HellDiverUK

Well, Supermicro uses pretty much exactly the same KVM - same software, the lot. As do AsRock Rack. If you can't get the Asus KVM working, you're not going to get a Supermicro one working.

The Seagate external will likely be a Barracuda, which is a SMR unit. They work fine in unRAID. The general recommendation is the WD externals which usually contain a WD Red (or the white label equivlent).

That's nonsence marketing jibber-jabber. Almost all drives share the same mechanism. An IronWolf has the same mechanicals as a SkyHawk, a WD Red has the same mechanicals as a Purple, etc, etc. Heck, my WD White-labels, WD Reds and WD Purple (all 8TB drives) all even have the same firmware revision on them, just different features turned on/off depending on the drive. Physically they're identical.

If it works with Linux, then it works with unRAID. If it doesn't work with Linux, then it's not a computer.

I have a reasonably good i350-T2 I got off eBay, it's a HP branded unit. Was cheap. I've also had decent success with Broadcom cards, mostly Dell branded ones. I use them in pfsense, they're cheaper than 'real' Intel cards, and work just as well.

Just a note, M.2 is the format of the SSD. You can get SATA M.2, PCI-E AHCI M.2, and of course PCI-E NVMe M.2. SATA M.2 usually defeat one of your normal SATA connections, so they're best avoided. PCI-E AHCI are OK, but I don't see them much now - I have a Samsung OEM AHCI M.2 somewhere and it works fine. unRAID supports all three types of M.2.

It's stuffed, and its time to buy a new drive.

reiserfs? Where's Disk 5, 8, 10, 18? But, yes, looks like Disk 7 is having a bit of a wobbler.

Just looks like a janky molding.

No problems after 4 days with my R5-1600. C-states on in BIOS, zenstates set in go file. Power consumption is a little higher than expected (idles at 70W, compared to 18W of my Skylake i5). I may rethink due to that, and go back to Intel.

I have to agree with @MrCrispy about COTS NAS units. In the past few years they've come on leaps and bounds. With Intel-based SOCs they can run Dockers, VMs, do Plex & Emby transcoding, and have great performance. I have a QNAP TS-453BMini here, and really I could probably run it instead of my Ryzen-based unRAID box if I put big enough disks in it.

Correct, I'm not. I've no need for anything other than the VNC connection to my VMs.

I don't understand the question? I used the webgui, I don't have keyboard mouse or monitor plugged in to the server.

You could always plug it in and see if it works?? It's the only sure way to know, but I'd be astounded if it didn't.

Realtek chips are like the old WinModems - there's no processing going on on the chip, it's done on the CPU. As the J3160 is a pretty weak CPU, it's no surprise things were slow. The Intel chips you're using now do all the processing on chip, so the CPU has very little to do. So, not weird at all, pretty much typical.

AGESA is how AMD do it, which is included in BIOS updates.

The R5 was cheap, and 6 cores with 12 threads is plenty. R3 was cheaper, but only ones available at the time were the 4-core ones, which were slower than the i5 I had. The motherboard is great, I used it in a gaming rig for a while with a R7-1800X overclocked to 4GHz and it never skipped a beat. I'd still be using it but I got a great deal on an i7-5960X that overclocks to 4.6GHz that I could plug in to my old X99 rig. The RM750 is a nice unit, it runs semi-fanless, so up to about 400W the fan doesn't turn. As the unRAID box only uses 130W peak, it's basically silent. Again, it's left over from my gaming rig, which now houses an AX860i which I got when I was running a pair of GTX980Ti cards (they were a little too much for the RM750 along with the i7-6800K I had at the time).

I have an Asus RT-AC86U. Great wifi performance, but not particularly stable, it stops routing after 3-4 weeks, or the OpenVPN server dies, or something stupid like that.

Initially I set C-states to Off in the BIOS, but that was before the addition of the Zenstates setting in the go file, which basically does the same thing. It's the C6 power saving mode that gives the hangups in unRAID (and linux in general). Most of the components are in my signature, but here is a full run-down: Asus Strix X370-F Gaming motherboard, Ryzen R5-1600 CPU with box cooler, Corsair LPX-3200 16GB kit (2x8GB in white), Matrox G690 8MB PCI-E video card (yes, 8MB!), Fractal Define R5 case (white), Corsair RM750 PSU, Samsung 950 Pro 512GB NVMe SSD (cache), 1x ST4000DM000 Seagate 4TB Desktop HDD, 2x ST8000AS0002 Seagate 8TB Archive HDD, 1x ST1000NM0033 Seagate 1TB Constellation ES.3 HDD (for Emby DVR storage), 2x WD80EZZX Western Digital Red HDD (parity). Cooling is via 2x140mm Corsair ML140 fans in the front, and 1x 140mm Noctua Redux fan in the rear, all running between 400-600rpm. It idles around 71W at the wall, and with all disks spinning and CPU busy it uses around 135W. More than my old i5 system, but it's much, much faster.

A mid-range Asus Strix X370F-Gaming. Works great, 8 SATAs, 1 M.2, i211 NIC. Just the baby R5-1600 using the stock AMD cooler. The board is a replacement for a PRIME X370-Pro that expired.

The DOM is slow as a slow thing on it's holiday. They're only running off USB2, and they're only designed to store configs and boot the OS. If you're getting 2MB/s from it, you'd be lucky. I wouldn't bother.

I sometimes spin up a Windows Server system and use it for a while, but unRAID is much easier to deal with. I fight with Server all day at work, when I get home I don't want to be doing it there either. unRAID, in general, just works. I've not had any show-stoppers with unRAID since I started using it, even hardware failures are trivial to recover from. I think I first started running unRAID at version 4.5, now on 6.5 and run pretty much every beta/RC on the way through.

Consider a Ryzen or Ryzen Threadripper. I've just moved over to Ryzen for my unRAID and I'm really quite happy, despite it only being a little R5 1600 (6 core, 12 thread at 3.2-3.6GHz).

I run VMs, but I don't pass through any hardware. I just run a couple of Debian instances, one runs pihole, one runs OpenVPN. I have a Windows 8.1 VM running nonsense stuff like Google Cloudprint. So far no problems with the rig, though I do have C-states disabled, I haven't rebooted yet to do the zenstates thing.

New Ryzen build just upgraded to 6.5, no problems. Wee bit quicker than my old i5-6500T.