Tatts4Life

True I guess what made me think of unraid as a backup system is the parity part where if a drive fails I can rebuild it from the parity drive. In the case of having back ups of my stuff what's the best option that is inexpensive? Still plan on building an unraid system, but I would really like a back up of my stuff since I have a ton of stuff.

Sounds like I'm probably covered with what I want to do. Since I don't know much about unraid what I'm really looking for is something to protect all my stuff from movies to music and photos. I will be moving my movies onto it and then watching from a separate system I'll build for gaming and movie watching. What can unraid do as far as gaming? As far as games go I have a nicely modded elder scrolls oblivion, fallout 3 and new Vegas, and a few others I play from Steam.

Thanks for the help Bungee. You are correct one of the PCIe 16x slots is being used for my video card. Right now I use my computer for gaming and photo editing and have been using it more for movie watching. Now that I have tons of movies, music, and photos on the computer I'm starting to get nervous that I should back them up some how. I plan on building a gaming/movie system and then having a laptop for editing my photos. I'll use my current motherboard for my unraid system. Since it doesn't have on-board video like you mentioned do I need to have a video card for the unraid system to watch movies? If it does need a video card I'll just keep what I currently have and buy a newer one for my other system I'll use for games and movies. Thanks Trurl that's good to hear.

So I have the Asus p7P55D deluxe motherboard in an old computer. Here's a link to the board. https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/P7P55D_Deluxe/specifications/ my question is how many hard drives can I use other then the 6 it mentions? I know next to nothing when it comes to computer stuff. I know you can add cards to I think PCI ports, but when it comes to what to add and where on the motherboard I have no clue. I would like to get as much use out of this before I would have to upgrade to a motherboard with more sata ports. Also an unrelated question sort of. When I upgrade the motherboard in the future switching everything over to the new board won't me I will need to format the drives right? Like I said I'm extremely new at this and know very little.

Cool I think I know what I'm gonna do now. Now comes the task of picking out the hardware. I still haven't figured out the motherboard I need. So far my only requirements are an internal sub port so I don't have a usb dongle poking out of the case. Also I think it's called IPMI looks like something that might be something I would want. But that's stuff for a different thread.

Thanks for answering my question. And don't worry I know that the drives get formatted. So I will have to buy at least two drives to use in the server so I can transfer my stuff. Once I have everything moved from my drives to the server I'll strip those and use them in the server. I'll probably get a second 6tb drive for the parity, maybe a third just so I can transfer everything I have. Then when I move my windows 7 and programs to a SSD then I'll have that 2tb drive and my 1tb drive that is empty right now. What sucks is I didn't realize I would have so much on my 6tb drive because right now I don't have enough free space between all my other drives to empty that one.

I'm looking to build a server for the first time soon and have a few questions. I hope they make sense since this is all new to me. So I have 2TB drive which is my main drive on my computer. I also have an empty 1TB drive and a 6TB drive that has close to 4TB's on it. I also have probably close to a TB of photos and music I want to back up. My question can I use the 6TB drive as my parity and buy a second 6TB drive to hold my data along with my other two drives? Or do I need to buy either an 8TB for parity or 4TB drives and use the 6TB for the parity? I guess what I'm asking is can the parity drive be equal in size as the others or do the drives need to be smaller then the parity?