HellDiverUK

WD have had a similar drive out for years, the AV-GP. They were designed for PVR and CCTV stuff. I have a 320GB AV-GP that came out of a PVR (I upgraded it with a 7200rpm 1TB Hitachi a few years ago). The AV-GP is SLOW. It doesn't get much more than 30MB/s read or write. The firmware is definitely written for streaming video. If the Purple is as pathetic as the AV-GP, then I'd stick to the Red in an unRAID situation.

If you look at the way external drives are packaged, they're far more protected in my option. I'd rather buy a drive that left China with rubber buffers inside a plastic box, inside a cardboard box, which it stays in until I open it. Bare drives can be mishandled at various points along the way (I used to work in the IT distribution sector, and I've seen a pallet of bare hard-drives falling from racking on to a concrete floor - they were gathered up and sold on as usual).

Well, I got the Haswell machine up and running, and the Intel NIC works perfectly. Currently just running with a single drive while I set up some plugins etc, then I'll fire in the other two Reds and the cache drive (a Samsung SSD). The H87I-Plus has 6 SATA ports, so I can fill the 5 3.5" bays and have the 6th SATA for the SSD cache.

I've been 'shucking' drives for years, almost always Seagates bought from the local PC World when they're on sale. I'm running a pair of Desktop.15 4TB drives which came out of external boxes. They're been perfect. I still have a 1TB drive I shucked. I saved enough over the years that if one dies, I can afford to bin it and just buy another drive, no warranty required. I paid £89 for the two 4TB drives about 3 months ago...plus I got two 12v PSUs which are handy little items to have about when you're a tinkerer like me.

I sort of thought that, the E2 is even slow doing Memtest. I've yet to find a use for that AMD board, it's been slow as s**t since day one. I've also discovered the G3220 is actually a G3430, so it's a bit faster than I thought. I assume the i217 NIC works OK on the H87I-Plus?

Hi folks. I'm about to build an unRAID box, and I have two choices of boards sitting on my shelf: Choice 1: AMD Asus E2KM1I-DELUXE (E2-2000 APU) with 2x1GB ECC DDR3 Choice 2: Intel Asus H87I-Plus and Pentium G3220 with 2x2GB DDR3 I'll be using my old favourite Lian-Li PCQ-25B, so both boards can fully populate the 5 bays in that case. I'll be running 3x3TB WD Red, and most likely using the onboard LAN (Realtek on the AMD, i217 on the Intel). I do have an Intel 1000PT adapter I can use if either's LAN is not recommended or won't work. Use scenario will be general downloading (Sickbeard, Torrents, etc), and MySQL for XBMC sync. Which do you guys recommend? I'm swinging towards the AMD due to the ECC support, and the power use might be a little lower (possibly).