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I recently bought a SATA card as well but had trouble with it when connected to the x1 slots on a Dell motherboard. It would work in the x16 slot, but not the x1 slots. I have replaced that CPU motherboard and RAM with something newer and it works in the X4 slots on this motherboard. For some reason the x1 slots wouldn't power up during boot. The lights on the card would turn on briefly but go back out. That only affected the SATA card though. I had a network card installed as well and it worked fine

OK. I only had 8GB before the hardware upgrade yesterday and never had a crash. Odd that I now have twice as much and ran out. Hmmm

OK, I managed to figure it out. I believe this was from before the reboot. mytower-diagnostics-20241006-1027.zip

I ran diagnostics from the command line before I rebooted. I'm not sure how to retrieve that one though.

Made some hardware changes yesterday to the server, replacing the motherboard, CPU, RAM. I also installed a couple of 256GB SSDs that I plan to use for cache, but haven't done anything with them other than clearing them. Everything seemed to be working fine. Woke up this morning and couldn't access the server via WebGUI. I could ping it, but that was all. So I grabbed the keyboard and rebooted from the command line. Hoping someone can help me with the diagnostics. mytower-diagnostics-20241006-1040.zip

Recently I have started getting back into hosting media and trying out Jellyfin. While trying to stream to my Living Room TV I realized that my hardware is not up to task. Existing server is an old Dell XPS platform with an i5-2300, 8GB of RAM. I added a PCIe to SATA adapter and now have 6 disks in the array, 1 parity and 5 data drives running unRAID Basic license (I'm at 6 disks so I'll have to upgrade this to add any more). I have acquired a Dell Precision 3630 with an i7-8700, 16GB RAM, a Quadro P1000, and a 256 GB SATA SSD. I also have two other 256GB Sata SSDs hanging out in older laptops that I am considering using for cache drives. So this is really a multi-topic post, which may or may not be the best way to try and get help but here goes. I'm using the *arr apps and Jellyfin so I'm considering using the cache drives (up to 3 256GB drives) to help speed things up along with the new hardware. I was thinking of using one of the drives to hold the appdata/Dockers. What is the best way to add the cache drive and move this data to the cache drive? The other 2 drives I may use as cache drives for media downloads, but I don't download much right now. Does it make sense to use 2 drives? RAID 1 for speed or something else? When first testing Jellyfin on my living room TV I wasn't able to stream a ripped bluray without stuttering using the Jellyfin client directly on the TV, a Sony Bravia XBR55X810C. I thought the issue was the server since the hardware is older. But after making a change in my router to give the TV high priority I was able to test stream even a 4K file for a few minutes without any noticeable stutter so maybe the older hardware was OK for this after all. I have not upgraded to the newer hardware yet. I still plan to use the newer hardware as it will just perform much better than my existing hardware for all tasks. I notice that just scanning media in the *arr apps brings the existing system to its knees. Is the 8700 enough by itself to do the streaming and all other server related tasks? Use quicksync? Try it without the P1000 first? Is there any special setup I need to do in Jellyfin or anywhere else if I use quicksync? How should I set up the Jellyfin settings for both server and client to get the best experience? I also noticed that I was only getting 2ch audio to my receiver through ARC from the TV so I need to figure that out as well. Forgive me if all of this sounds trivial or sporadic. I'm just starting out on trying to figure this out and I think I might be trying to do too much at one time maybe? At the same time I don't want to have to undo a bunch of stuff down the road that I should have done from the start. I might not even be asking all the right questions. Thanks for your time and let me know if you need any more information.

Thanks. I tried all other slots and it looks like it works in the x16 slot only. Bummer, at least for adding a GPU later, but the drives are showiung up in unassigned devices now at least.

I have a motherboard (OY2MRG), i5-2300, and 8GB of RAM from an old Dell XPS-8300 that I am using for my unRAID server. Recently I have started getting back into storing media on this server and so I picked up a couple of 12TB HDD to add to the server for more storage. I also bought a PCIe to SATA adapter to add more ports as the 4 onboard were already in use. I bought this one as it has the ASM1064 chip which I read is supposed to be supported by unRAID. I got everything installed and powered on the system, but the BIOS nor unRAID see the drives. The card has some LEDs on it and they turn on when the PC boots up, but go off as soon as post completes and do not come back on. The BIOS is severely limited in its options (it's a Dell after all) and I don't see any options that jump out at me but I'm certainly open to suggestions. Otherwise it looks like I'm limited to 4 SATA devices for the time being until I upgrade the platform (which might be sooner rather than later if I can't get these drives working, lol). I tried 2 of the 3 PCIex1 slots and neither worked (but showed lights during boot). The third slot has a NIC in it as the onboard NIC died years ago. The x16 slot is unavailable but I may be adding a GPU to this server as well for transcoding. I added the diagnostics just in case (think I did it correctly). mytower-diagnostics-20240923-1121.zip

This server has been in this same configuration for YEARS. I don't see myself needing larger disks, but things can always change. In all honesty I could probably get rid of half the data on this server and never miss it (mostly movies that we no longer watch on our HTPC because we can stream them from various services). Instead this server is mostly just a place to backup our other PCs.

I agree. Having to use the switch on the PSU sounds like thermal or over current protection.

Got the new drive and finished the swap. Everything went as planned. Anything else I should do now? mytower-diagnostics-20220629-0803.zip

Thanks. I'll pick up the new drive tomorrow.

I can get a 4TB drive locally but that would have to become the parity drive. I've had an issue with Amazon and shipping with these disks.

Yes. Can I just replace the drive and allow the data to be rebuilt from parity or should I clone the drive to a new one and then add it to the array?

Diagnostics here. mytower-diagnostics-20220626-1613.zip