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?

That's what I was thinking but with the server set to the local master and rebooting everything several times (including shutting everything down and then booting the server first followed by everything else), still the same issue. really obnoxious

I just upgraded to 5.0-rc8a and for the most part everything seems to be working. However, when i try to navigate to TOWER (which is what shows up under my Network...Windows 7 machine, just fyi), I get the message "Windows Cannot access \\TOWER...blah blah blah...Error code 0x80070035 The network path was not found" If I type in the server's IP into the explorer, all the disks and shares show up in my Network, and they are all able to be accessed. tower/ works to browse to the unRaid menu/webpage/whatever-it's-called. Using putty I can telnet into the server using either "tower" or the server's IP. I feel like I had this issue once before, but I can't for the life of me remember how to fix it. I've run the permissions utility a couple times. I've set the server to local master and rebooted everything. They're both on the same workgroup as well. Not sure where to go from here...anyone have any ideas? Edit: It might also be worth noting (since I just checked), my HTPC (also a Win7 machine) accesses TOWER just fine, so it seems like there's just something screwy going on with my other computer...again, don't know what to do to fix it though.

My only other question would be what would you gain from creating a VPN and using something like OpenVPN? In terms of transfer speed I assume it might be a bit faster, but the bottleneck for transfer speed is most likely going to be the upload speed of my broadband connection right? I was testing last night with the help of a friend and copying files she was getting a transfer rate of ~ 200KB/s. Considering my upload speed is only 2Mb/s I don't know if I could do much better than that.

that works beautifully, didn't know you could run hamacchi from unraid. thanks

I am using user shares (like I said, I have a share set up for TV, which includes 3 disks, and a share set up for movies, which also includes 3 disks). If I create another share, let's say Documents, and include one of the disks that is also included in my movies share (for example), will not all the files on that disk be included within the share? Or will they simply be excluded due to the fact they're included in another share? Edit: Oh look, that's exactly what'll it do haha (should have just tested it in the first place). Ok great, thanks

I want to keep documents and music files on my server along with all my video files. Right now I have my server split up into 2 shares, one for TV and one for movies. These shares are mapped as drives on my HTPC and desktop, and then my HTPC front end (media portal) just has the appropriate plugins pointed towards the appropriate mapped drive. Stand stuff, etc. The thing is, my documents and music files are going to take up far less space than my video files (talking about a few hundred GBs vs. 10+TB at this point). It seems like a waste to give these files their own drive (and more importantly, their own sata slot, which I'm running out of already). At the same time, I don't want them showing up in my movies or TV share (or vice versa...when i map what will be my music and documents share to a drive on my desktop I don't want the video files on that disk to show up in the drive). So is there any way to split a disk into what would basically be two disks (like you would partition a disk if you were installing multiple OS's on it), or a way to exclude specific files from being included in a user share? thanks

This may not be directly related to unRaid (not sure if unRaid would be part of the solution for what I want), but seeing as you're a knowledgeable bunch about this stuff I thought maybe you guys might have some suggestions on how to accomplish what I want. From a theoretical standpoint what I'm trying to accomplish here is basically having one single hard drive that all my computers (home desktop, work desktop, laptop, and phone) can see and edit, but not in the way that cloud storage options like Google Drive or Dropbox work. The issue I keep running in to with Drive (which is what I'm using) is that some files don't sync at all, or even worse the wrong version of some files get synced. I've had whole folders of files deleted because of Drive syncing the wrong thing. What I want is one instance of every file, as if I were carrying around an external hard drive that I plug in to whatever machine I'm using at that point in time. I don't need a local file on every machine (which is how Drive has it), but rather just one version saved somewhere that I can access and edit from any machine as long as I have internet. Part of the reason I want to do this is my laptop has relatively little storage space (I have the hard drive partitioned for a few different OSes, and it's a SSD so it doesn't have a ton of storage to begin with), so I need basically a remote drive it can access that is sync'd with my other machines but that doesn't require the laptop to have a local copy of the files. I could do this with Drive, but it would basically require me to log-in and download any file that I want to edit, and then re-upload it. The question is, what's the best way to do this. One thought is to create a VPN server and use a drive on my home network (either on my desktop at home or in my server) as the "master" hard drive. The problem with that is I'd basically have to be logged into the VPN all the time on my remote machines, which isn't ideal (since there are plenty of instances where I either need to be on my work network or logged into my work VPN). Something like logmein might work, but then that requires my desktop to be on all the time, which again isn't ideal. I suppose I could use logmein with my HTPC (since that's on all the time), but I'm wary of that as well. I don't know what other options are out there, which is largely why I'm here asking you far-more-knowledge individuals so yeah...thoughts?

All set (Tom sent me it again). Thanks for the input everyone

Same thing. I NEVER delete emails. They all just get sorted into various labels in gmail. It's like this one had a self-destruct in it or something

I just sent you a private message with the email address to try and protect Tom from the spambots. Les. Thanks I got it. Unfortunately I'm still not finding the email. Oh well, guess I just have to wait until he gets back to me (already emailed him with the information mentioned above)