an E3 1220V2 (3.10ghz) is only a few bucks more than an i5-4570. Would I need a different motherboard and memory combination for that to work out, and either way, would that be beneficial? I'm leaning towards this motherboard and memory: ASUS Z87-PLUS ATX LGA1150 Z87 DDR3 3PCI-E16 2PCI-E1 2PCI SLI SATA3 USB3.0 DVI HDMI Motherboard (because it has 8 SATA ports) G.SKILL Ripjaws X F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL 8GB 2X4GB DDR3-1600 CL9-9-9-24 Memory (because it's on sale)
  6. Oh, another question came up from googling- would the "s" model make sense if one of the things I'm trying to accomplish is cutting down on energy usage? Would that impact performance on plex transcoding?
  7. Neat website, I'm in Canada but it's still helpful for building. Thanks! Do you have any hotswap cages for your Antec 900 you'd recommend? One of the biggest pains for me (and something discouraging about not just going with a prebuilt nas) is that working within the machine is so time consuming and cumbersome for me. I'd love something simple with respect to putting drives in and taking them out. I've only just learned what SAS is- is it worth it looking for a mobo that supports it, and then a few hotswap enclosures for the drives?
  8. Great! Thanks for the tip, I didn't realize that the "K" signified "unlocked" and forgot what that meant. I used to know all about overclocking (my celeron 300 at 450 was a beast). I did some cursory looking and it seems like 6 sata ports is standard, but for cleanliness of cables and ease of use I'd love to have a board that can handle 8 so that I don't have to bother with cards. If anyone has a suggestion, I'm all ears.
  9. I think it's just about time to retire my HTPC, which has dutifully run XBMC for many years now. I can't deal with the lack of netflix, google play all access, etc. so will be moving towards a Chromecast and Roku setup with Plex. My unraid is built around a P4 3.2Ghz Northwood, so I don't think it'll have the horsepower to transcode any HD content. So, time to upgrade. I used to be very up to date with computer hardware but don't have the time these days so thought I'd ask for some basic advice. I'm looking at this bundle: ASUS Z87-A ATX SLI Motherboard & Intel Core i5 4670K Unlocked Quad Core Processor to go along with 8 or 16GB or RAM. I'm hoping this'll support transcoding of at least 2 x 1080p streams. Can anyone comment on whether this'll be sufficient? I already have some sort of SATA expansion card in my existing machine (though I honestly can't remember what it is, maybe something by Startec). A decent HSF recommendation would be helpful too, something easy to install. I'm going to try to swap out the motherboard/cpu/ram in my Antec 900 case. I'll probably try to consolidate at least 2 hard drives too, as I'm currently using 7 drives for only about 7.25gb of data (mostly 1tb drives, but a 2tb parity and data drive along with a 750gb drive). I'm considering moving into a different case, but it seems like the Antec 900 is still well regarded. I'd love something quieter and definitely something easier to work inside of (I hate getting my hands cut up) but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. Thanks!
  10. Thanks for the tips. I've renamed the apcupsd pkg and tgz files, I've copied everything off the drive, formatted and copied it back and still no luck. I do have a printout of my drive assignments so I suppose I can start over if necessary, but I'd like to avoid that as I would have to redo all my shares and redo all the plugin configuration. I wonder if anyone has any other suggestions? edit: I also scanned the disk in windows, and repaired errors found.
  11. bump... getting worried. disabled everything in my go script, still no boot...
  12. I accidentally shut down unraid using "shutdown" rather than "powerdown" from the terminal yesterday, and now it won't reboot. The logs aren't showing me the error but it appears to be hanging on apcupsd upon reboot (I'm on rc5-b16c). I've tried booting to safe mode which also isn't work. message is: apcupsd: no process killed >>>waiting... >>>waiting... >>>waiting... and this continues to loop over and over. When booting in safe mode, it also hangs. Since I can't copy and paste the error logs, I took a couple of pictures of the screen. http://imgur.com/QRw9usy,ciAcK92 Any thoughts?
  13. I upgraded to rc-16c (from 5 or 8, I think) yesterday and in doing so have created a problem. I now can't boot. When I upgraded by copying bzimage and bzoot, the server hung. I thought that the usb drive may have gotten damaged somehow (the system is headless, so I couldn't see what was going on) so I brought it to my laptop and ran make_bootable.bat. Still no luck booting. Today I brought home a monitor and realized it was my cmos battery that died, so I fixed up the bios and rebooted to be greeted by this error which I gather is related to syslinux. I'm at a loss as to where to go from here. I've run make_bootable.bat again and the drive still won't boot. Any suggestions about how to get it back up and running? Would copying all the files off, formatting, copying the files back, and running make_bootable.bat be an awful idea? edit: ok, glad I didn't do anything stupid(er). I found the version of menu.c32 that matched the newer version of syslinux.exe I copied over in the unraid install, once the two matched up it booted fine.