Newbie with some MB questions. New Build!

[lagamm]

1st post!

 

I decided I am upgrading my 2 disk 1tb ready made NAS to an un-raid server. I love the flexibility and expandability. Current hardware I have bought or already have left over from previous computer builds is:

 

Ultra Full tower case: (dug out of the basement), should able to hold 10-12 hard drives in this with good ventilation.

AMD X2 Toledo 2.2ghz dual core (have 2 left over)

2 gb ddr 3200 OCZ mem.(left over)

Corsair 550w PS (new)

Cool master 4 in 3 hardisk cage (new)

Lexar Firefly USB jump drive 1gb (for unraid boot) (new)

Have 1 new 1tb WD HDD (parity drive), plus 3 old WD 500gb & 2 old Seagate drives (300gb & 250gb). So staring out with 6 drives and planning to expand to 10-12 drives.

 

 

For the MB I purchased off eBay a used Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board. Is anyone using this board? It is listed under the motherboard compatibility list and I have a few questions about it.

 

The MB has 8 SATA connections! 4 are on the Nforce southbridge chipset and 4 are on a separate Silicon Image (3114R) raid controller. Which is the better performing connections for the parity drive? The manual list the SI Raid controller to be used for raid functions I still can use these connections with unraid, correct? I just would not build the array in the bios. The way the instructions are worded it seems like these 4 sata connections are only for raid arrays. If so I bought the wrong board!

 

Next

 

The board has 2 lan. Nforce Gigabit MAC w/external Marvell PHY and a marvell 88E81001 pci gigabit lan.

 

Which one would be better to connect to?

 

Any other comments about this board or any other hardware I’m using. This is my 1st Server build and I hope to god it goes better than my 1st HTPC build, LOL! My main use for this server is video (DVD, BlueRay/HD-DVD), music, pictures and DVR (Beyond TV) storage.

 

Thank you for your help and support to this newbie!

Larry G

[BryantD]

1st post!

 

I decided I am upgrading my 2 disk 1tb ready made NAS to an un-raid server. I love the flexibility and expandability. Current hardware I have bought or already have left over from previous computer builds is:

 

Ultra Full tower case: (dug out of the basement), should able to hold 10-12 hard drives in this with good ventilation.

AMD X2 Toledo 2.2ghz dual core (have 2 left over)

2 gb ddr 3200 OCZ mem.(left over)

Corsair 550w PS (new)

Cool master 4 in 3 hardisk cage (new)

Lexar Firefly USB jump drive 1gb (for unraid boot) (new)

Have 1 new 1tb WD HDD (parity drive), plus 3 old WD 500gb & 2 old Seagate drives (300gb & 250gb). So staring out with 6 drives and planning to expand to 10-12 drives.

 

 

For the MB I purchased off eBay a used Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe board. Is anyone using this board? It is listed under the motherboard compatibility list and I have a few questions about it.

 

The MB has 8 SATA connections! 4 are on the Nforce southbridge chipset and 4 are on a separate Silicon Image (3114R) raid controller. Which is the better performing connections for the parity drive? The manual list the SI Raid controller to be used for raid functions I still can use these connections with unraid, correct? I just would not build the array in the bios. The way the instructions are worded it seems like these 4 sata connections are only for raid arrays. If so I bought the wrong board!

 

Next

 

The board has 2 lan. Nforce Gigabit MAC w/external Marvell PHY and a marvell 88E81001 pci gigabit lan.

 

Which one would be better to connect to?

 

Any other comments about this board or any other hardware I’m using. This is my 1st Server build and I hope to god it goes better than my 1st HTPC build, LOL! My main use for this server is video (DVD, BlueRay/HD-DVD), music, pictures and DVR (Beyond TV) storage.

 

Thank you for your help and support to this newbie!

Larry G

 

I use this MB for my unRAID server. You definitely want to use the nForce Sata connectors for parity & data as they are on the PCIe bus. The SI 3114R Sata connectors are on the PCI bus which is slower (especially with more than 2 drives connected) but you can use all of them if you wish.

 

Use the nForce Gigabit ethernet as it is on the PCIe bus whereas the Marvel is on the PCI bus.

 

If I can help you in anyway let me know.

[lagamm]

thank you, helped out alot.

 

Plan right now is to run 4 drives off the Nforce Sata and 2 on the SI 3114R. I'll eventully add 2 more to the SI 3114R and 4 more drives to An adaptec PCI-e 4@ SATA ($120)