I'm brand new to this but after reading about unRaid I decided to take the plunge.  It might be overkill but here's what I have on order:

 

Motherboard:  Asus P8H67-M LE (newegg)

 

CPU: Intel i3-2100T 2.5GHz (35W) (newegg)

 

RAM:  Corsair 2x2 GB 1333mhz DDR3

 

PSU:  Corsair 650 Watt TX Series 80 Plus

 

CASE:  Azza Helios 910

 

SATA Expansion Cards:  NONE - Will expand later.  Board has 6 SATA ports from what I can tell (4x3Gbps, 2x6Gbps) so that should be fine for starters.

 

HARD DRIVES:

  2x Samsung Spinpoint 2TB 5400 rpm (Data) - New

  1x Hitachi Deskstar 2TB CoolSpin (Parity) - New

  I have several other 1TB drives that I'll add for data drives

 

 

So far I have received the case, PSU, and 2x2TB Spinpoint HD's.  The rest is supposed to arrive on Tuesday 5/17.  I haven't bought the USB flash drive yet but I'll get one that is recommended.

 

As far as CPU selection is concerned, I went back-and-forth between the Sempron 140, one of the Althlon x2 low power CPU's, and the i3 2100T.  I decided to go with the i3 2100t b/c of how little power it requires (yet to be seen in actual use) and because I might use this motherboard/CPU for another purpose and swap in a motherboard/CPU from another older machine I currently have.  

 

Thoughts?

 

Looks great to me, and that board has some nice expandability options.  Let us know how it goes.

I finally was able to get the server and unRAID up and running today!  I ran into an issue with version 4.7 where it wasn't getting an IP address (ran 'ifconfig eth0') and spent a good bit of time researching and trying to fix it.  Today I decided to try out version 5.0beta and it immediately worked and was assigned an IP address!  Maybe it was an issue with the NIC on the new motherboard not being supported but I'll troubleshoot later if necessary.

 

So of course, instead of trying to resolve the issue I'm going to stick with 5.0beta for now and start creating shares to get some experience with unRAID.  After I have some time with it, I'll check to see how much power this hardware is consuming...I'm very interested to see what the numbers are.

 

I'll post the results of the power usage tomorrow afternoon...

I assume you are running 5.0beta6a?  That one is the current 'stable' beta and is considered safe to run on a production server.  I wouldn't recommend running any other beta version.

so I am planning or ordering a new mobo and cpu in the next couple of weeks. I am planning on sandy bridge with a supermicoboard

-F one. I do need some advice on the cpu. The one stated on this thread is the lowest speed/cost but is there any advantage to a 4 core?

I currently run 4.7 but am willing to upgrade to a beta if it will still protect my data.

Maybe someone else will chime in but I'm so new to this that I can't answer the question.  From what I've read though, even my build is overkill unless I intend to run some of the add-ons that may be more CPU intense.  I may do a couple add-ons but nothing that would require even the relatively low-powered processor I have.  If I had to guess a quad would be completely overkill unless you plan to do encoding.  I was considering the new low-end quad AMD processor but only b/c of the low-powered aspect.

 

Rajahal-  Thanks for the response!  Yes, I'm running 5.0beta6a...it's very good to hear that it is stable!

I can't find the kill-a-watt to measure the power draw so it might be a couple days until it turns up!

 

I bought a new USB drive (the one I was using was old and looked beat-up) and had issues getting it to boot.  When I plugged the original one in it didn't boot either.  After troubleshooting, I forced the USB drive to be of type 'FDD'.  The USB drive then showed up as two drives in the BIOS boot screen: One had a 'UEFI' banner over it and the other was simply an icon that looked like a USB external drive.  Once I switched it to the external drive USB option (and NOT the 'UEFI'), it booted up fine. 

 

Just wanted to post that in case anyone else had a similar issue.  It took a while to troubleshoot...

yeah. i'm not sure either.

 

When i ordered my Sandy, I did not find anyone actually running one on the forums. it has been a real treat for me as far as performance and power consumption.

I am also a NOOB myself...

 

unraid itself only uses 1 core. an I3-2100 is overkill for a vanilla build

 

My guess is the i3-2100 is fine. even for SABnzbd, Sickbeard, and CouchPotato running.

 

If you are also going to run transcoding or ripping software on top of those 3, I am sure it would not hurt to have a multi core. but would probably be fine?

 

the real benefit of say a quad core would be for some sort of virtualization. for that you need a multi core xeon (sandy or not) or non-sandy i3,i5,17. since the I-2 series sandys dont have VT in them (you can do 32bit OS's in fake VT)

 

I'm not going to run any add ons for now...I think I'll install unMenu though and then I'm sure I'll start adding as I get more comfortable.

 

I just got 2 more 1TB drives in that I'm going to hook up over the weekend.  I also bought the ICY Dock 4 in 3 hot swap enclosure to hopefully make things easier.

 

I'm hoping I might find the kill-a-watt b/c I'm really curious about the power draw!