Upgrading and unRAID robustness

Hi All,

I just wanted to share a few details of my recent system upgrade.  I don't have full pics, but this is the basic story...

My original unRAID box used a Gigabyte GA-D510UD motherboard with a no-name generic SIL3114 PCI card.

I have 8 drives hanging off this (7 x WD 2TB green, and 1 x WD 1TB green).  Supply is Corsair CX430.  Idle power consumption about 35 watts.  Processor is 1.6GHz dual core Atom, but disk speed is limited by that PCI bus for four out of the eight drives.  As a consequence parity checks take about 21 hours.  I have had this set up running unRAID 4.7 since I built it about 14 months ago.  It has been very reliable.

Wanting a bit more speed and CPU grunt but still wanting low idle power and keeping the same case, PSU and drives I have now migrated to an Asrock H67M-ITX motherboard with an i3-2125 CPU and Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8.  (I could have used a slower/cheaper i3 but I already had that one).  I also upgraded to unRAID v5b14 in the same step. 

The thing that most impresses me is this...  I do have a backup of all data on another server in case of disasters, but I did not need it.  unRAID v5 correctly assigned the six data drives and the parity drive, leaving me to set up the cache, run the "permissions script" needed when going from 4.7 to 5, and then to set up the users and permissions on the shares.  I have added SimpleFeatures, the iTunes server plugin, the APCUPSD plugin and TwonkyMedia Server, and I am back up and running without any drama, no loss of data, and with a relatively small investment in time and hardware.

Idle power consumption with all drives spun down has hardly changed - up to 39 watts from 35.  With all drives spinning and running a parity check I am up to 79 watts, but the parity check kicks of at 116MBytes/sec rather than the 25MBytes/sec that I had previously.  I anticipate it will take between 5 and 6 hours. (Will edit later.)

update: Tested with v5.0-RC1 - parity check across 6 x 2TB + parity took 6 hours 25 minutes. 

This degree of hardware compatibility and robustness is just amazing to me.  Thank you, Limetech.  And thanks to the many who posted their experiences (good and bad) who helped to make this easier for me.

Les.