I just found the perfect unraid server. I just got HP 380 G6 for 200 shipped. It came with 8 bays 2.5" and looks like I can remove cdrom cage and add another 8 bays for 16 total. I can get 1tb sata 2.5" for $60 I did not look at buying  2tb hard drives. I  believe in a year 2tb ssd will be cheap and most of ssd are 2.5" .  The server came with xeon e5520 so it shows as 16 cores to esxi, xen. It has sd slot and usb build to motherboard and it came with raid controler 512 mb cache battery backup.

I get this as test

14806 MB in  1.99 seconds = 7440.01 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 254 MB in  3.01 seconds =  84.34 MB/sec

Timing cached reads:  14576 MB in  1.99 seconds = 7325.94 MB/sec

Timing buffered disk reads: 284 MB in  3.01 seconds =  94.31 MB/sec

 

I  believe in a year 2tb ssd will be cheap

 

:)

 

... I love an optimist 

Being a HP server, are you sure the raid controller is unraid compatible?  Most of them aren't such as the P400/410 models.  Also since it sees 16 cores I'm assuming you have two processors.  I'm not knocking your system, it all depends on what you want to get out of it.  If you want to run ESXi/Zen it will work great but not sure you can pass through the drives to unraid on a controller that may or may not be supported. 

Perfect if you have free power and somewhere you can put it where you can't hear it

 

 

I am using samsung/seagate  momentus 2.5" hard drives 1tb I got 3 of those for 59 each. and there are fast.  I have 128 mb ssd  I upgraded ilo2 bios raid firmware and changed cooling settings to os controlled and server is very quiet .  I was able to get 16 caddies for $4 a peace and 24 for second 8 hd bay. Average Seek time:

- 12 ms

Drive Ready Time:

- 4 sec

Rotational Speed:

- 5400 RPM

Power Usage:

- Read/Write: 2.3W

- Idle: 0.7W

- Standby: 0.2W

 

So this is uses 35 watts for all drives when regular drive will use 19 watts per drive. So this should save money. So hpsa is not available on unraid ?