Recently I was running a 2.3TB network shared media drive for fellow users on my network. I'm out in Iraq, with a 6 person network. Well I've had nothing but problems with using Intel MB raid 5, and windows vista 64. The MB likely failed and my data is likely lost. So I'm done doing a raid system that relies upon one specific piece of equipment to function.

 

Now my understanding of unraid is, that the only piece of equipment that makes unraid work, is the flash drive with the unraid OS loaded onto it correct? And you could very easily backup the unraid to another flash drive correct? That way if it failed you could just swap to the backup flash drive.

 

Here is my current left over specs I'm looking to adapt to unraid.

Intel C2D E6550

Cosiar DDR2 1066 2x1GB

Geforce 7300GS

Samsung spinpoint T series 500gb 7200 rpm x8

 

I need to pickup a new motherboard, since the old one is junk was looking at

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128077

And I would pick up 2x promise 300 tx4 cards also.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102062

 

Would this be a decent system for unraid?Its only used for media storage and streaming media files.

 

thanks,

Kip

I am with your traditional raid sucks outside of the enterprise.

 

You don't even need to backup the flash in reality. What raid does is put all the parity info on one drive and not striped across all drives  like traditional raid 5. It also uses normal reiserfs for all your disks. What this means is that all the disks will work alone and dont have the horrible relationship with raid cards you have had problems with (i.e. if you wanted to you could pull out one hdd and pop it into another machine and see all the files on it). If a single disk breaks unraid can rebuild the data onto a new disk when you replace it using the info from the parity drive along with the data that exists on all the remaining drives. If 2 drives break at once (very unlikely) you would only lose the data on those 2 drives and not every drive like raid 5.

Onboard LAN

LAN Chipset Realtek 8111B

Max LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps

 

On the mainpage they say to only use Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet  Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet, would the above MB work with unraid, I see other people using asus boards.

 

You can find motherboards with 8 SATA connectors on board. Get a 6 port board at the very least to start - try a G33 or P33 based board for 6 ports. I'm sure there are others too.

 

If you do go with SATA add-in cards then look for a PCI express solution instead of the PCI ones you listed.

 

Peter