Good Afternoon All,

 

I have been wanting/needing to build a NAS for some time.  Once I stumbled upon unRAID, I new it was the solution I've been looking for. 

 

Currently I have an ancient Gateway PC (Pentium III [Coppermine] 600Mhz, 256 mB of RAM)running Unbuntu 8.04 as a file server with extremely old IDE drives.  I need to fix this situation.

 

While I have been drooling over the Supermicro boards with IPMI etc it is currently not in the budget.

 

I have several 4U server cases I can use along with a 1U (not much disk space).

 

I have a  MSI K9MM-V motherboard with a SEMPRON 3200+, and 2GB of RAM.  While old this is from a server that was never used.

 

Motherboard has 2 SATA 1.0 ports and an IDE port.

 

I currently have a WD 1TB Green HD (WD10EADS) never used, my NAS planning has been going on for some time. 

 

Will this motherboard/cpu combo work to get me off old system before it dies?

 

I would add another larger hard drive for the parity drive such as:

 

WD20EZRX  - WD 2TB Green

ST2000VM003 - Seagate 2TB

WD30EZRX - WD 3TB Green

WD20ERFX - WD 2TB Red

 

Or perhaps not use a parity drive at this time.

 

While this is a not a long term solution, it may need to be in place for a little while until funds become available.

 

Regards,

 

Chris

 

Good Afternoon All,

 

I have been wanting/needing to build a NAS for some time.  Once I stumbled upon unRAID, I new it was the solution I've been looking for. 

 

Currently I have an ancient Gateway PC (Pentium III [Coppermine] 600Mhz, 256 mB of RAM)running Unbuntu 8.04 as a file server with extremely old IDE drives.  I need to fix this situation.

 

While I have been drooling over the Supermicro boards with IPMI etc it is currently not in the budget.

 

I have several 4U server cases I can use along with a 1U (not much disk space).

 

I have a  MSI K9MM-V motherboard with a SEMPRON 3200+, and 2GB of RAM.  While old this is from a server that was never used.

 

Motherboard has 2 SATA 1.0 ports and an IDE port.

 

I currently have a WD 1TB Green HD (WD10EADS) never used, my NAS planning has been going on for some time. 

 

Will this motherboard/cpu combo work to get me off old system before it dies?

 

I would add another larger hard drive for the parity drive such as:

 

WD20EZRX  - WD 2TB Green

ST2000VM003 - Seagate 2TB

WD30EZRX - WD 3TB Green

WD20ERFX - WD 2TB Red

 

Or perhaps not use a parity drive at this time.

 

While this is a not a long term solution, it may need to be in place for a little while until funds become available.

 

Regards,

 

Chris

 

Search the forums for that motherboard. Refer to the sticky on how to search because it is not obvious.

 

If you don't find it determine the chipset. Then look at the motherboard compatibility list to see if other motherboards with this component are compatible.

 

If that doesn't yield results or you're too lazy to do all that research try it. There is a very good chance it will work.

 

But you face challenges in adding more than a few drives as the motherboard has only a PCI bus for controllers. The PCI bus quickly becomes overloaded esp. when doing simultaneous I/O. Parity checks get painful. And there is no gigabit LAN, and media can stutter.

 

So I can't wholeheartedly recommend your aged motherboard for unRaid but as a starter system with 3-4, maybe 5 disks it would give you a taste of the possibilities. You might keep an eye on the for sale forum as you might find a deal on a used motherboard or server.

The mobo has to be able to boot from a USB port.  That's really a deal breaker if the board won't.

 

If this board doesn't fly what type of budget would you consider? It seems like there's lots of used hardware out there for little $$....no not SuperMicro, but good stuff for unRAID!

It was actually a Baracuda 3xx Load Balancer at one time.  It comes with two PCI gigabit NICs.  Currently all laptops, Blu Ray, and TV  are wireless and router is 10/100 so gigabit speed is not available at this time.

 

It is capable of booting off of USB, I did that with NAS4FREE once.

 

I think two drives will suffice at this time.  This will only be temporary, my Gateway PC and drives are ancient and it is just a matter of time.

 

I wasn't seeing much is my searches for either the mobo or cpu.  I will check out the sticky and do more searching.

 

Chris

Unless you're not worried about the loss of data, you should use a parity drive. So with the basic version you can have two data drives and one parity.  Where I used to work there were two Barracuda SPAM firewall boxes we had that became redundant; I never thought to look inside the 1U chassis to see what they were using. Good luck with your build.

 

It doesn't take much getting the USB flash drive built; if the board/chassis' got power it wouldn't take too long to find out its suitability for your task.

Thanks everyone.

 

I'll try it out, worse case it just doesn't work.

 

Chris