What is your budget? No strict budget, the cheaper the better but I am willing to spend for quality parts.  Lets say ~$800 excluding hard drives

    How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need?  I already have a pro key, but I don't see this build growing to 20 drives any time soon.  For the purpose of this build, lets say 10 drives.  I'll be using 6TB drives and 10 drives would more than double my current capacity.

    Is expandability important to you?  If so, what's your long term goal?  Expandability is not overly important.  If I can handle 10-15 drives I'd be happy and quite futureproof.

    Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons (see here)?  No, other than unmenu I will not be running any plugins, this is purely going to be a file server.

    Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives?  If you don't have a specific need for 7200 rpm drives, then choose green drives.  I'll be running green drives.

    Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build?  This includes drives.  This computer will be built from all new parts.

 

I am a long time Unraid user (6-7 years) and my current server is getting a bit long in the tooth and is literally busting out of the case.  It currently uses a mix of 1 and 2 TB drives and I have to utilize an external case to hold all my drives (13-14 in total).  It's also not very energy efficient.  It's got plenty of horsepower for my needs, if memory serves me correct it's running an ASUS P4P motherboard with a 2.4ghz single core CPU.  My power needs are not high at all for what I use unraid for.

 

Basically, what I am looking for is motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU and possibly SATA card recommendations (I'd like to find a mother board with lots of ports, but if going with a card makes more logical sense I will do that).  I'd like to keep the energy requirements low as my energy bill is quite high and any help I can get in that regard would be welcome. 

 

I've been trying to do research on here but so much of what I am reading has to do with Plex, VM, and other stuff that I have no interest in and is way more horsepower than I need.

 

If anyone has some Motherboard/CPU recommendations I would really, really appreciate hearing it. 

 

To sum up, what I am looking for is:

 

• Low horsepower requirements, my build will purely be a file server.  No transcoding, plugins, etc.
  
• It would be nice to have MB with lots of SATA ports, but not a requirement
  
• PSU recommendations would be great too
  
• Energy efficient.  I am not looking for anything super extreme here, but the lower the better
  
• Amount of RAM recommendation
  
• I can figure out case, hard drives, etc. on my own.
  

 

Thank you all very much.

How about this board and this proc, pick up one of these AOC-SAS2LP-MV8's.  That will give you low power CPU,12 sata ports, onboard video and gigabit lan. Add 4 gigs of ram for 44 bucks, and you are sitting on easy street.  As for the PS single rail 80plus is what folks are loving these days but I don't own one so can't attest to how nice they are.    That should be a monster file server. 

Thank you ntrlsur, that looks like a solid starting point.  I really appreciate the response.

 

Anyone else have any other thoughts?  Anyone agree/disagree with ntrlsur's recommendation?

 

Thank you!

Search the forum here for some of the mini-ITX Atom builds - you can really get some low power consumption numbers with them if you don't need to support CPU intensive apps.  Though I like Asus, I'd also take a look at the SuperMicro boards that support ECC ram (and I'd go at least 4GB).  I like WD Red drives for the longer warranty and reputed vibration tolerance.

I've been checking out SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-HF-O and it looks like it would be perfect for my needs.  Does anyone know if it will work with 6TB drives?  I saw here that they support 4TB so I assume they are good with 6TB too?  Correct?

I didn't go strictly low power, but power was a definite concern.  Since this is my first unRAID build, I didn't know what to expect for performance or if I would end up using many plug ins.

 

I went with a Core i3-4370 (54W TDP) and an Asus GRYPHON Z97 motherboard.  I wish the motherboard had more than 6 SATA ports, but I'll add a HBA card later.

 

The Apcups plug shows a load of 43.25W on my UPS.  My server has 4x 4TB drives( all 4 spun up with one of them being pre-cleared) and a SSD cache drive, and a couple extra fans.  The UPS also has a 2 routers and a switch running off it.

 

While power was a concern, I also didn't want extremely poor performance.  (The performance shock of going from a server with a RAID 5 array of 8x 2TB drives on a RocketRaid card in a server with an Core2 i7-920 (~550 MB/sec sequential reads) to a much lower power Mediasonic 4x 2TB drives in a USB3 RAID enclosure (~200 MB/sec sequential reads and dog slow writes) made performance something I wasn't going to neglect again).

So here is what I have come up with.

 

 

Case: Fractal Design Define R4 with Window Black Pearl Silent ATX Mid Tower Case

Hard Drive x6: WD Green WD60EZRX 6TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

PSU: CORSAIR HX series HX650 650W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Motherboard/CPU: SUPERMICRO MBD-X7SPA-HF-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard DDR2 667

RAM: G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Laptop Memory Model F2-5300CL5D-4GBSA

Fan: Fractal Design Silent Series R2 FD-FAN-SSR2-140 140mm 140mm Fan

 

How does it look?  My only concern is the board being able to handle 6TB drives (See previous post). 

 

Feedback is greatly welcomed.

 

Thanks!!

The latest reviews of that board are not very good..  FYI..

 

I really like the X10SL7-F board. Also, since you're going with a server caliber motherboard, you might as well get ECC ram.

 

Check mine out, since it hits many of your requirements/parts list: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35249.0

For the cost of that mini ITX Atom board you could get a full ATX or mATX + Celeron easily enough. You'd have much more horsepower and expandability.

 

The Define R4 will hold all three sizes, so why opt for the smallest / slowest / most expensive option...food for thought.