Late December I found out about unraid from a posting on abhdtv and using some stuff from the junk box I did a quick evaluation, which looked good.  I ordered the pro-key on December 23 and got it the next day.  Initially I was using a MSI K9MM AMD AM2 motherboard running a dual core 3600+ processor with PCI PATA (cheapo Rosewill) and PROMISE SATA300 TX4 cards.  This arrangement worked great as I incrementally added five 500 GB SATA drives plus two 400 GB PATA drives.  Based on observation and postings on this forum I concluded that the dual core processor was overkill.  I also decided to reuse an obsolete motherboard from the junk drawer rather than the still viable K9MM.  So I swapped out the motherboard for a Biostar TForce 6100 socket 754 running an AMD 3200+ single core processor.  I moved the discs and the system rebooted first-time with all the data intact.  I'm now up to 5 TB with a mixture of 14 discs. All the onboard PCI, SATA & PATA slots are occupied however I can expand using the PCI-E slots when the time comes.  I used a PCI Gigabit Ethernet card while I was moving data to the array but since I need the PCI slot and since my requirement is only to handle two simultaneous blu-ray read streams the onboard 100 Mb LAN connection seems to be adequate for now.

 

Compared with the hassle I've had with Windows installations (most recently,Vista although perhaps I shouldn't count this beta SW as a real install) set up was a breeze.  This is an outstanding product.  My only concern is if I get a USB key failure.  When I placed the order I included a question about key replacement in the event of hardware failure but Tom declined to answer.  So I guess I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.

 

Thanks to you guys and the this great board for helping me select unraid.

 

paul

 

 

:o UPDATE I've since discovered that the Biostar TForce 6100 socket 754 mobo can damage unRAID without warning so I'd strongly advise you not to use this or any other mobo using an NForce 4 southbridge. See here for more information http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1845.0

Congrats on getting everything up smoothly!

 

Tomm in the past has said that in the case of a failure, let him know and he'll take care of you.

 

Tom has already replaced keys for folks who have had failures. In fact when he was selling hardware keys with the code I had one of THOSE fail and he replaced it without question. For the foreseeable future this isn't something that I'm sweating...