About a week ago I came across a forum post mentioning the concept of unraid and I've been looking into it ever since. The more I saw, the more I loved the idea. I've already used the search function in order to do some more research before posting any stupid questions but the problem is that a lot of those posts were quite old and many compatibility issues seem to have changed with the latest betas.
Let's start with the system I'm going to build. Yesterday I bought an Asus P5B-E PLUS, because it shows up on the compatibility list, has 8 sata ports and was quite cheap. You can find the specs here: http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=307&model=1399&modelmenu=2
now to get to my first question... The esata port uses the JMB363 chipset. Is it true that it supports a sata multiplier that would let me add additional drives? I mean something like this: http://www.cooldrives.com/cosapomubrso.html
the other parts will be:
Intel Celeron 430 (cheap and low power consumption)
1GB PC800 RAM
550W PSU
Chieftec Big Tower (can take up to 18 hdds)
some cheap VGA
I'm currently using the same case together with 4 500gb drives which I want to move to the unraid server. I'm also gonna get a 1TB Samsung F1 as parity drive. Is it possible to build the array first and add the parity drive later? I'm on a low budget here and I'd have to transfer the old data to the 1TB hdd and then use two of the 500gb drives to build the array. Then I could transfer the data once again and add the 1TB for parity. It would be better to start with 2 new TB drives (1 parity, 1 data) but I can't afford that right now.
I think that's it for now. I'm getting the remaining parts over the next few weeks and if everything works out with those 2 or 3 drives, I'm definitely getting a pro license as well.