SATA Expansion and NIC Card

[manny]

Hi All, I am novice in unRaid so please excuse me asking basic questions. I have the free version of unRaid running 3 X 2TB drives running Unraid 5.0-rc8a for quite sometime now. This is  great software and till date its been running without a single issue. However since I am running out of space I am planning to purchase pro version of the OS. I need help with the following,

 

1. My motherboard Asus P8B75-M LE has 6 SATA ports but i want to add more drives. My case can take upto 9 HDD but I am planning to get HDD cages to expand the storage more , say around 16 drives. How to expand my SATA ports in my mother board. If you could suggest expansion card it would be great.

 

2. The onboard Realtek 8111F-VB-CG gigabyte LAN controller is pathetic to say the least , can you please suggest a good NIC (intel?) which i can purchase

 

3. Should I continue with the current OS version or should I upgrade, I absolutely don't have any problem with the current verion.

 

Also I live in India and i will not be able to buy the NIC card and SATA expansion from ebay.com since it will be problem to return/replace if there are any issues. But I can get it from other big sites from Amazon, newegg , tiger direct etc.,

 

Thanks for taking time to answer my questions.

[manny]

Anyone ?? :-)

[apgood]

For the data card get the M1015. It is an 8x PCIE card that has 8 sata3/sas ports. Should work in any of x16 pcie slots on your board.  You will need to flash it to IT mode if it hasn't already been done.  There are a few threads on here about it so just do a bit of a search.  For nic's any intal based pcie card should be fine.  As I get mine from eBay you'll need to hunt around but assume you should be able to find on amazon or similar.

 

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

 

 

[manny]

Thanks, this info gives me a good place to start.