October 27, 200817 yr Just got my UnRaid server up and running this week end with and old Asus board that just had your standard on board 100 LAN and 3 IDE hard drives. My question is if I can put on a PCI Gigabit LAN card and UnRaid will see it. Better yet is their any reason that I need to have Gigabit. This is strickly a server for Movies, Picture and Music. It seems to play BluRay rips just fine the way it is. It does take longer to Rip a BluRay to the server -vrs- the work station, I imagine that the Gigabit would help that?
October 27, 200817 yr Just got my UnRaid server up and running this week end with and old Asus board What board? It seems to play BluRay rips just fine the way it is. It does take longer to Rip a BluRay to the server -vrs- the work station, I imagine that the Gigabit would help that? It might be better to hold off on the gigabit card for now and save towards a motherboard with a better bus layout which would include gigabit on the PCIe bus. The PCI bus will always be a limiting factor. Along side that you have IDE drives which may be sharing the PCI bus. On top of that there is parity calculation yielding a read, read, xor, write, write for every block of data. What might help improve writes is a cache drive. If you have reads that are stuttering, then going towards SATA, A better motherboard and Gigabit are options.
October 27, 200817 yr Author Thanks for the thoughts. It is a Asus P4T-533 board. The IDE drive are all run from the mother board, nothing on the PCI bus right now. But I am going to add a SATA PCI card so I can add a couple of more drives. It does make more sence to go for a new board that would have the Gigabit and SATA on the board. Just trying to spend as little as possible and not have to get a new CPU and memory also. Right now I have $0.00 in it, all old parts. I am just going to try it for awhile and see. As long as their is no problem with BluRay play back (and their isn't that I can tell) I can live with the slower right times.
October 27, 200817 yr If your board has the promise controller on it, that will be on the PCI bus. Even my NCCH-DL with PCI-X has the embedded promise controller on the PCI Bus. If you are using IDE drives and two drives share the same cable, then they will throttle communication to one another. I.E. only one drive on a cable can communicate on the cable at a time. How much ram is in the machine? There is only so much you can do with improving write speed. The cache drive is the best bet if write speed is an issue. I've only seen 8-12mb/s with a 20-22MB/s burst on my system. It all depends on what else is running vs how much can be cached.
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