September 13, 200619 yr As a service to other new users who wish to build their own unRAID media servers, could anyone who has already done just that post here which motherboard you used and whether you've had any issues or not? I'm going to test out my existing motherboard - a Gigabyte GA-K8VT800Pro - to see if I can get unRAID working properly on it (and if I do I will post here), but if it doesn't work out I'm going to have to buy a motherboard I know will work. Here in NZ I cannot find any of the Intel boards mentioned on this site. Even the ASUS board mentioned in another thread is listed as "phased out" meaning I can't purchase it here any more. This has made having a "backup plan" very difficult, and I imagine I'm not the only one in this predicament. So for the sake of all unRAID newbies (me too) please post!
September 24, 200619 yr Another vote for P5PE-VM here Thinking about getting another one of these as a backup for the long term in case the unRaid server board dies. Also thinking about getting one of these as a second desktop based board, as it's cheap and fully featured with onboard sound, LAN and Video Matt
October 17, 200619 yr I'm really interested in building the unRAID soon. That's why I want to bring this topic up again: Are there any other motherboards supported by unRAID than the old intel board (which is almost impossible to find in Germany / Switzerland) and the ASUS P5PE-VM with socket 775? Since the unRAID is running 24/7 I was thinking of using an energy efficient cpu, i.e. AMD Sempron. That requires for instance a mobo with socket 939. Can we put up a real list with supported / working motherboards? I think that might be really helpful for everybody who is planning to built the unRAID Server to make the right descision and to make unRAID more popular. Greets from Switzerland, Ulan
October 17, 200619 yr I don't think the CPU is important, what is important, obviously, is: 1. USB boot (ideally, USB2.0 HiSpeed) - Most but not all boards now seem to support this 2. Chipset (Southbridge I think is the important one for the disk controllers) - needs to be one of the supported types 3. Gigabit LAN - needs to be one of the supported types I'd say you have a reasonable chance of finding a board that fits the bill, especially since Tom has recently added support for quite a few chips; I find Asus in general have a good selection, but remember that Tom can only recommend what he has tested, which is the Intel board which you now can't get. That's why we are sharing our experiences with the boards we have, until Tom can clone himself several times and test lots of boards on the market... HTH! Matt
October 20, 200619 yr I am currently (as of today) using an Asus p4c800-E with the onboard IDE controller and onboard gigabit ethernet lan. This system was intended only test out unRaid basic to decide if I want to use unRaid it to expand my current 3ware 1 TB array, which services 4 TV's with SageTV, DVD's, Music, and some HDTV. This was my desktop machine which had two sata-II drive on the promise controller in a raid-0 config. I originally booted with my usb stick to see if it would at least boot before I attempted to do anything with the drives, and it did. It seemed to recognize my IDE and Sata controller when I looked at devices in the unRaid GUI so I decided to proceed. So I then disconnected the Sata drive so as not to "somehow" corrupt my desktop and installed three small IDE hard drives on the onboard controllers. Then it would not boot from the USB stick...I finally got it to boot after about 10 iterations of BIOS adjustments. So far so good. I just need to decide if I can live with the writing performance. So now if I want to build a new system which motherboard can I pickup at Newegg etc.. that will work...ie boot from USB. I want to use SATA II drives and am ok with buying adapter cards to achieve that if onboard controller are not supported. What is the motherboard and controllers used by Tom on the system he sells? I noticed it's out of stock. Is that due to hardware availability of tested components ?
October 20, 200619 yr So now if I want to build a new system which motherboard can I pickup at Newegg etc.. that will work...ie boot from USB. I want to use SATA II drives and am ok with buying adapter cards to achieve that if onboard controller are not supported. What is the motherboard and controllers used by Tom on the system he sells? I noticed it's out of stock. Is that due to hardware availability of tested components ? If you look up the top of this thread, a couple of us have stated that we are using the ASUS P5PE-VM happily and has 4 onboard SATA (150) ports as well as one IDE connector. If you want more drives, you can use the recommended ones that Tom publishes in his hardware supported list. Just noticed you want SATA2 - don't know if the drivers Tom uses support SATA2, but the board I mentioned only supports SATA1. HTH! Matt
October 20, 200619 yr mutant matt, Actually there are two IDE connectors so you can have up to four (4) IDE PATA hard drives. I only saw two SATA connectors on the board. I am presently evaluating this board as a replacement for the original Intel micro ATX board that Tom recommended at the beginning. Regards, TCIII
October 21, 200619 yr You know, you're right. Stupidly, I remembered it wrong and have ordered 3 SATA drivers - Doh! Time to check out if Tom supports PCI SATA controllers.... One of the other ASUS boards I nearly bought had 4 SATA ports and 1 IDE though... Matt
October 23, 200619 yr PCI SATA controllers: Tested & known to work: - Promise SATAII150 TX4 - Promise SATA300 TX4 Sil3114-based SATA should work (driver included) but we have not tested.
October 23, 200619 yr OK Tom, Sil3114 card ordered, Fingers crossed. I'll let you know how I get on. Cheers, Matt
October 27, 200619 yr Sil3114-based SATA should work (driver included) but we have not tested. Tom, OK, my Sil3114 card has arrived. Which version did you add support for this to? I'm still running 3.0 Beta2 (lazy, will get round to upgrading). Ta, Matt
November 18, 200619 yr Another vote for P5PE-VM here My main concern about using the P5PE-VM is that it appears to only be a PCI connected gigabit LAN. My current 865 based gigabit LAN motherboards can only achieve perhaps 150 - 200mbps max throughput on the network connection due to the limitations of trying to run gigabit LAN on the limited 'shared' PCI bus bandwidth. Although this is still over twice as fast as the real world effective throughput of a 100mbps NIC, it is much less than the throughput available with a PCI-e or media bus connected Intel Pro gigabit on-board LAN. Of course this also depends on your client PC also having a fast dedicated bus connected gigabit LAN for fast multi-GB sized file transfer. Can anybody post their LAN throughput performance experiences (eg. Via the Task Manager 'Networking' tab or using other performance testing tools)? Of course, the disk read / write performance of unRaid may also be a file transfer speed limiting factor?
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