November 11, 200817 yr Hi, I am eagerly awaiting this motherboard providing it is or will be compatible with unraid. Asides from the PCB colour and one added NIC it looks almost identical to Intel's development kit for the Intel Atom Processor N270 and Mobile Intel 945GSE Express Chipset Development Kit. This motherboard was reviewed a few month back at mini-itx.com while the official specs are available on the official MSI page. The more notable specifications to consider that I can tell in terms of compatibility are as follows: - Chipset Intel® 945GSE+ICH7M - LAN 2 x Intel® 82574L GbE LAN Interestingly enough there are also models of this motherboard with DC power connectors instead of ATX. Unfortunately I have not found anything on the hardware compatibility list nor the forms about the compatibility of either with unRAID. Having said that despite my eagerness, my searching skills are usually a bit lackluster. Anyone have any ideas? I am intending to get a mini PCI-E to PCI-E 1x adaptor and plug in my SIL 3132 card. The only such adaptor I have found to date is the PEMINI2x1-F from Adex Electronics. I currently do not have a price directly from them although a quick google search reveals a price ~ $100. Hopefully with onboard gigabit NICs, and the cache/parity running off of the chipset's sata ports it should offer reasonable I/O for normal transfers although definitely shy of many other users solutions. When multiple data drives would be accessed simultaneously such as during a parity sync while being funneled through a single PCI-e 1x (I believe it is 1.0 like my current card not 2.0) of 250MB/sec, it would be horrendously slow with roughly every drive only having roughly 25MB/sec of available throughput. I suspect this solution wouldn't be cheap either especially as I do not have a cost for the motherboard yet but as far as I know it would be the lowest power consumption possible for a 12 drive unRAID box using 2 sata multipliers. Conceivably you could get more by running a pair of drives off of a PCI adapter. Supposedly the motherboard is rated < 12watts compared to the ~28watts of a typical atom board based off of the 945GC chipset. Once again, this will only work if unRAID would support this either now or in the future. Deleted from the other forum where I accidentally posted first and re-posted here.
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