So time has come to upgrade my faithfull motherboard to something with a few more ports available.

 

Got a good price on a Biostar P45 board (http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/introduction.php?S_ID=365) so will be moving my E4500 setup to this new board along with a SATA3 PCIe card I aquired as part of a hardware bundle. At the same time I'm also looking to upgrade my existing parity drive from 1TB to 2TB.

 

I've seen a lot of guides on swaping the hardware over to I don't see that part being any major issue but i'm wondering what you would recommend being the best order (if it indeed matters).

 

1) I swap the motherboard first, get everything up and running then once I know everything is stable go ahead and swap the parity drive.

 

2) Swap the parity drive, allow it to do the rebuild / check. Once I know its all safe go ahread and swap the motherboard.

 

I'm also presuming I shouldn't find any difficulty in moving the Parity and cache drives to the SATA3 controller - although I'm aware realistically I'm not likely to see big difference.

 

With cache disabled I currently get around 35mb/s transfer to the box via a share copied from Windows 7 --> unraid.

Honestly. It makes no difference if you do 1 or 2 first.

 

The only thing id do before step 1 is run a parity check before and a non-repair check after the migration.

 

If had to make a choice, I'd upgrade the parity first on known good hardware.

 

Also, unless you cache drive is an ssd, I'd leave the parity and cache on the motherboard ports for maximum buss speed bandwidth.