wsume99

I got mine yesterday as well. That is a bogus excuse. You better believe that if I had paid full price that the order would not have been canceled and instead the e-mail would have said that the item was on backorder and would be shipped as soon as the item was in stock.

Yes - except depending on the results of #1 you may not want to proceed to #2.

Here you go... BTW, I don't know why Intel doesn't just include a low profile bracket with their full size PCI NIC, but they don't. PCI:Intel PWLA8391GT Desktop Adapter PRO/1000 GT 10/100/1000Mbps PCI 1 x RJ45 - OEM: $30 w/ Free Shipping (I have this NIC and it works perfectly. I wish I could say the same for my onboard Realtek 8111C NIC) PCI (low profile):Intel PWLA8391GTL Desktop Adapter PRO/1000 GT Low Profile 10/100/1000Mbps PCI 1 x RJ45 - OEM: $27 + $3 Shipping PCI-e: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Network Adapter 10/100/1000Mbps PCI-Express 1 x RJ45: $28 w/ Free Shipping

There is no problem using the PCI bus. If you absolutely want to avoid any issues then Intel NICs are the only way to go. The Netgear uses a realtek chip which is basically the same one that's on the MB. I'm not sure about the D-link. The issue with realtek NICs is that the drivers built into the linux kernel are just not very good. Limetech usually uses older kernels to ensure that unRAID is more stable but the problem with that is then you are getting older versions of the NIC driver which depending on which unRAID version you are using will cause problems.

That's because onSale is out of stock. The item is now being fulfilled by Amazon.

+1 - In for 3 myself. If this works I'll be laughing to myself for quite some time.

Feeling lucky is right. That MB is on the list of Hardware Known NOT To Work on the wiki.

This sems to be a frequent sale price for this drive now that WD bought Hitachi. HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Well if you factor in the cost of 4 5-in-3 hot swap bays @$90 ea then the Norco 4224 is definitely cheaper and it can hold more disks (24 vs. 20). So it really comes down to how many drives you need/want to hold and do you need/want hot swap capability. If so, then the Norco's are the cheapest route. If not, then I agree that the Antec 1200 is probably one of the best options out there. I have my server in an Antec 300 and so far it has been great. It's pretty cheap but still high quality.

Assuming you do what I said above, it won't matter where you use the EARS or EADS disks - they will all basically perform the same. If you want to keep the data on the EADS drive then I would use the two new EARS drives first, one as a data drive and the other as parity. Then you can move the data off the EADS drive onto your parity-protected 2TB unRAID array. Once you've got the data on the array then you can preclear the EADS drive (which will erase all the data on it) and then add it to the array as a second data disk. That would bump the capacity of the array up to 4TB.

I use the USB to ethernet cable with my Back-UPS ES 550 and it works perfectly. It took me about 3 minutes to setup. It really could not be any easier - all you need to do is use the package manager in unMenu and it's a piece of cake.

No jumper needed on EARS drives if you are using unRAID 4.7 or newer. Just make sure that you change the Default partition format option on the Settings page in the unRAID webGUI to MBR: 4k-aligned. And if you are going to preclear your disks (which I HIGHLY recommend) make sure you download the newest version of Joe L's preclear script and use the -A option as well to ensure that they are 4k-aligned.

Not to discourage you but I don't think there is such a thing as a "silent" 14 drive server. I'm hoping that your intent is to make it as quiet as possible because if you are after silence then I'm afraid that you are going to be disappointed, especially if you are going to use 7200 rpm drives. Also I'm not sure why you are limiting yourself to mITX boards because any case that can hold 14 3.5" HDDs will definitely be able to accomodate a mATX board and most likely a full sized ATX as well. You could try the ASUS E35M1-M PRO mATX board. I have this board in my HTPC. It will support up to 16 drives and it is passively cooled. You can also find quiet CPU coolers. The Scythe Big Shuriken is a popular choice for a quiet CPU cooler and it is compatable with just about any processor out there. I guess what I'm trying to say is that you can pick just about any MB/CPU combo out there and still get relatively quiet operation. The only differences will be cost, performance, and power consumption. I have a Corsair 650TX in my server and can confirm that it is very quiet. Probably the most important selection is going to be the case. If you are after silence then you are going to want to minimize the number of fans in the server. The problem is that in order to get 14 drives into a case you are probably going to have to use 3 5-in-3 drive cages. That means you are going to have at least 3 fans in the case. My advice would be to build the server and see if the noise level is ok. If it is too high in the stock configuration then I would suggest that you replace the stock fans on the drive cages with PWM fans and use a fan speed control script to keep the fans as quiet as possible.

Obviously it should be at least equal to the largest size file you plan on writing to the share. I have my free space set to twice the size of the largest file that I write to the share. I've seen several people recommend this strategy and it's worked just fine for me. For movies I estimate that the largest file that I'd write to the share is ~15GB (1080p mkvs) so I have the free space set at 30000000.

Simple answer - No. But ... personally I keep my preclear reports so I can use them as a historical comparison so that when I run SMART reports on a disk I can go back and compare the results to when the disk was new.

I had a WD20EARS that showed the same behavior that you are seeing. I RMA'd that drive. I suppose WD would say that technically there is nothing wrong with the drive because it is passing the SMART test but I opted the RMA it back to the vendor I purchased it from anyway. I did this because I just didn't feel comfortable adding the drive to my array. The replacement drive cleared without any problems.

Actually I think that the CNQ drivers are not included in 4.7 but they are in 5.0b6. My first server used a sempron 140 and 3 green HDDs and it pulled ~65w when idle because CNQ did not work. I switched to a E5500 and my server now idles at ~42w. If you don't need the processing horsepower for add-ons (like airvideo, etc) then an atom or zacate board would be a good choice.

I'm not sure if you had a typo or not but I believe the default IP address is 192.168.1.150 NOT 192.168.1.50 This is normal. You need to use the Start Sabnzbd button on the User Scripts page of unMenu every time after you reboot to start sabnzbd but you do not have to complete the entire install procedure again because you have enabled it to be reinstalled upon reboot. Assuming he's using Bagpuss' conf file (the one a couple of pages prior), sabnzbd should start on reboot, no? According to his post he's using the package from the first page so I would not expect it to start on reboot. There are so many packages attached to this thread that it is getting hard to follow what is going on.

I'll add my 2 cents ... My server is in a Antec 300 case and I only use a 120mm single fan for cooling. Granted I only have 3 drives + 1 non-array drive for apps running but I think this would work pretty well even if I had more drives. I use a Delta AFC1212D-PWM 120mm Case Fan on the back panel of my case. I disconnected the fan on the top of my case and taped off the opening. Basically air can only enter my case through the front panel - i.e. it must flow across my HDDs. Then I setup my server to adjust the fan speed based upon the highest temp drive in my system. I followed the instructions from these posts to get the script working: X7SPA-HF based small (perfect) server build & Temperature based fan speed control? I am very pleased with how this all worked out in the end. Since my server is in the basement the fan is off most of the time because my temps usually don't go above 30-31c when streaming video. When I run a parity check the fan kicks in at a pretty low speed and keeps the max temps stable at 33-34C. I'm only using about 25% of the fan's total available speed so if I were to add more drives I'm pretty sure I could maintain those temps, it would just require a higher fan rpm. The only hiccup I had was finding a PWM fan that I could command to zero speed.

I'm not sure if you had a typo or not but I believe the default IP address is 192.168.1.150 NOT 192.168.1.50 This is normal. You need to use the Start Sabnzbd button on the User Scripts page of unMenu every time after you reboot to start sabnzbd but you do not have to complete the entire install procedure again because you have enabled it to be reinstalled upon reboot.

Was anyone else shocked to see that SnowLprd thought it was essential that AFP needed to be in the 5.0 release? /sarcasm

Well the good news is that now they are merging with Seagate so I'm sure that we can expect any future firmware releases to be completely flawless.

Cat5e is rated for gigabit speeds so upgrading to cat6 really won't matter much unless you plan on going faster than gigabit speed. However when I wired my house I went with cat6 becuase it wasn't that much more expensive for the cable & jacks and I wanted to be somewhat futureproof. IIRC cat6 can handle 10Gbps for runs of ~35m. Which effectively means that my home wiring can handle 10Gbps. Is that added capability worth the extra cost? Well that's for you to decide. In my case it was only ~$50 more in material, so I opted for the cat6 cable.

@Ripper - I believe you will only see a performance hit when you are writing to or reading from the 5400 rpm disk. Your throughput to all the other disks should remain the same. Except during parity checks/calculations because that speed is essentially determined by the slowest spinning drive in your array.

Yes. To fix my 8111C problems I got a PCI card because I didn't want to sacrifice a PCI-e slot and it works perfectly.