I've been reading about and researching unRAID for several months waiting for the right time to do a build for my house. I've just run across a smashing deal on some Dell server equipment that I'm thinking about picking up to use for my build but wanted to make sure that it will work before I drop the money on them.

 

My use case is that I want to build a central storage location but also run several VMs on the system as well to virtualize things in my house that are currently on stand-alone machines. If any of you could look over these specs and give me an idea if unRAID will support this I'd appreciate it. I guess I'm mostly concerned about the DAS unit as the server itself should be fine since it'll run pretty much any of the latest versions of Linux.

 

Server:

Dell PowerEdge R410

2x Intel Xeon 5500 Quad Core 2.13GHz Processors

32GB RAM

 

Storage:

Dell PowerVault MD1000 15-bay DAS

Controller card (more info unknown on the card)

 

that is alot enterprise hardware.  To put unraid on it would be underkill.  What controller cards in the hardware would determine if things worked or not.  Unraid might not see the hardware controller in the R410 or the addon card for the MD1000.  unraid is stripped down so alot of linux drivers are not installed.  Plus that would be a very noisy setup..

That was kind of what I was worried about honestly. I'm mainly looking at it b/c I can get the whole setup for about $300. I was mainly looking at it because of the massive amounts of disks that are supported. Does unRAID support adding additional drivers that aren't bundled with the main distro?

 

Noise isn't an issue as I have a separate room on the other end of the basement for stuff like this.

 

I honestly may buy the thing anyway and do some other kind of installation on it besides unRAID. The systems were used for virtualization lab testing in this company that is getting rid of them so I have some options.

 

Thanks,

Dan

My opinion is that there are too many unknowns.  Plus, for the power bill youll pay the run that thing, you could by some nice quiet hardware

 

But seriously...too many unknowns  Say the whole setup is 300, and it doesnt work.  You will still have to buy hardware.  Now, correct me if I am wrong please....  but you might have better luck running ESXi on there, then virtualizing unraid.  But I would recommend having experience with both ESXi and Unraid before trying this.

for 300 I would pick it up just cause personally.  If you dont buy it put me intouch with the folks selling it and I will. 

Good points both...I'm gonna go ahead and pick up one of their dual quad core R410s and the storage array. If unRAID doesn't work, I'll have an excuse to play with the free VSphere product or just put FreeNas on it and call it a day.  Too much hardware at too good a price to pass up IMO.

 

Thanks everyone for your input.

 

Dan

Just to circle back around to this for anyone that might find this later, I went ahead and bought the PowerEdge R410 and the MD1000 enclosure.

 

The R410 has a standard, non-RAID controller inside it supporting 5 SATA connections (1 currently used for the DVD drive). I have it populated right now with a 2TB and a 4TB drive for data and a 4TB drive for parity. Another 4TB drive is enroute and when the 2TB drive needs replacing I'll put a 4TB in its place. unRAID is installed on a Sandisk Cruzer USB drive. The Dell folks thoughtfully put a couple of standard USB ports inside the top of the case so the Sandisk is installed there. The R410 is running a 30-day trial of unRAID 6 now with no issues.

 

The MD1000 wasn't as productive. The BIOS on the LSI card will detect and configure SATA drives I put in it, but unRAID doesn't see the drives. I'm going to keep researching and see if there's another controller I can get to use with the enclosure. If not, I'm not out that much money and I'll eventually have 12TB of storage in the server natively.

Thanks for the update.

The R410 has a standard, non-RAID controller inside it supporting 5 SATA connections (1 currently used for the DVD drive).

 

Hey, I'm actually also considering getting a refurb R410 for my Unraid server, and was wondering if yours shipped with ECC Ram or non-ECC?

Some sellers don't seem to mention either, but I'd wanna assume if they're putting it in an enterprise piece of hardware it would have ECC Ram.

 

And also, are the SATA ports on the mobo SATA2 or 3? that was a concern of mine as well.

 

Thanks