I have been looking to increase my storage capacity for a while to accommodate my foray into making videos and to have somewhere to backup my DVD collection so I put those discs in storage. And a guy at work tipped me off to unRAID. I hate to delete anything plus I'm not a big fan of hard drive failures. I just decided to go for the budget model that was suggested on the wiki site to get started and will build it up as needed. Here's what my shopping list ended up being:
Case: Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower ($60)
PSU: CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX ($30)
Mobo: BIOSTAR A760G M2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 760G Micro ATX ($65)
RAM: Kingston 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 ($55)
CPU: AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core ($33)
HDD: 2xSamsung SpinPoint 1TB ($70 each), 1xSeagate Barracuda 1.5TB ($80)
So, my total was $463, which seems pretty good compared to the box listed on the wiki page.
So, I decided to give this a shot and so far, so good. I'm not computer savvy at all, well not to the degree that everyone else on the forum is. Just looking at all the parts laid out was kinda overwhelming. But putting everything together seemed relatively quick. (Considering I've never put a computer together before.)
It only took me 2 hours to get everything hooked up and running. It only took me another 30 minutes to realize I forgot to plug in the power for the CPU.
Here it is chugging along doing its first parity-sync. Only 350 minutes to go.
Hopefully, I can figure this stuff out without asking a bunch of dumb questions. I've already learned a lot just from reading this thread.