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I don't have to worry much about good airflow in my Norco case since the setup is kept in the basement. For general use, my hard drive temps are in the 20's. When I do a parity check, they get up to the mid to upper 30's. I feel the airflow through the case is pretty good anyways.

Here is what the backplane looks like on mine. I got this from Newegg about 2 months ago.

I have not tested this with v4.3. I updated just before I swapped out the motherboard. I can be leary too at times running betas, but this one seems pretty solid so far. I'm sure I'll get the final when it available.

Well, I pulled the trigger and got the motherboard and installed it this morning. The install went smoothly and everything booted just fine first time around. I have all the drives hooked up to it and am using the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller. UnRAID boots just fine and all the drives are there, along with a network connection. I ran a parity check right away and speeds were between 60k and 70k all the way through. Here is my total setup so far: Norco 4020 case Supermicro MBD-X7SBE motherboard Intel Pentium E2160 1.8GHz G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) Corsair 650w power supply (single rail version) 3xSeagate 1.5TB (1 used as parity) 2xSamsung 750GB 2xSeagate 320GB (1 used as cache) 2xWD 320GB 1xSeagate 500GB 1xSeagate 300GB I also wanted to mention that I finally upgraded my unRAID version from 4.3.2 to 4.4b2 when I changed the mobo. I was really shocked how quick unRAID now boots up. My guess is that boot time was cut in half. All in all, everything went quite well and I will keep an eye on things for the next couple weeks to make sure it is all working good. At this point, I think the extra expense of the mobo was quite worth it One other note: All 3 of my Seagate 1.5TB drives have the SD17 firmware, but I haven't run into any problems yet. Maybe I am lucky??

I've been thinking of possibly getting this motherboard for my unRAID server. The biggest reason is the pci-x slots that are available for the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller that I already have. The board is listed at newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182142 Looking at the board's specifications, here are the pros and cons: Pros onboard video controller (ATI ES1000) so there won't be any video card taking up precious slots 1 pci-e x 8 slot and 1 pci-e x 4 slot 2 pci-x 100mhz slots and 2 pci-x 133mhz slots 6 onboard SATA connectors via Intel ICHR9 controller dual gigabit lan which are also on the pci-e bus would be able to use my current Intel E2160 processor current memory should also be compatible with this board (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231098 Cons 2 less SATA connectors than current board (GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R) onboard lan controllers might not be compatible with unRAID (Intel 82573V & 82573L) not the cheapest motherboard out there ($290 shipped) not even sure if the Intel 3210 northbridge is compatible with unRAID

Thanx for the info. When I placed the order earlier, I added the Corsair 650w power supply. I rather be safe than sorry. Especially since I plan to keep adding drives. Looks like I got a little project to do this weekend. I will update you when I finish the upgrade. Hopefully it will go nice and smooth. I will post that in the hardware section. Wish me luck.

To start, I wanted to say that I've been using UnRAID for 6 months now and it has performed exceptionally well. It is very convenient to have all my data in one location and that it has some type of protection. I look forward to each and every new release and the added features/bug fixes they bring. For the record, this is the hardware I used to build the server: GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R motherboard Intel Pentium E2160 1.8GHz G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) XCLIO GOODPOWER 500W 2xSamsung 750gig (1 used as parity) 2xSeagate 320gig (1 used as cache) 2xWD 320gig 1xSeagate 500gig 1xSeagate 300gig The upgrade I am looking at is moving everything to a new case and adding 3 1.5TB drives. The case I am moving everything to is the NORCO RPC-4020. In order to add more SATA connections, I am also adding the SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 controller. I am looking for some advice when doing this upgrade. First, will my power supply be addequate for 11 drives total? When I add the drives to UnRAID, am I able to add all 3 at once, and after formatting, assign one as a parity drive then the other 2 as data drives? Needless to say, I will make sure to do a full parity check right before the move. All in all, I'm hoping for this to go as smooth as possible and appreciate all the advice.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121 Use promo code EMCAEBHAJ for free shipping

So far, from what I've researched so far, I will probably use a full ATX board like the Abit AB9-Pro to start and build from there. It also helps that I just purchased the Abit IP35 Pro for my HTPC along with an E3110 Xeon (basically the same as the E8400) and I've been really happy with the features and stability on the Abit board. Thanx again for all the comments. I think it is now time for me to dive in and actually get my unRAID going. Wish me luck.

I did a little searching on my own and found this ITX board. Looking at the specifications, this could make for a pretty good board for unRAID. http://www.portwell.com/products/detail.asp?CUSTCHAR1=WADE-8656

I've seen it mentioned many times that AMD based boards aren't the ideal solution for unRAID. I'm just using one of these motherboards just for experimental testing. I did a quick build on Newegg and was quite surprised at how cheap an unRAID solution would be to build. A whole system, including case, motherboard, cpu, memory, video card, and even 4x750GB drives comes to about 850 shipped. Not bad at all for over 2TB storage with parity. The MozartTX isn't actually a spare case. I'm using it right now as my main computer. The main reason I got it was I wanted the room for all the hard drives I have. Overall, I have 1x500GB, 4x320GB, 1x300GB, 2x250GB, and 3x200GB hard drives between my main computer and my HTPC. This is why unRAID is so attractive for me. I can just put 1 or 2 drives in each computer and throw the rest in the unRAID server. I do have another question that Weebotech got me thinking about. Since the MozartTX also has the capability to have both an ATX board and an ITX board, how well would an ITX board work with unRAID? Would I be quite limited in drives? Are there any good ITX boards that work well with unRAID? Other than being limited in drives, I would think that would be a great low power solution. Unfortunately, I have a concert tomorrow night and its going to basically shoot my whole day for Sunday. I'm hoping that through the week, I have some spare time to get this built and let you guys know how it works for me. Thanx for all the help so far.

I am thinking of trying unRAID for myself. To start, I'd like to build a box from all the spare parts I have lying around. One of the main suggestions I need is which motherboard I should use. I have these 3 motherboards: MSI K8NGM2-FID Foxcon NF4SK8AA-8KRS Asus A8N-SLI Premium From the reading I've done so far, I should probably go with either the Foxcon or the Asus since the MSI doesn't have a compatible ethernet controller. The Asus mobo seems like overkill, so I'm thinking I should probably use the Foxcon. The rest of the hardware will be as follows: AMD Opteron 175 (overkill, but is an extra laying around) 1 or 2 sticks of 1GB Patriot RAM (I know it only supports 1GB, but it can't hurt to throw 2 sticks in does it?) Nvidia Geforce 7600GT (only spare PCI-E video card available) 3x200GB SATA HDD XClio GoodPower 500W power supply PQI Intelligent Stick 2.0 512MB All of this will be in a Thermaltake MozartTx, which has 6 internal hard drive bays and 5 external 5 1/4" bays for future expandability. (Not to mention tons and tons of room to work in.) If unRAID works for me, this probably won't be the final hardware layout of course. This would be to try it out for now and see how it works for me. I would be using the unRAID box to store DVD images, music files (mp3, flac, and wma), and video files (avi, wmv, mov, and mkv). With all this, are there any suggestions or comments? I am definately open to what you all think.