Up until early this year I'd been running unRaid for file storage. However the Fractal Design Array 2 case I had only held 6 HDDs and I'd ran out of space. So I decided to 'upgrade', as I had the 2700K spare from my old computer and an eATX motherboard, I'd decided to go for the humongous Nanoxia Deep Silence 5 which holds 11 drives, with 4 5.25's that can be converted.

I thought the 2700K would be a little wasted so I opted for Windows and Flexraid.

 

A few things have made me want to upgrade again. But I'm most likely going to split the two looking at the options. So I'm probably looking back at a separate file server and Windows server.

 

The case I've seen is the new ITX Lian Li case that holds 10 3.5 and 1 2.5 HDDs. The thing looks amazing! I think I'm sold on it already but are there any other options available with as many HDDs with case size in mind?

 

 

So that's the case sorted. Next up would be which motherboard/CPU? Ideally, as I'd be buying new parts. I'd rather go from some server grade hardware, mainly for the ECC RAM. I'd also like a motherboard with enough SATA ports to be able to connect all available HDDs. (Well, 10 at least, I'll probably not use the 2.5 as a cache drive or storage). I'd like to try avoid SAS cards, I do have already which I could use, can't remember the name but it's a pretty cheap Supermicro card, I'm currently using that in my existing server, and it works but. But it doesn't allow smart checking. It's also another thing that could fail. So, after a very brief bit of researching, I've found some Intel Avoton server boards, that do have 11 HDD ports. Server Quad/Octa core versions of the Atom I believe. Which would be great because they're low powered. However I seem to have found people saying they are having problems using them with unRaid. The ASRock C2550D4I and ASRock C2750D4I are the ones I've seen. So, will either of these work? And if not are there any ITX motherboards that do have 10+ sata ports (or SAS ports?).

 

CPU, obviously the two options I've listed above have the CPU built in, but if I were to purchase motherboard and CPU separate. How important is the CPU? I'm under the impression that it isn't very important at all. But when I were using unRaid before I were getting 40MB write speeds, all the drives were 3TB Seagate Barracudas and although I don't think the lower write speed had anything to do with it, I'll ask now to be sure. 40MB isn't that bad to be honest, all I do is transfer Blu Ray rips to it really, so I only have to write the odd thing every so often.

 

And my final question, and another thing that is wanting me to rebuild is the announcement of 10TB HDDs, that will apparently be the best price per TB you can find. Which is great! That's one thing especially that'll allow me to fit everything in a smaller build. But (I know it's probably early to tell), will unRaid support 10TB HDDs and if so, will that have an impact on performance. I'm sure I remember reading somewhere higher capacity HDDs can slow down the array.

 

Cheers!

unRAID will support 10TB drives but I have some real reservations about using them.  The first thing is that a non-correcting parity check on a 3TB array is a bit over seven hours.  I can run that overnight and have it finished before I would start to use it the following morning.  On a 10TB based system, the same check would probably be in the twenty hour range.  That is almost a full day! 

 

I just did a google on 10Tb drives and what I found that Seagate announced that "it would release 8TB and 10TB hard drives in the next 12 months, has started delivering early samples of its 8TB hard drive to “major customers” (i.e. enterprise customers)."  It may be a while before any of us will be getting one.