UPS dropped this board and another 4 WD10EADS drives off this morning. This build appears to be the one for me. It has the best mix of efficiency, power, expandability, and cost.

 

The chipsets and Realtek gigabit lan are old and well supported so I'm not expecting any issues to come up. This board is actually a rebadged Foxconn G31MX-K and can be flashed with newer Foxconn bios.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813158003

 

With an E5200, Seasonic S12 430w, and 1GB dimm the power usage at the wall was:

 

33.5w onboard audio, ide, serial, ir, and parallel disabled (booted into unRAID with speedstep in effect)

36w gig-e ethernet plugged in

39w 4 WD10EADS spun down

50w drives idle with heads parked (8 seconds of no activity)

58w drives idle without heads parked

65w drives during parity creation

102w startup spike

 

With 2x 2gb instead of 1 1gb dimm:

 

41w 4 WD10EADS spun down

53w drives idle with heads parked (8 seconds of no activity)

61w drives idle without heads parked

 

The stock cpu fan was spinning at a somewhat noisy 1700rpm instead of the typical 1200rpm. Changing the fan control to be temperature controlled fixed that. On my Intel board it only ramped the fan up to 1800rpm when the cpu got up to 70c.  Oh, unRAID started on the first boot without any changes to the bios.

 

That's all there is to report so far. This is a very simple board and it's working as expected.

 

Edit: Added parity creation and check syslog & 4gb power numbers.

I am using a Foxconn G41MX-K 2.0 which is not in the Hardware List but working fine.

It contains a Pentium E6500, 2x1GB RAM and six Samsung EcoGreen F2 1500GB - Enermax PRO82+ II 385W

Idle Power Consumtion: 42W

Under full load (all Drives spinning): 84W

No unusual issues so far.