HellDiverUK

I've never used the dust filter, it's still attached to the stock fan in a box somewhere. As it's the only fan in the case, that makes it positive pressure, so there's basically zero dust buildup. There's perhaps a very light dusting on the sides of the drives, but really nothing to be concerned about.

Agreed, the Asus is just an Aquantia NIC painted red. Same NIC is fitted to a lot of NAS/server boards. There's no reason it won't work on unRAID. My QNAP unRAID box has the Aq NIC and works fine, and I've also had the Asus card working in my old unRAID box (a i5-6500T machine).

Adding to this thread, I've tested unRAID with the following two QNAP machines, both work perfectly. No configuration required, just plug in the unRAID boot USB and off you go. QNAP1: QNAP TS-h973AX (9 bay Ryzen V1500B), 32GB DDR4 ECC, 2x960GB Micron U.2 NVMe drives (cache) and a few 3.5" array drives. The 2x2.5G and 1x 10G NICs work fine. QNAP2: QNAP TS464 (4 bay Celeron N5105), 16GB DDR4, 2x WD SN570 M.2 NVMe, and a few 3.5" array drives. The 2x2.5G NICs also work fine.

Thanks. I neglected to mention I also got two DOA AsRock boards - all three I've bought have been AsRock Rack workstation boards, C226 WS boards of various flavours. One arrived factory sealed with a mashed CPU socket, and one was just plain dead. The third I've already described. I do have a number of machines at work using elcheapo AsRock Z370 boards (the low-end microATX boards, supplied in pre-builts), and had no issues with those in the past year or so. It's annoying that the AsRock Rack boards were a 100% fail.

CrapRock. I wouldn't touch one of their boards with yours. Do yourself and return the board while you can, before it flames out and burns your house down or something. Yes, I've had an AsRock flame out, thankfully I was only setting up the machine and had the side off, and was able to power it down PDQ.

"Last checked on Tue 23 Apr 2019 03:11:16 PM BST (yesterday), finding 0 errors. Duration: 21 hours, 45 minutes, 16 seconds. Average speed: 127.7 MB/sec" That's a 10TB Red as parity drive, data drives are 2TB 2.5" Blues (slow), a 8TB Gold (fast). The second 10TB Red hasn't been added yet. The NAS was in use, so a normal parity check should take a little less time. Each pair of 3.5" drives has an AsMedia PCIe to 2x SATA controller chip, I assume the 2.5" bays run off the SOC's SATA controller as I don't see an AsMedia on those: SYSTEM DEVICES PCI Devices and IOMMU Groups IOMMU group 0: [1022:1566] 00:00.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1566 IOMMU group 1: [1022:156b] 00:02.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 156b [1022:1439] 00:02.1 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 16h Processor Functions 5:1 [1022:1439] 00:02.2 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 16h Processor Functions 5:1 [1022:1439] 00:02.4 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 16h Processor Functions 5:1 [1022:1439] 00:02.5 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 16h Processor Functions 5:1 [111d:8063] 01:00.0 PCI bridge: Microsemi / PMC / IDT Device 8063 (rev 01) [111d:8063] 02:02.0 PCI bridge: Microsemi / PMC / IDT Device 8063 (rev 01) [111d:8063] 02:04.0 PCI bridge: Microsemi / PMC / IDT Device 8063 (rev 01) [111d:8063] 02:06.0 PCI bridge: Microsemi / PMC / IDT Device 8063 (rev 01) [1d6a:0001] 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Aquantia Corp. AQC107 NBase-T/IEEE 802.3bz Ethernet Controller [AQtion] (rev 02) [1b21:0625] 04:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device 0625 (rev 01) [1b21:0625] 05:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device 0625 (rev 01) [1b21:0625] 06:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device 0625 (rev 01) [1b21:0625] 07:00.0 SATA controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device 0625 (rev 01) [8086:1539] 08:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03) IOMMU group 2: [1022:1537] 00:08.0 Encryption controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1537 IOMMU group 3: [1022:7814] 00:10.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB XHCI Controller (rev 11) IOMMU group 4: [1022:7801] 00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 40) IOMMU group 5: [1022:7808] 00:12.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB EHCI Controller (rev 39) IOMMU group 6: [1022:7808] 00:13.0 USB controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH USB EHCI Controller (rev 39) IOMMU group 7: [1022:780b] 00:14.0 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SMBus Controller (rev 42) [1022:780d] 00:14.2 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH Azalia Controller (rev 02) [1022:780e] 00:14.3 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge (rev 11) [1022:7813] 00:14.7 SD Host controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SD Flash Controller (rev 01) IOMMU group 8: [1022:1580] 00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1580 [1022:1581] 00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1581 [1022:1582] 00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1582 [1022:1583] 00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1583 [1022:1584] 00:18.4 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1584 [1022:1585] 00:18.5 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device 1585

This. Unless you're running pure storage with no apps/plugins, it'll just run 24/7. Same as Synology.

QNAP OS is fine, but having all the drives spinning all the time isn't what I wanted. Most of my data is pretty much stangnant, only getting accessed on rare occasions, so why have drives burning electricity for no reason? My NAS is lightly used during the evening, and does a little downloading overnight, but most of the time sits idle.

Just a quick note that I've had zero problems running unRAID on my QNAP TS-963X 9-bay NAS. The machine has an AMD GX-420MC CPU (Quad core 2GHz), 9 bays (4x2.5" and 5x3.5"), an i210 1GBe and a Aquantia AQC107 1/2.5/5/10GBe NIC. I'm running 16GB DDR3L RAM (2x8GB sticks). All I did was plug my unRAID stick in the back, turned it on, and unRAID was up and running. I did later, however remove the internal DOM so it can't boot QNAP's OS again - it's just a little board that fits on a normal PC-like USB2 header. I'm going to use an internal-to-A adaptor to move my unRAID boot stick inside. For fan control, I'm just using the usual AutoFAN plugin from community apps, as the BIOS fan curve is a little aggressive as it's controlled by the warm CPU temp. There is NO video output on this machine, and indeed no GPU of any sort, so if you need to troubleshoot via console you're SOL. Thankfully I've never had to as "It Just Works(tm)". I'm getting great performance from the machine, and run a few light VMs on it, as well as Emby which transcodes one stream just fine. It's also happy to run Emby DVR from a HDHomeRun Quatro - it'll record 4 HD channels at a time no problems to a 2.5" WD Blue. Idle power consumption is low, too, at a little over 20W - happy with that for a relatively old SOC, 9 bays in a tiny form factor, with 10GBe and 16GB RAM. Details of the machine here: https://www.qnap.com/en-uk/product/ts-963x - they're around £600 in the UK which is pretty good value for a solidly built 9-bay.

Pretty much every router has some sort of VPN server. I don't see what the problem is? I run OpenVPN server on my TPLink router, and it works great, I VPN in to home from work using my Windows PC, and also with both Android and iOS phones (I have iOS, the wife has Android).

Just tried unRAID on my TS453Bmini. Doesn't work - the 453B has two SATA ports controlled by the Intel SOC, and the other two by a Marvell controller. So, the inner two bays work, the outer two don't work - they throw a load of timeout errors on boot and the drives aren't detected.

WD Blue 4TB - WD40EZRZ - bought batch of 4. 2 died within a month. Replaced by WD, refurbished drives run much cooler and quieter than originals. WD Red 5TB - WD50EFRX - bad sectors after just under a year, sent back to WD. WD replaced with a 4TB Blue. 6 months of arguing with WD eventually got it replaced with a 5TB Purple.

ST8000DM004 is a good drive. It's basically the 8TB version of the venerable ST4000DM000 - slow and reliable, and readily available by shucking.

The CX-M is Corsair's more basic PSU. It's unusual to get a dud Corsair, really - I have a heap of them, and even still have a CX750 that's been running at 600W draw 24/7 running a cryptominer for several years now, and I've had no issues with it. The general recommendation is SeaSonic, but I also like FSP and SuperFlower. All three make good PSUs.

Also consider using NFS - less overhead than SMB. MC is a two-pane file transfer program, a bit like xtree Gold in DOS days if you're old enough to remember that. Very useful program to get familiar with.