DGalt

Yeah that's what I was looking at when I posted the question

Awesome, saving some money then. Thanks again for all the help

Is there any major benefit of the Z97 over the H97? I know the H97 only has 5 Sata ports, but I'm probably going to go with the 8 port expansion card so the difference between 5 or 6 is almost certainly negligible for my foreseeable future.

Sounds like my best option is to go Z97 / i5 setup with an expansion card. Any cards in particular recommended? Thanks for all the help

8 drives will probably be enough as I switch out my current drives to higher density ones. I would like to add a cache drive right away, though, and I've already maxed out my 6 sata ports, which would mean an expansion card right away (unless you're familiar with a mini-ITX board with 8 sata ports). How would this route compare with going instead with something like ARock C2750D4I? I know I'd need ECC RAM, and I probably won't ever use all 12 SATA ports, but depending on mobo / cpu choice and after getting an expansion card probably end up around similar price point.

I don't mind spending $400-$500 on a CPU / mobo combo, I just don't want to add another $150 on top of that for RAM seeing as I have 16GB of DDR3 laying around after another recent system upgrade. I'm out of SATA ports at this point, which is also partly why I'm looking for upgrading the mobo as well (instead of just delaying the inevitable by getting PCI expansion cards). Is there no middle ground?

I built my current unraid box back in 2011, and has served me well. I'm moving towards using Plex, though, to stream content to the various devices in my apartment and the current CPU is probably not up to the task. Current system: M/B: ASUSTeK Computer INC. - M4A785T-M CPU: AMD Sempron 140 @ 2700 Memory: 2048 MB (max. installable capacity 16 GB) I haven't used Plex before, though, so I'm not 100% sure as to what types of requirements it needs. I will at most be streaming to 2-3 devices simultaneously. I won't be doing anything more resource heavy on the server than this, though (i.e. no VMs or anything else). I know I could just upgrade the CPU, but I'd like to get a new mobo with at least 8, preferably 10+, sata ports to future proof myself a bit. Hoping to put something together that will last another 4+ yrs, as I've gotten out of this current setup. Ultimately I want to do a full overhaul, with this being the first step (I'm also currently swapping out my 2TB eco greens for newer drives). As far as mobos go, smaller is better as I'd like to move away from a full tower at some point. I've read through a number of similar threads here so far, but the CPUs / Mobos suggested are a bit on the high side for my current price range (i.e. $250-$300+ a piece is beyond what I can currently pay considering I also need to replace at least 1 HDD as it's on its last legs). I'm also going to recycle some RAM from another system, which is non-ECC RAM. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks

Awesome, thank you. When it comes time to set up shares again, will the previous information be pulled in? If I look at the 6 data drives, the appropriate containing folders are all there. Been so long since I had to deal with any of this, though.

I have an unraid system that I built a number of years ago that, after moving about a year ago, has sat unused. I'm finally getting around to setting it back up, but I don't have access to the original configuration (USB was accidentally wiped, and I didn't have it backed up ) At the time, I was using one of the early version of unraid 5 (14b keeps popping into my head, but that may be incorrect). So, I went through setting up a new USB with unRaid 6 (was this a mistake?), plugged it in, and everything booted up fine. Went into the web interface, everything is sitting there (all 6 drives). I cannot remember which drive was my parity drive, so I just added them all to an array (didn't assign parity) and started the array up to see what was what (again, maybe this was a mistake?). 5 of the 6 drives are working just fine, I can navigate through them and take a look at what contents are on the drive. The 6th, though, is telling me under "Used" that it is unmountable. Otherwise no obvious errors are reported (green "normal operation" for the drive). What does this mean? Was this my parity drive, or did something happen to this drive? Looking through the other drives I see nothing could obviously be the parity drive, but to be perfectly honest I don't know what that would look like anyway. Attached picture of array devices in web UI.

which announcement thread are you talking about? I don't see one mentioning samba (not mentioned in 5.0-rc8a thread either)

nevermind, apparently when I re-ran the permissions utility it didn't finish properly. running it a second time fixed the issue.

I'm using unRaid version 5.0-rc8a AiO that is also have hosting a LogMeIn Hamachi VPN. I've been able to access all the various subfolders on my server from my OSX laptop while at work (or just remotely in general), but I'm having issues doing the same with my Windows 7 desktop machine (also at work). I can access the majority of the folders on the server, but for some reason random folders are not accessible. I get the message "Windows cannot access \\MEDIASERVER\Documents\My Documents\Random_Folder" Oddly enough this only seems to be the case with the Documents user share (I can also see the "TV Shows" and "Movies" shares that are on my server, but I only have the Documents share mounted since I'm using it as a remote backup & sync across all my machines). There are no differences about the security settings for the different shares, so I assume this is something on the Windows side. If that might not be the case, though, let me know what to try. I have no issue accessing these folders on my two Windows 7 machines at home (which are on the LAN). I'm sure more information is needed to help me troubleshoot this so let me know what to provide. thanks

well I pretty regularly turn my pc on and off while my server and my htpc are pretty much always on, which is why i've always kept the server as the local master. But whatever, changing to name worked and all that required was remapping my drives, which took all of 30 seconds. c'est la vie.

That didn't fix it either, but changing the name of the server did. Gotta love Windows sometimes...

I'm frightened that if I change the server name my HTPC will stop recognizing it I would care about it not recognizing the tower name since the IP address works, but it doesn't connect to the IP address automatically (have to actually type it into the explorer, at which point it then shows up un my Network). Is there any way to add the IP address to the Network permanently?