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Thanks for the tip. I'll try it out and see if crushftp accepts that just so I'll know.

Sure, been there already, tried it, for whatever reason didn't work even though the tool said it executed successfully. After lots of experimenting, it seems crushftp didn't like a space I had in part of the path. Windows and the pivos didn't seem to care. Guess that's a UNC no no.

I searched and read through all the threads I could find on windows network, unc path, etc. issues here on the forums. And did a google search to see what I could find elsewhere. Hoping someone has further suggestions: unRaid box has been configured and working well for many months, picked up fine by my winXP and win7 computers, no problem adding directories from XBMC on pivos xios either. HOWEVER, I recently installed crushftp on the windows XP box because I desire to utilize a sftp service to make a share folder on the unRaid box available to several colleagues for storage/backup. crushftp is working fine, can login and see any files/folders shared on the XP machine. HOWEVER, crushftp cannot seem to see or find the unRaid box or shares. I mapped the unRaid folder as a network drive on the XP machine, but apparently MS does not make mapped network drives visible to services, which crushftp runs as. I also tried specifying the direct UNC path to the unRaid folder within the crushftp virtual file system (add shared files/folders) section as was suggested by crushftp support, with no success. I tried \\tower\directory //tower/directory smb:\\tower\directory smb://tower/directory. It seems that crushftp simply can't see the unRaid box or shares. This sounds similar to problems others have reported with unRaid not being visible to explorer on windows machines. Except that mine is and pretty much always has been. Any other thoughts?

Huh, weird. So I reformatted and reinstalled unRaid on my USB, no change. Found an old 256MB USB, formatted and installed unRaid, no change. Figured at this point it was clearly my hardware causing problems. Before posting again, I figured I'd make a final attempt to ensure everything was seated properly and as default as possible to aid in debugging, so I first went into the BIOS and did the "reset to default settings" thing. Well, that seemed to work a charm. I guess my mobo either intentionally or unintentionally shipped with non-default BIOS settings (as I hadn't changed anything). Some "stock" performance profile, perhaps? In any case, now I can start playing around and learning so I can ask even more dumb questions! Thanks for the assistance. Sorry it was such an obvious problem.

OK, I'll check out the USB stick, format and redownload if I have to. Not sure if I have another USB stick laying around but I'll look. Hadn't tried another OS because of lack of HDD... didn't think about a live CD. If I get repeated failures after verifying the USB shouldn't be a problem I'll try that. Thanks. I'll report back.

Ok, just got back into town. Looks like 77 hours running the memtest, 207 passes with no errors. Rebooted, let it start unraid. I get the loading bzroot, lots of dots, perhaps ten seconds later it says ready. Then a second or three later I see a brief flash of what looks to be some text and a blue rectangle on the upper half of the screen then immediate reboot. Flash lasts only a few frames, not long enough to make out any of the text. I've tried several times. Mainboard and processor above. Using latest stable unraid, 4.7 right?, trial version, sandisk cruzer 4gb. PS is corsair builder 430cx. All default mobo settings, timings, voltages for now. Can't think of what else would be useful info. Suggestions for where to start troubleshooting? sent from galaxy s2 using tapatalk

OK, it's been running the mem check for 12 hours now, all tests passed without error. I'll let it keep running for now... will probably be out of town over the weekend. Assuming this continues to check out without error, I'll post when I return with any other useful info and see if we can figure out what's going on.

Ah. Then I'll do the memory check and report back afterwards. Thanks.

So I finally picked up the parts to form the beginnings of an unRaid server... something I've been wanting to do for far too long as I have some 2K plus movies that need a better way to access. Went with the AsRock 880GM-LE mainboard and Sempron 145, 1GB ram for now. However, hard drives are still on the expensive end, and I'll wait another month or three to see if prices start trending down (everything I have lying around the house I could use are smallish PATA drives that aren't worth fooling with). I wanted to know if my system/USB combo would boot fine, and figured I might could get used to the unRaid environment and Linux in general. However, when I boot the system (and it does appear to boot from the flashdrive) it gives a short unRaid boot menu, starts to boot, and then perhaps 10-15 seconds later spontaneously reboots before I can even see whatever it is flashing up on the screen. So newb question... is this the expected behavior when no HDD is installed in the system? A quick search of the forums and through the FAQ didn't seem to say, I'm guessing because unRaid without HDD's is so pointless that no one has bothered to boot that way.

Thanks for the thumbs up. I'm still looking for other sales/deals for alternatives, but the closer I get to the day I pull the trigger the more this looks like a very attractive option.

I'm a Linux noob so I certainly don't know. Over at xbmc you'd think Ati was still the devil.

Point taken. There are of course several choices up to 50 drivs and a few beyond, but they do become expensive. You can get a 36 drive 4U enclosure but I do not know the price. 2 Norco cases is always an option for a homebrew application but then it begs the question why not just have 2 separate unraid boxes, other than for power consumption issues? Parity rebuilding would certainly be faster. OK, so I'll remain sensible and consider anything that gives easy 24 drive expandability (by easy that means I'd like to avoide 16 port SATA cards or SATA port multipliers). So now the bottom line becomes price and power consumption. I'll keep my eye out for cheap H55/i3 combos. Too bad the Fusion line isn't quite here yet... possibly by the time I'm ready to buy? Not sure when the product launch is planned. An aside... I know ATI drivers have never really played nice with linux. I assume from the number of people using AMD boards with integrated ATI graphics that unraid at least supports the necessary driver for simple 2D and text rendering/display? Back to my deal hunting for now...

If unraid supports it down the road, then quite possibly yes. I see the need to house large media collection.

From searching, it looks like all H55 boards are limited to 2 PCIe x16 slots. Not sure that is a deal breaker, but I like the idea of having 3 for any future growth of the unraid server drive capability. I'm still a ways off from pulling the trigger so I'll keep my eye open for deals available between now and then. After some reading, it seems the Sempron 140 is very close in power consumption to the i3 530. The Sempron has about the fastest single core available, which should work perfectly for unraid. System power consumption measurements are all over the board, from just over 30W idle to over 70W idle. I think this is due to peripherals (gfx cards etc.), HDDs in the system, onboard features (LAN vs none, onboard video, audio chipsets, number of memory slots, expansion slots, ports, etc.) and whether cool n quiet is enabled in the OS in test system. Hard to compare directly really. Best "comparable setup" review I can find suggests that Sempron on 785 is very close to i530 on P55 at idle and max isn't too different. So it comes down mostly to price and expandability. Does anyone know if unraid currently supports cool n quiet for AMD processors? I was under the impression that this depended on the OS as well as mobo/bios. Is that true?

Best I can find for an i3 system will be $100 more and sacrifice a PCIe slot with otherwise similar features. It's likely that the ASRock AMD board I'm considering will lose a PCIe slot if onboard video is enabled. I guess with a few PCI cards lying around I don't mind... displaying text isn't too hard. I guess I really need to research the power consumption of these two options, and decide how far $100 will go. Plus 22 drives max vs. 30 drives max might eventually make a difference in future unraid versions, and with around 100TB of data to transfer, that could become important. I suppose it isn't 22 max... 16 port cards or expanders are always an option! I'm just trying to be reasonable about the cost. And don't expanders remove the single drive spin up/down ability?

I've been looking that route as well... the popular x8sil (or whatever the alphabet soup is on that one!) with processor is about 3x the price of the Asrock/Sempron combo. Any suggestions on a cheap alternative that can easily accommodate 20+ drives?

If you haven't settled on a recommended "budget" board, I'll confuse the issue a bit more by offering another alternative to consider - one that I'm considering after much searching and readin. ASRock M3A785GXH/128M which is currently $80 on newegg. A bit pricer than some of the other budget board nominees (by $10 to $20 or so), but has the decided advantage of 3 PCIe x4 or faster slots (at least two should be capable of running even with onboard graphics enabled). Same ATI HD4200 graphics as many of the ASUS nominees, Realtec GigE, 6 SATA ports. In fact, it could qualify for the 20+ drive beast. How much is future expandability worth? I'd say $80 plus $40 Sempron CPU is still a budget compared with many of the $200-$250 Supermicro and other "server" boards people often look to when planning for 20+ drives. Start cheap and still have the sky as the limit... pretty attractive. But it definitely blurs the lines between budget and beast. And I can't find anyone else using it currently, so who knows about compatibility or reliability?

Ah, good catch, didn't look at the voltage. Memory isn't that important... well, it's important, but at this point I'm looking for any advice/knowledge on mobo/cpu combination and will fit appropriate memory when the time comes to pull the trigger. But thanks for pointing that out as I might have never noticed! I've read dozens upon dozens of threads here and elsewhere on what mobo/platform to use. Since I've pretty much settled on an unraid and unraid only box for file serving, I would think cpu power would be minimal. I want low power consumption, but it just doesn't look like there are any good atom, nano etc. options for supporting 20+ HDD's of eventual expansion. And I don't want to break the bank, thus looking for expandability in a platform that is low cost, and reasonably low power consumption.

Looking to build the cheapest and lowest power consumption unraid box that can easily expand to an eventual 20+ drives. The drive requirment seems to knock out a lot of the cheap and low power options like atom platforms etc. especially if price is figured (the supermicro atom is better but not cheap!). So after a lot of reading and searching I'm thinking about a combo containing: ASRock M3A785GXH/128M Sempron 140 (.45nm, 45W TDP) Kingston HyperX 2 x 1GB PC1600 DDR3 With some undervolting and underclocking options that seems about good as I can do on the processor front aside from atom, which seems to be out of the running. Mobo has 6 onboard SATA and 3 PCIe slots (x16, x8, x4) so I think future expandability is decent. Onboard video (Ati 4200) which I could do without, but read reports that least the onboard and PCIe x16 could work simultaneously. I could disable and use and old PCI card if needed, and may consume less power anyway? Total prices from a place like newegg is in the $165 range. I have a nice server cube case with lots of power and room for at least 12 internal HDD's with good cooling, maybe more if no floppy or optical. So good for now there. I'll need a new PSU, probably something like the single ~45A rail Corsair 80+ or similar. Any thoughts? A search here didn't turn up any hits that I could find. Anyone used it or know of any specific problems? I'm trying to dig deeper into the specifics of which chipsets and such might work better or less well with unraid, SATA controller cards, etc. but this one from what I can tell shouldn't have any problems.