This thread is intended to document my unraid build, which (by necessity) is going to be an incremental process.

 

Notionally, it is intended to have the potential to get big, so up to 24 drives (the capacity of my case). From the start however, and as part of my unraid education, it will be merely a 2 drive affair with no expansion beyond the onboard SATA ports.

 

I already have a Norco RPC-4224 and 700w PSU with which it shipped - sold in the UK by x-case:

 

 

 

I plan to use the ASRock AM3 M3A770DE motherboard:

 

 

with an Athlon II X2 250:

 

 

and 4GB of Corsair DDR3:

 

 

The mobo in question has a Realtek 8111DL chipset for its NIC, which is unraid friendly. It also has 1 PCI-E x16 slot, and 1 PCI x4 slot, which I plan to use for a pair of Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 cards. Those, plus the four on board SATA ports, gives me 20 total, then I plan on making up the remaining four ports with a 4 port PCI card, perhaps like this one (SIL3124 4-Port SATA II PCI Card).  For now though, only one of the SAS backplane connectors will be getting wired up via reverse breakout cable directly to the motherboard.

 

The motherboard, CPU, and RAM have been ordered, as have a couple of WD20EARX drives, which according to Compass work a treat.

 

Two drives to start with, and a basic unraid license whilst I find my feet, should get me started nicely - I shall be updating as I go

 

edit 13/9/11 17:13 added PSU photos.

Off to a good start...looks like you've done your homework!  I'm guessing you already know that the 4 port PCI card will be a bottleneck once you put more than 1 drive on it.  I would suggest using a 2 port PCI x1 card and a 2 port PCI card instead.  The 2 port PCI card will still be a slight bottleneck, but not nearly as noticeable as a 4 port card.