I had a motherboard die on me. A 6 year old Athlon board that had been on its legs for a long time but since it was serving up my 11 unRAID array, I didn't want to mess with it unless I really had to.

 

And I finally had to. It died.

 

Hi ho hi it it's off to Fry's I go, and came back with an Intel DP35DP (open box) with the cheapest Core 2 (also open box) I could buy.

 

After figuring how to get my 8xIDE + 3xSATA drives working on a mobo that only has 1 non-operational IDE connector (fortunatly, I had an old SiiS IDE card around), I booted up, set the proper drive order in the devices page, and the array started without even needing a parity check (though I did one anyway).

 

After all this time, the simplicity, reliability, and convenience of unRAID still astounds me. The fact I could go from a 6 year old motherboard to a brand new one, totally change which drives were on what connector or expansion car, and then just have it "work" makes this a great product.

 

Since I now have a couple spare SATA connecters, I also bought two 1TB Seagate drives and am in the process of adding them to the array.  One drive will replace a 400GB IDE, and the other will be an addition. This will then give me 7.4TB in 12 drives. I hope by reducing the number of IDE drives the parity check will speed up a bit. 

 

When first adding in the 1TB drive so it became parity, my parity calc speeds are:

0-400GB 15MB/sec

400-500GB 18MB/sec

500-750GB 55MB/sec

750-1TB 65MB/sec (just the parity drive by itself)

 

 

After all this time, the simplicity, reliability, and convenience of unRAID still astounds me. The fact I could go from a 6 year old motherboard to a brand new one, totally change which drives were on what connector or expansion car, and then just have it "work" makes this a great product.

 

You can thank the linux kernel for this.. had it been a windows machine, you would be re-installing the OS! 

Don't get me wrong, Windows is OK for a desktop, but when it comes to simple management of large amounts of data. UNIX is the way to go.

well that's what i did ... had a pentium 4 motherboard and swapped it with my X2 3800+ nvidia nforce 4 motherboard.. no problems at all..

everything's up and running once again.

 

I know unix rulez ... SGI octane owner

PLEASE ... go into your personal text on the forums and list the MBs which which you've have had GOOD experience and BAD experience.  Put the "grade" in parenthesis (A-F).

 

You'll see that many forum members have done this, and it is so helpful to new users to be able to see what others are using!

 

HOW TO:

Click the "PROFILE" button (just below the search box near the top left of the Web Page you are on right now).

Then click the link on the far left that says "Forum Profile Information".

Enter your information into the field called "Personal Text:".  You don't have a ton of space, so feel free to abbreviate if you have experience with more than one MB.

 

Thanks