Nick_D

Thank you @ConnerVT That makes things much clearer. I appreciate you dumbing it down for me.

So I read through that thread and it did help a little. I am still not clear on why he is using some of the hardware. Like the LSI card and the SAS card...I don't really understand how those "work" in this setup. Isn't the LSI card a RAID card? I thought unraid didn't need RAID cards? He has 10 hard drives...where do those connect? All 10 to the RAID card? Obviously I am still not clear about how this all "works"

Hey Guys Current Hardware : I have 3 Drobos (2x8Ds & 1x5D). The 5D has been nothing but problems since day 1 - With all the confusion surrounding drobo I decided to look at alternatives. 8D (1) : 8x8TB 8D (2) : 4x8TB & 4x12TB 5D : 3x8TB & 1x6TB & 1x4TB External USB : 2x2TB & 2x8TB My Issue : standalone NAS servers seem to cap out at 8/12 drives and need to be the same size drive. Purpose : A storage unit that needs to be able to send data for 4K movies to a media player (Zidoo) Current Situation : Have the 3 Drobos connected to my Mac Mini. I use a program on my Mac Mini to serve the data using NFS (although there are other protocols it supports if that makes a difference). The Zidoo player find the NFS shares and plays the Blu-Ray movie. A couple movies push 100MB/s or so but I generally don't have an issue (unless things are being written to the drobos while I am trying to play those higher bitrate movies). What I am looking for : The best system for this purpose...not sure what that is...a fractal define 7 to hold 18 drives...but then what? What motherboard? What processor? What else? As you can see, I don't know what the hell I am even asking...any help would be greatly appreciated!