wsume99

He already has the case. Why spend $250+ for a case to house 3 drives if you've got something that will do the job right now? You may need to upgrade in the future, but I don't see the need right now.

I'd have to agree with that and if I were going to buy a case today for a server it would be the 590 (unless I was going to build something real big). It's really the best value out there for a new unRAID system. The only reason I'm using a 300 is because I already had one.

I'd have to partially disagree with this. I'm currently using an Antec 300 and it does a wonderful job of cooling my drives (WD greens & black). With the two case fans on low my temps never go above 33C. If I set the fans on high they all stay below 30C. The reason to get a 590 instead of the 300 is total drive capacity. The 590 can hold up to 15 drives with three 5-in-3 hot swap bays installed. The 300 can only hold 11 drives max - 6 internally and 5 in a hot swap bay. If you go with the 300 you'll have to upgrade your case in the future to go beyond 11 drives.

Your problem here is going to be how to determine which connectors are on what rail. I would seriously consider getting this power supply. It will handle anything you can throw at it. At a minimum I would get one with a single 12v rail.

For the server you should consider this Newegg combo deal. ASUS M4A785-M + AMD Sempron 145 You'll save a few bucks. Also, many long time users on the forum consider it a bad practice to buy more than one of the same drive from a single vendor at a time. They would suggest doing one of the following: wait a while (maybe a few months) before getting your second drive from Newegg, order a drive from a different mfg from Newegg now, or get your second WD20EARS now but use another source (Amazon, TigerDirect, etc). Your HTPC is fine, but if you're only going to stream bluray, dvd, & music from your server then I'd suggest you look into getting a nvidia ION based SFF PC. It will be smaller, cheaper, and use less power. The Zotac ZBOX HD-ID11-U would do that perfectly running xbmc live using a SD card or the complete xbmc install on a SSD to keep the heat down.

Did you spin down the drives before sending the command?

Well now I'm totally clueless. After I noticed that strange behavior at the beginnng of my preclear I removed the initialization of the sleep script from the go file because I wanted to get my new drive checked out. I've left the sleep script out for the past few days while I've been reorganizing my array - swapping drives in and out, preclearing, rebuilding parity, etc. Well I finished that up on Wed night. Last night I put the two lines back in my go file to initialize the sleep script. I installed a spare 160G HDD as well. Rebooted the server and started a preclear on the 160G drive. So I'm right back to the scenario when I first noticed the anomaly. Once the all the drives in my array spun down I waited and nothing happened, no spinning up and down of the idle drives like before. WTF I don't know what to say, I know it happened once before but I cannot reproduce it now. Of course my array is different now after adding a new drive and I'm preclearing a different HDD so that may have something to do with it. So I'm just going to have to let this one go I guess. Maybe there was something specific to the firmware of that WD20EARS drive? However I will be paying close attention to see if it ever happens again. Maybe if I sneek down in the basement in stealth mode I can catch it in the act! Sorry for the distraction.

Well my theory that the hdparm command was spinning up the HDDs was incorrect. If this was true then this strange spinning up and back down would occurr whenever a disk was spun down (aka asleep). I have verified this is not happening. So I'm back to what papnikol suggested before. What I observed was exactly the same as what I've seen when my server goes to sleep. It's as though the server was trying to go to sleep (and it shouldn't have) but something stopped it. I'm focusing on steps 1 and 4 of the sequence. Is it possible that a drive being precleared would appear asleep to the s3 script but then when the server tries to sleep for whatever reason the preclear stops the sleep process? I've just finished swapping out a drive in my server so now I can test this condition to see if I can reproduce it. Once I can reporduce it then (with your guys help) I might be able to solve this mystery.

I'd give this guy an A+ for creativity. I don't need a $250+ case, I'll make mine from a $17 sheet of plywood and it'll be sweet. It's a good thing he dialed the fan voltage back to 9v. A few more volts and he'd have to file a flight plan for that thing.

LOL - Did you catch the leaning tower of HDDs on the desk in the 5th picture? Gotta run - I'm on my way to Home Depot ....

That's how I viewed it as well. I was thinking that the OP wanted more than 16 drives and that's why he was asking about a 4-port PCIe x1 card. I overlooked the post where he said that 16 drives would be more than enough for him. Sorry about that.

What about using the IDE port? I've seen SATA to IDE adapters that you could install onto a SATA drive so you could connect it to your IDE port. Couldn't you add 2 more drives that way?

Oh believe me I always try using the promo codes. That's how I found out that Newegg doesn't allow it. I've never been lucky enough to slip one by them though. I guess I'll have to keep trying.

No problem. I just went throught this myself about 6 weeks ago so it's still fresh in my mind. Once you confirm that your server enters S3 when commanded and will wake after receiving the WOL command then you're halfway there. Part II is to make it go to sleep on it's own. Just follow the guide and you'll be fine.

Not that it matters now, but just FYI I believe you cannot use a promo code on a combo deal. Anyhow great deal, sorry I missed out an that one. :'(

Yes. No. But you should make sure that your ACPI is set to S3 in your BIOS. My MB has two options - S1 and S3. Your MB may not have this option. Not sure, but I did it with my array started and it worked fine for me. You'll need to send a "magic packet" from another PC on the LAN to the MAC address of the NIC in your server. I highly recommend you write down your server's MAC address before putting it to sleep. You can find it on the Settings page of the unRAID webGUI. I found a link on the How-To wiki titled Setup Sleep (S3) and Wake on Lan (WOL). It's in the Utility section. This guide will walk you through all the steps, including how to send the magic packet. I would have provided a direct link to that post but I thought that you might find some of the other info on the How-To wiki useful as well. Power on by X is not what you're looking for. You want WOL by PME. WOL by PME is what you want to be sure is enabled in your BIOS. If there is no BIOS setting then it is probably just enabled and you can't change it. Here is a description from my MB manual of WOL by PME... Allows the system to be awakened from an ACPI sleep state by a wake-up signal from a PCI or PCIe device. Note: To use this function, you need an ATX power supply providing at least 1A on the +5VSB lead. (Default: Enabled) Checking my MB architecture diagram I can see that the GigE port is connected to the PCIe bus so the WOL signal would be received on the PCIe bus. Most likely your MB is the same. Yes. Force it off. When you reboot it will most likely start a parity check by itself because you did not properly power down. That has been my experience.

Did you edit your go file to automatically load unMenu at boot? Check out my post here for my newbie-speak unMenu installation guide, it seems to have worked for another user.

You'll also need an H55 MB if you plan on using the integrated graphics provided by the i3/i5 chips.

Go ahead and install the drives in the server but do not add them to the array without preclearing them first. At least I would not advise it. Preclearing your drives before adding them to the array is a good practice and it minimizes the downtime of the server. Since your server isn't running the downtime issue is not a concern but the health of the drives you are about to add should be. To run the preclear process you need to add the script to the root directory of your boot drive. The instructions on how to install and run the preclear script are in this post.

I guess that really depends on how soon you think that you are going to expand past 16 drives. If you want to install more than one MV8 card you'll probably need to move up to an ATX board. You should be able to find what you're looking for at around $100. If it's going to be a while (like 2+ years) before you think you'll need more than 16 drives you might want to just stick with what you've picked out now. Don't forget you could use the IDE controller for a cache drive if you wanted. So you could get 15 data + 1 parity on SATA and 1 IDE cache drive. 15 2TB drives would give you a lot of storage.

I believe you are mistaken. I checked the link that you provided in your OP and on the ASUS site it says the board has the following ports: 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16 1 x PCIe x1 2 x PCI So no the Asus M4A78L-M will not accept two of the MV8 cards it will only accept one. Greybeard is correct this board can support 16 drives between onboard SATA and PCIe slots (8 in x16 + 2 in x1). I believe you can also add maybe 2-4 more with a PCI controller card. Some users avoid using the PCI slots because they share bandwidth which usually means that if you get more than 2 drives attached on the PCI bus then you could start to see a performance hit. The board you have selected will support 16 drives no problem with a potential to go as high as 20 if you are willing to accept a little lower throughput on those last 4 drives. There are ways to setup/allocate the disks in your array to minimize the impact of the PCI bandwith limitation. If you seach the forum you'll find numerous discussions of this topic

Gotta love that GigE Glad it's working for you.

I don't think this is correct. If you have a Movies share then setting a split level of 1 will make certain that the contents of any folder placed inside of the Movies share will all be on the same disk. If you set the split level at 2 then the contents of the folder placed inside the Movies share could be spread across all the disks in the Movie share. Check the unRAID manual for the explanation of split levels. The important point is that no matter how you have your shares folders structured you want to set the split level high enough to be sure that you are not spreading the files within an individual movie folder (i.e. Avatar, Gladiator, Transformers, etc.) across multiple disks. Let me see if I can show an example. Split Level 1 - Movies Share (includes disks 1, 2, & 3) - Avatar (disk 1) - everything in this folder must be on disk 1 - VIDEO_TS.BUP (disk 1) - VIDEO_TS.IFO (disk 1) - VTS_01_0.BUP (disk 1) - VTS_01_0.IFO (disk 1) - VTS_01_1.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_2.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_3.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_4.VOB (disk 1) - Gladiator (disk 2) - everything in this folder must be on disk 2 - VIDEO_TS.BUP (disk 2) - VIDEO_TS.IFO (disk 2) - VTS_01_0.BUP (disk 2) - VTS_01_0.IFO (disk 2) - VTS_01_1.VOB (disk 2) - VTS_01_2.VOB (disk 2) - VTS_01_3.VOB (disk 2) - VTS_01_4.VOB (disk 2) Split Level 2 Movies Share (includes disks 1, 2, & 3) - Avatar (disk 1) - VIDEO_TS.BUP (disk 1) - VIDEO_TS.IFO (disk 2) - VTS_01_0.BUP (disk 3) - VTS_01_0.IFO (disk 3) - VTS_01_1.VOB (disk 2) - VTS_01_2.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_3.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_4.VOB (disk 1) - Gladiator (disk 2) - VIDEO_TS.BUP (disk 2) - VIDEO_TS.IFO (disk 1) - VTS_01_0.BUP (disk 2) - VTS_01_0.IFO (disk 3) - VTS_01_1.VOB (disk 2) - VTS_01_2.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_3.VOB (disk 1) - VTS_01_4.VOB (disk 3) Hope that makes sense. Perhaps I have interpreted the unRAID manual incorrectly but I have my shares setup exactly as hunter69 proposed with a split level 1 and none of my individual movies are spread across multiple disks.

^^So if you've configured your SATA controller in AHCI mode then spin-up groups would not apply?

Do you have different spindown groups defined? If so, then that could cause this. Otherwise I would agree that this doesn't make sense.