SteveNeal

Thanks ohlwiler. I should be able to back up the contents of the two drives to other discs in the array - as I have some spare capacity. I don't NEED my parity drive yet as the rest of the content is backed up elsewhere still. Does Seatools work on non-Seagate drives OK? I'm guessing it does as you've suggested I use it!

I purchased an Adaptec 1430SA from ebuyer a fortnight ago for £75. I was struggling to find suppliers of PCI-E SATA cards at reasonable price in the UK - and was trying to avoid using Scan. (There is an ongoing thread over at AVForums with some nightmare Scan customer support stories from well regarded members)

Hi all - apologies if this is the wrong place to post this. I have been running an unRAID server (Free version with 2 drives - Samsung 1TB and Samsung 500GB) for the last year or two, based on a MA74GM-S2H motherboard with the dodgy HPA BIOS. I recently upgraded this to an unRAID Pro set-up and added some 2TB WD EAR drives. As I couldn't upgrade my motherboard BIOS to one that didn't have HPA (too old a board) I also upgraded to an Asus motherboard with a cleaner BIOS. All went well - but I checked all my drives for HPA according to a thread here - and surprise surprise, both hard drives previously used with the Gigabyte board showed up with HPA. I used the hparm -p suggested solution in a thread here to resize the drives and remove the HPA stuff. However I think I must have got the sizes wrong - as when I did my first parity check (I hadn't previously been running with a parity drive) I got 200+ (same number on both) errors on both Samsung drives. I'm not an expert - but I have a feeling I got the hdparm values wrong and the drives and unRaid or the OS are expecting the drives to be bigger than they really are (because I've told it they are?)? Advice please? I can backup the content on the two drives and reformat if that would help? Syslog is attached (have only posted the first few errors to keep the size down). Syslog2.txt

Couldn't get the non-H version - so I'm running the GA-MA74GM-S2H (which has HDMI in addition to DVI-D and VGA AIUI) - with an Athlon LE-1640 and 2Gb of RAM and a couple of Samsung Spinpoint F1s. Only been running for a couple of hours - but it is talking to my PC fine over Gigabit Ethernet, and I'm getting 50MB/sec and above reported transfer rates for large files according to Vista. Blown away at how straightforward the whole process was - much Kudos to the developers.

Couldn't find stock of the MA74GM-S2 so ended up with a MA74GM-S2H (quite a bit cheaper than my MA78GM-S2H used in my HTPC - so no point paying over the odds) as part of a bulk eBuyer purchase. Delivered this morning - time from delivery to file transfer was less than 90 minutes. Never built a system in an ATX case before - so nice to have room! (All my previous PCs have been compact HTPCs where everything is really fiddly and cable management is a nightmare. So nice to be able to neatly tie-wrap everything easily for a change!) The system is mounted in a Cooler Master Centurion 5 with Cooler Master Extreme Plus 550W PSU, I'm using 2Gb of Kingston 5400 / 667MHz RAM, and an AMD LE-1640 CPU with stock heatink and fan. Hard drives are Samsung Spinpoint F1s - 1TB and 500GB currently which I had spare. Not yet put in a parity drive. Using a 1GB Lexar Firefly (as recommended) as the USB boot disk, with BIOS configured to boot from USB-HDD running the Free version, just to check things out. Have switched on AHCI support and disabled all the on-board stuff that UNRAID doesn't use (Audio, floppy etc.). Have still connected the audio headers to the case - well it gives them somewhere to go... Haven't even bothered bunging in an optical drive. Connecting via Gigabit Ethernet to my MA78GM-S2H-based HTPC I'm getting around 45-50MB/sec transfers - both large ISOs and a bulk transfer of lots of 320k MP3s and Apple Lossless stuff. This appears to be completely respectable (I was getting around 60-70MB/s SATA to SATA transfers within the HTPC, and compared to the 20MB/s I get with a USB2 external it is a major improvement!) Centurion 5 with 550W PSU was a reasonably cheap bundle - may regret it as it only has 5 exposed 5.25" drive bays - so I can only use a 4-in-3 and a 3-in-2 if I get ambitious, and won't be able to use two 4-in-3s - but that would still leave me with 11 drives - which may be too many for the PSU anyway... However at the moment I suspect I'll be fine! (No problems with fitting 6 drives - which is my motherboard SATA limit) Obviously it has only been running for a couple of hours and I'm not running with a Parity drive yet, - heck I haven't screwed the side on - but I'm really chuffed at how easy it was. (And VERY impressed at the boot from USB with no requirement for a lengthy OS install)

Doh! Great suggestion! Many thanks.

Thanks guys. Been doing a bit more research. How about an AMD-based Gigabye MA78G-DS3H ATX board? This appears to be very similar to the MA78GM-S2H uATX board (which I thought was listed as compatible - but it is the 78SM not GM...), but with 6 SATA rather than 5 SATA+1 ESATA, and with 3 PCI-e x1, 1 PCI-e x4 and 1 PCI-e x16 (though the x4 and two of the x1s share a PCI-e bus?) as well as 2xPCI slots for future expansion (the uATX model only has 1xPCI-e x16 and 1xPCI-e x1) I've built an HTPC around the MA78GM-S2H (with a 4850e) and 4Gb of RAM and found it a very easy board to work with, and Gigabyte's documentation was OK for me to follow. The HTPC has a maximum of 3x1Tb 3.5" hard drives in it (along with a 120Gb 2.5" OS drive) and I'm running out of space - and a Gigabit Ethernet server seems neater than external hard drive enclosures, and unRaid offers some degree of protection for my media (I have the original discs so it is more a time-saving than vital data I can't afford to lose) withouth the proprietary RAID issues and a NAS seems a bit limiting (and very expensive if you want more than 2 drives) On the other hand 6 SATA drives and 2 PCI-e slots are probably going to be enough for me - and the MA74GM-S2H suggested is about 2/3rds the price... Would a Sempron and 1Gb of be enough - or should I consider something more like an LE-1640 or a 4850e and 2Gb of 53/5400 RAM ? AIUI unRAID is now fine with more than 1Gb of RAM ? Just thinking about slight future proofing elements - particularly if unRaid supports plug-ins in the future. (Simple things like an iTunes audio server, uPnP or Twonky etc.?) Was thinking of either a Coolermaster Centurion 5 or 590, or an Antec Titan 650 case, to allow for future expansion. Any thoughts? (Apols if this should be moved to hardware not motherboard discussion)

Hi there Have looked at the compatibility list - and many of the boards listed seem to no longer be widely available in the UK. Can anyone who has recently built an unRaid system (particularly in the UK) - suggest a good motherboard that I can purchase here in Britain? I'm looking for fast Gigabit Ethernet, at least 4 (ideally 6) SATA channels on-board, and enough expansion to add 4 more via an expansion card. I don't mind if it is Intel or AMD - though I believe that Intel PRO 1000 ethernet adaptors are well regarded? ATX or Mini-ATX are fine for me. I'm looking to build an unRaid system to store backups of my DVDs (as ISOs) for use in Vista Media Center via MyMovies, and also to store my audio files. I don't like the sound of Windows Home Server - so am planning on an unRaid build. If anyone wants to suggest good cases available in the UK - ideally able to hold 8 3.5" SATA drives - that would also be great. Apologies again if this isn't the right place to ask this?