What is guaranteed to work?

[candre23]

The hardware compatibility list appears to be abandoned.  There is only one board on the whole list that hasn't been discontinued, and it's $120.  Having been burned by incompatible hardware in the past, I don't want to buy anything that hasn't been tested.

 

I need a board that is cheap, has 6 SATA ports, and is currently being manufactured.  I'd prefer something with an LGA1155 socket, but that's not a dealbreaker.  Do any boards fit these modest criteria that are verified to work with unraid?

[sureguy]

I'd look at what other people are using.  Then find out what chipset is on the motherboard, and which NIC.  If a chipset is supported, the same chipset on another motherboard will probably work.  Stay away from motherboards that have HPA, which will backup your BIOS to your first HD - this is not desirable (Gigabyte boards tend to have this feature). 

 

I personally can't help you, unless you want to spend more money than necessary, as I'm running ESXi, and unRAID as a virtual machine, and using an LSI card for connecting my drives.

 

As far as network cards go, a lot of the onboard NICs aren't as good as a dedicated NIC, like a 1000mb/s PCI intel NIC (which is what I have dedicated via passthrough to unRAID).  Many onboard NICs can't reach 1000mb/s.  Whether this is a driver or hardware issue, I don't know.

 

The other thing to be aware of (regarding motherboards) is that certain revisions may change some hardware (such as the type of onboard network controller).

 

Many people will be reluctant to say something is guaranteed to work, because of issues like a motherboard revision change.

[BigErn77]

I'd also like to know this.  Specifically, which motherboards are guaranteed to work, AND guaranteed to work properly with 3 or 4 TB hard discs, i.e. allow full use of the space.

[Tybio]

Ok, the best resource for this is the compulsive design forum, and green-leaf's prototype builds:

 

http://www.greenleaf-technology.com/blogs/prototypes/index.php

 

If you just post an open ended question, the community can't answer as each member only has direct knowledge of a few motherboards (Other than the greenleaf guys that is .

[mrow]

As far as network cards go, a lot of the onboard NICs aren't as good as a dedicated NIC, like a 1000mb/s PCI intel NIC (which is what I have dedicated via passthrough to unRAID).  Many onboard NICs can't reach 1000mb/s.  Whether this is a driver or hardware issue, I don't know.

 

I disagree and I think most people on here would disagree as well. A dedicated NIC isn't necessary if your board has gigabit on board and is known to be compatible with unraid.

 

As for the OP, your are pretty safe going with any board with a current Intel or AMD chipset these days. Sure someone might occasionally run in to some obscure issue but those are very few and far between. I've gone through three different motherboards in my server so far and have always just bought whatever board I could find that was a good deal and I've never ran into any compatibility issues. If you look through the forums most of the issues with motherboard compatibility are from a years ago. There were some Realtek on board NICs that had problems in 4.7 but as long as you're running 5.0 you're fine.

[BigErn77]

And to follow up on my own question in this thread - I researched it a bit and it seems as though any current motherboard should have no problem natively supporting Large hard disks, such as 3 or 4 TB ones.

[candre23]

Ok, the best resource for this is the compulsive design forum, and green-leaf's prototype builds:

 

http://www.greenleaf-technology.com/blogs/prototypes/index.php

 

Everything in the compulsive design forum is geared toward big 18+ drive servers with $200+ motherboards.  Every board linked in the budget prototype builds section on greenleaf is no longer available.

 

your are pretty safe going with any board with a current Intel or AMD chipset these days. Sure someone might occasionally run in to some obscure issue but those are very few and far between.

 

I've been burned before.  This is not for a personal server (mine is running just fine), this is for a friend who does not live nearby.  I need to be able to get it up and running in one go - I can't spend days or weeks futzing around with partially-functional hardware.  Surely somebody has built a server with a currently-manufactured $50ish board and can confirm it works.