I was in the market for a 4 bay raid device to support my media room’s HDI Dune H1 via my home network. While doing some research I came across unRaid and once I realized it was more than just a bunch of drives and involved learning something new I was hooked. I love to tinker.
I didn’t want to place the server in my media room cabinet cause it’s hard enough to keep that cooled even when the AC is running so it had to be small in order to sit on my desk in the family room. I came across neilt0 MicroServer build (Thank you for the inspiration) and minutes later the confirmation email was in my inbox from Newegg =)
OS at time of building: unRAID 4.7 Plus
CPU: AMD Athlon™ II NEO N36L (1.3GHz Dual Core, 12W TDP)
Motherboard: Proprietary HP
RAM: 4GB Kingston 240-pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered 1333
Case: HP
Drive Cage(s): 4x Cold Swap
Power Supply: 200W
SATA Expansion Card(s): Future upgrade
Cables: 6 foot ESATA to SATA cable to support the 6th drive
Fans: 1x 120mm fan for whole chassis + 1x 40mm PSU fan
Parity Drive: 2TB Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632
Data Drives: 2TB WD20EARS, 2TB Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 , 2TB Samsung HD203UI, 1.5TB ST31500341AS
Cache Drive: 500GB WD WD5000BPKT 7200 rpm
Total Drive Capacity: 7.5 TB
Primary Use: Movie, Music, File Storage
Likes: Meets the wife acceptance factor and still provides me with plenty of storage and speed to meet my media needs.
Dislikes: The case top is a pain to put back in place once removed but that’s not very often. Several cables had to be removed to slide the motherboard tray out to replace the memory but what do you expect when it’s such a tiny case.
Add Ons Used: unMenu and a few support packages.
Future Plans: I ordered a 2 port PCIe SATA card to support one more drive. Tinker time!!! I would like to see if it’s possible to remove the cage and replace with a 5 drive.
Power Requirements: I don’t have a Kill A Watt Meter on purpose as the thought of what my media room components draw frightens me. I consider this another part of the room and another thing to feed my obsessive compulsive behavior.