Shurik

I feel your pain! My Corsair 450VX bought in May 2010 seems to be running fine so far, but then again - I have only 5 drives running off of it.

I figured I don't want a backplane and I just added CM 4-in-3 cage into my CM Centurion 590: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817993002&Tpk=stb-3t4-e3-gp Sure, it's not a 5-in-3 module, but it's lightweight, doesn't add extra bulk to the case, fits in perfectly and has the same 120mm quiet fan as the stock HDD cage of Centurion 590. And it's cheap, as oppose to all those backplane modules. I don't think there is a reason to go beyond 10-12 HDDs anyway, considering that even 2TB are cheap now.

Hi bcbgboy13, Did you happen to try the card that suppose to be compatible with regular MBs? I find this item very interesting, but not sure if it would work with my H57 Gigabyte board in JBOD configuration... Any news would be welcome!

Sorry to hear about such a short leash you've got there

By then his 'backup' file will be 3.7TB and off we go again

Wow, thanks a LOT for your detailed answers, aiden! Well, I will be looking at this board then hoping for it's availability in the next few weeks. Electricity around here is quite expensive so I would want to minimize the load as much as I can.

"Right matched parts" seems to be the keyword here That's why I was concerned about compatibility with memory.

I have that case for my HTPC with Atom 330 - that little thing does wonders with 1080p video while hanging on vesa mounts behind the TV.

Aiden, I am looking at building a system now and I was considering this board after reading your posts (if it is at all possible to procure it), but I had few questions if you don't mind, since you've had this board for a while now. I haven't used unRaid before, so all of this is very new to me as I'm looking to move away from hardware RAID5 solution I have now. 1. Do you use unRaid for anything but nas (nzbget, sabnzbd, anything else)? I need something with low power consumption (electricity here is quite expensive), but I want to be able to run few extra things on unRaid box. If I cannot have a little extra room for addons then I'd rather go i3 route (apparently not that bad of a power hog either). 2. How many drives do you have running off this board? I might be wrong, but I believe that one of the new PCI-e Supermicro SATA controllers is now supported by unRaid. Do you, by any chance, have that as well? 3. Did you have hard time getting correct memory for the board - I run across quite a few reviews on the internet with complaints about memory issues with Supermicro boards (not this one in particular). 4. How does IPMI works for you? Again - read quite a few reviews about issues with that on Supermicro (dropped connectivity, instability). I've never worked with IPMI so I wonder if this is something that you cannot live without once you try it. 5. How does having lower level CPU affect parity checks? I'm planning on having about 6 data drive to start with (8TB total) and wonder what sort of performance hits I might have to take from time to time. Thanks!

According to reviews on newegg this board comes with a share of issues. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813500043

Don't have any experience with Supermicro boards, but reading quite a few reviews on the net I couldn't help but notice a lot of issues that people experience with memory compatibility and IPMI connectivity. Even the review for this board on newegg mentioned issues with that. Also, I read that few of these 1156 boards from Supermicro don't work that good (or at all) with anything but Xeons (so, no i3/i5/i7). It's getting harder and harder to figure out which components to buy for my computer.

There is no question about the performance and possibility to expand. I totally agree. In my case electricity is somewhat more expensive (~40c per kWh), so I've been thinking about Atom (Supermicro X7SP) as a possible solution, but I keep thinking about i3 as well and so far couldn't make up my mind - just researching the subject. I'm surprised to see your results for power consumption. Also, reading this thread I keep wondering as to why are you so concerned about read/write performance? If you are looking to find a best performing system, then wouldn't it be wise to look at hardware RAID solutions with high performance HDDs as oppose to software solution like unRaid? Or is this just to have faster parity checks? I don't mean this as a disrespect or anything negative, I just have hard time understanding the reason behind all this except for the sake of it. It's the same to me as when people are talking about getting 7200 rpm drives as oppose to lower power 'green' drives. Won't network saturate much faster which will negate the performance of the drives anyway?

Well, if your system is up and running 24/7 with all drives spun up all the time, then, maybe, power draw is not _that_ much different, but if you think about unRaid being in idle state most of the time, then it makes much bigger difference. My 2c.