Kosta

I believe most people on these forums suffer from some degree of digital hoarding so if you find a good helpline do let us know But yes, what you say makes sense, and with the necessary RAID controllers it's a lot more expensive than running plain unRAID. You bring up a good point regarding mirroring the most important data. I'm in a similar situation where I have stuff of varying levels of importance, and just as you, pictures and docs are something I can't afford to lose. Initially I copied this stuff manually across most drives, but then my syslog just started filling up with duplicate file warnings. In the end I have a backup<disknr> folder on each disk and I rsync them as needed. This works but it could be done a lot better as it pollutes the samba shares list and involves some manual work. It would be ideal if unRAID actually had capability of mirroring important root folders. That way you could simply have an extra textfield where you define across how many drives you want to mirror that particular folder and unRAID would do the rest for you. But that's a discussion for the suggestions forum

Spectacular! Question though, I have been thinking about unRAID with larger arrays such as yours, and to be honest I wouldn't be perfectly happy with a redundancy of just 1 disk. Wouldn't something with multiple drive redundancy like raid6 be more appropriate in your scenario?

Nice, the OCD in me has awaken looking at your sweet cable management. I think I'll be off to buy some cable ties after work today And yes, it's amazing how much of a difference even a light breeze makes on the HDD temps. I have one 140mm fan cooling six HDDs and just changing that from a 600rpm one to a 900rpm one changed the temps by 5-10 degrees on average!

Not quite pimpin' yet, but it's getting there.... I opted for a Fractal Design Array R2. I replaced the original 140mm fan that came with it with a Thermalright X-Silent 140 which is just as quiet but pushes a lot more air. The temps are around 5-10 lower on average with it. Here it is front and back: I'm currently up to 3 drives in it, 3 more are waiting to be moved over from Drobo: And you can see poor Drobo spilling its guts and accepting its inferiority in front of the mighty unRAID box We had some good times, Drobo and I, but lately it was giving me too much grief so it was time to move on. One of the irks I have with it is the woefully inadequate cooling since the drives are practically sandwiched together. Here it is receiving a breath of fresh air: One note regarding the motherboard as well. I got the Zotac NM10-DTX before I read about all the problems with the on-board raid. So far I was able to attach multiple drives to it and have them appear individually. Unfortunately the LAST drive in the array does not respond to SMART commands for an unknown reason. Also, jumpered advanced format drives seem to be bringing the entire array down unless they are preformatted correctly. I'm still investigating that tissue.