First off, I'd like to thank Unraid for fulfilling all of my home's storage and media needs since 2008.  It has truly been a boring and uneventful time, and that's a GOOD thing!

 

I've upgraded a few things along the way: large HDs, move from a tower case to a Rack, but largely my build has remained the same.  I'll even admit that my unraid server is running 4.6-rc3 (lazy, i know).  As a self confessed hardware geek, it was initially hard, not to tweak, upgrade and change settings, but I finally treated unraid as an appliance and not a workstation/desktop and it has been worth the piece of mind for my data.  But its time for an upgrade...

 

Here's my first Unraid build straight from an old Newegg order:

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1 x AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz Socket AM2 45W Dual-Core

1 x Lexar JumpDrive FireFly (Blue) 1GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable) Model JDFF1GB-431

1 x GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

2 x Athena Power BP-SATA3051B 3 x 5.25" Bays to 5 x 3.5" HD (SATA) Backplane

1 x COOLER MASTER Centurion 590 RC-590-KKN1-GP Black SECC / ABS ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

2 x Open Box: PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card

 

Current Drives:

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1TB WD parity

7x640GB Greenies

2x500GB Seagates

2x320GB WDs

 

Two years ago I scored an outstanding deal on (2) of these 4U cases and decided to drop the 3x5.25s & tower case. 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147155

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132035

 

I also dropped the promise cards in favor or some Cheap Monoprice SATA PCI-E cards (it was a good speed boost)

 

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Reason's for my upgrade:

-I decided to finally start buying Blu Rays instead of DVDs, so I need much more space!!!!

-I read a few years ago about gigabyte bios issues + unraid and have wanted to get rid of the board for a while

-My wife and I travel more so I'm considering a private VPN tunnel and "light" transcoding (only one of us travels at a time) so we can watch our recorded TV and movies anywhere

-An empty 4U case with no purpose sucks

 

Here's the current items I have on order:

ASRock B75 PRO3

Intel Celeron G1610

(2) SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 SAS

(5) 3TB WD Reds (Starting Capacity)

4GB memory

Intel Gigabit NIC

 

The 4U case I have only holds 12HDs, but I've done some creative cutting of acrylic and old mouse pads to allow for vertical HD mounting of 22-24 drives in two rows (backblaze style).  Once everything comes in I'll post some pics in the UCD forum.

 

Thanks again Unraid...now where did I put that second Unraid USB stick??

 

Since you travel and are remote with a working VPN tunnel, have you considered the Supermicro boards that have embedded IPMI?  The boards may cost more, but it has the ability for remote KVM over IP. bios and power access.

Sounds like it's served you well ... and I'm sure the new system will as well.    I've also found UnRAID to be a remarkably reliable storage utility ... and I think the vast majority of issues folks have is with various plugins they're running on the same hardware.    A stock UnRAID, used purely as a NAS, run VERY well.

 

I have two systems - my main media server still running v4.7; and a new small server with 6 3TB WD Reds in a Lian-Li PC-Q25B case running RC16c.    Both are rock solid => the current uptime on my v4.7 unit is 259 days ... and that last reboot was only because the UPS software shut it down due to an extended power outage.

 

@WeeboTEch > Oh I travel alot less then my wife, so i haven't consider a board with IPMI.  I currently just VNC to a desktop in the house and access the unraid GUI that way.

 

@garycase > It truly has.  It's one of the better tech investments I made a few years ago.  I restart the servers every 3-6 months due to power outages, dust cleaning etc.  I still haven't decided if i'm going to sell off the old server (wouldn't net much), or just keep it going.

Agree your old servers have very little cash value -- not worth the bother IMHO.    You may want to keep them available as backups, although a few spare 3-4TB drives would be far simpler to use, and backups don't really need to be fault-tolerant, especially when the system you're backing up is itself fault-tolerant.    I use bare drives stored in drive-boxes to backup my two UnRAID servers.

 

I would hold on to it. I have throw away a couple of computers in the last year and regret it now. I didn't realize you could do so much with old computer.