DoeBoye

Agreed. I also have 3 of the aforementioned internal monoprice ones with the same chipset (sil3132) in my system. 1 in a x1 slot, 2 in x16 slots. mobo: Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H They all work well. For the record, I ran them out of the box with the raid bios, and they worked fine (just got an error on boot saying raid wasn't enabled because only one drive on card). Have since flashed them all with the bios to make them into a regular sata controller.

I just recently built a system around the Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H. It has 6 built-in SATA ports, 3 1x pci-e slots, 1 8x pci-e slot, and 1 16x pci-e slot. I currently have 7 drives plugged in using the onboard ports and the 2 port 1x pci-e sata card from monoprice.com. I have 3 of the 2-port cards currently plugged in, and the board registers all of them. This is a good thing, as it seems some/many boards limit the 8x and 16x slots to supporting video cards only... Currently I am using the SATA board plugged into the 16x slot, and will be adding a 400GB drive to the 8x slot. My long term plan is to eventually have 12 drives running... Once my system is finished (In the process of converting all my movies to isos), I will be testing for Level 1 and 2 compatibility. From my own usage, I can tell you that the system has been rock solid. No random reboots or bandwidth issues. The only oddness I have come across is that S3 sleep is not functioning correctly. I tested it before and it worked as expected, and I believe it may have something to do with the add-on SATA cards I have installed since testing it initially. It shuts down when told, and wakes up via magic packet (WOL), but unfortunately, it appears to completely shutdown, rather then going into s3 (Though it still wakes up without problem, it just reboots the machine....). It's become less of an issue for me, however, as I realized it would almost never have the opportunity to go into S3 sleep, as I am using it to store my email locally, and the drives are constantly being accessed by my work PC anyhow... Though I haven't tested it, logic would dictate that you should not have a problem if you use 4-port sata cards rather then the 2-ports that I am using, and that should give you a minimum of 18 drives (6 on-board + 3*4-ports). Again, I HAVE NOT TESTED 4-port cards, so buyer beware etc etc ... [EDIT] Just realized that 4-port cards may not be supported in 1x ports. If that is the case, you would need to go with 2 4-port cards in the 8x and 16x, and 2 port cards in the 1x slots.... Or find a supported denser PCI-e card... I think an 8-port PCI-e card is in the process of getting supported, but you'll have to talk to the experts on the board . [/EDIT] As far as processor, from what I have read on this board, if you are not running other apps concurrently (torrents etc), entry level cpus are fine. I am using the Sempron 140, and it works a treat! Hope this helps! Cheers, DB. PS: As an aside, I initially was going to use the Gigabyte GA-MA785G-UD3H, but the shipment was delayed so I bought the UD4H locally. I believe some other users are also using the UD3H, so it does have more backing.... Though I think it is one of those boards that does not support SATA controllers in its 8x and 16x slots... You may want to query the forum for more input from users who actually own one...

Though I can't speak for unRaid, I am using an SD card to boot my XBMC HTPC and it works very well. I bought one of the new Class 10 ones (Benchmarks at around 17 - 20 MB/s read+write). I think I paid around $40 cdn... It might do the trick for unRaid... Not too mention if kids/pets are a concern, personally I would rather boot a few seconds slower and have the security of my array not being at risk of a critter's curiosity... Also, though it's been mentioned before in this forum (It's where I got the idea), you can buy a little mini usb header to usb port adapter and have the usb stick on the inside (which is what I've done). In a small case, you may need to search for a tiny usb stick, but they certainly exist...) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220450&cm_re=patriot_class_10-_-20-220-450-_-Product http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815201028&cm_re=usb_header_adapter-_-15-201-028-_-Product

Doh! Too late! Just saw this post this morning, and I pulled the drives last night and flashed them from my Windows box!! Thanks anyways! ... Though frankly, as a complete and utter Linux newb, I'm a bit nervous to try something that I could mess up and kill my unRaid

Will do!

So I was looking to procrastinate on doing some other work and figured I'd give this a whirl... Unfortunately, though it boots up without problem (I *did* have to remove my unRaid Stick), the image would not load . I only had a few minutes to spare so couldn't delve too deeply, but looks like it's not be a solution for no cd drive. I guess I'll be pulling them out and flashing them on the windows machine. Sigh.

Hey folks, Just precleared an older Seagate 1TB drive. Tried to interpret these numbers, but I'm having trouble making heads or tails of them... < 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 147540226 --- > 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 108 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 16402173 59c59 < 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 060 056 030 Pre-fail Always - 231985297980 --- > 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 060 056 030 Pre-fail Always - 236280364147 65,67c65,67 < 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1 < 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 075 053 045 Old_age Always - 25 (Lifetime Min/Max 23/25) < 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 039 019 000 Old_age Always --- > 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2 > 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 075 053 045 Old_age Always - 25 (Lifetime Min/Max 23/26) > 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 050 019 000 Old_age Always Thanks for any advice!

Hello All, Here's a great little app that allows you to 'burn' an iso image to a usb stick to make it bootable: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ I used it a few days ago to install XBMC Live to my media server, and just found out I need to use it again for my unRaid box. Turns out when I opened my external hd case to pillage the drives for my unRaid box, the 2 1GB drives I had in it that I thought were WD Blacks, turned out to be Seagate ST310s with the bad firmware . The patch from Seagate needs to be burned to a cd and run at boot time, so I thought of this little app again. Still pre-clearing one of the Seagates, so haven't run it yet, but the iso mounted fine on the usb stick, so hopefully it will boot without conflict with the existing usb stick. If it does conflict, would it be a problem to remove the unRaid usb key for the firmware upgrade, the put it back in when complete? Thanks for any advice!

Hey folks! The Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H appears to support PCI-e sata cards in all PCI-e slots! What a pleasant surprise! I have tested a x1 card (Monoprice 2 port card) in the 3 x1 slots, as well as in the x8 and x16 slot. So question: Assuming it doesn't disable the x1 slots when the x8 and x16 are being used (Don't have enough cards to actually test that yet, but could find no mention of that in the manual), and assuming the an 8-port x4 card will soon be supported (I've read it may be in next release), theoretically (assuming there was no licensing limit on number of drives), this board could support 28 drives (6 mobo headers, 3 x1 slots) ?? Thoughts?

@bubbaQ: Yeah, I read some good things about the unlocking. If I was using this as an actual PC, I may have tried harder to unlock the core ... I set the bios to hybrid and enabled the ACC, but did not see any change... Oh well. Maybe I have a non-unlockable chip. I was kind of glad it didn't come with esata, as I would have had to convert it back to SATA to use it for another disk in the array anyways. The plan is eventually to get 12 disks in here. @VampyreGTX : Absolutely will do! I just wanted to get things up and running first, but it's on my list to do! Once I got unRaid to install (My flash drive was being picky and needed to use the HP tool), this motherboard was extremely easy to get running! It should support 12 drives as well (And potentially more if one of the x16 slots would actually take a SATA card...)

Hey All! New to the whole UnRaid thing, but I have to say, I am pretty excited! After doing a bunch of research, I bought all my components, assembled everything, and installed a Pro license. Specs: Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-UD4H (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=3003) CPU: Sempron 140 Ram: GSkill 8500 2x 1GB Drives: 4x 2TB WD Green, 1x 1.5TB WD Green, 2x 1TB WD Black Case: Coolermaster Centurion 590 PS: Corsair TX 750W So far, the board is working like a champ . Only thing I had to do to make it work was flash it to the newest bios as it was missing the ability to shut off HPA in the original bios. It is supposed to be able to unlock the second core on my Sempron 140, but I didn't have much success (Didn't try too hard either, as I don't believe it would really make much difference in this application, and may add to instability). Passed parity tests no problem. No GB lan issues. No errors or crashes of any kind after 48 hours... Drives 1 2.0TB WD Green for Parity 1 1.5TB WD Green for Cache 2 2.0TB WD Green for storage Will be adding the 1.0GB WD Black drives once they are empty of existing content. Once all the content is transferred over and parity checks are passed, I'm going to move the 1.5TB drive into the array and put an old 320GB IDE drive in as Cache drive. Which leads me to my first question: Will using an older IDE drive as a cache drive slow things down? Currently getting 40 - 50 MB/s write speeds to SATA Cache drive. Writing to the array is usually at around 25-30 MB/s, so if the IDE Cache drive won't improve much on that, it might not be worth it... I've tested S3 functionality, and it works like a charm. Shuts down as it should. Turns on as it should. I can expand more once it is actually fully operational, if anyone is interested. The board has 3 x1 PCI-e slots, as well as two x16. I have 3 PCI-e x1 SATA cards from Monoprice that I will be testing shortly. Though I don't hold out much hope for the x16 slots, I'll try them out as well and report back! Guess that's it for now! I want to thank this community for all the fantastic information and help threads. I would never have gotten this far without you guys! Cheers, DB.

For the Canadians in the audience, Direct Canada is selling the non-EARS 2TB WD Green drives for 169$cdn. Free shipping if you buy 2, or 9.99 for one. http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=25350DR0501&vpn=WD20EADS&manufacture=Western%20Digital%20WD