October 20, 200916 yr My UnRaid server consists of Asus P4T533-C Mother board Pentium 4 2.26ghz 512kb RDRAM On Board 10/100 Network 2 UltraDMA Ports (no SATA ports) 3 Western Digital 120gig IDE Drives 4 Seagate 1.5TB SATA Drive (1 is parity) This is used as a media server; DVD, BluRay, and Music. Up until now I have only had a 10/100 network in the house and it has served well, most of the time never a problem when watching BluRay but once and a while you get a little freeze. Well now we have a new house and I ran CAT6 for everything, Gigabit switch is coming today and the HTPC already has Gigabit in it. So my dilemma is should I pick up a gigabit NIC for the server or start over with a new Motherboard, which will require new CPU and Memory I am guessing. My current mother board will not boot from a USB so I do use a kicker disc, which with the reliability of floppy disc is always a little scarry, but has never ben a problem. So what is a good Gigabit NIC that fits a PCI slot and will work with UnRaid? Or what is the best Motherboard right now to use with UnRaid, fastest drive write/read speeds?
October 20, 200916 yr It depends on how much you want to spend and if you want to take the time to troubleshot a problem should one occur while you are hooking up the new stuff. Also take into account that if you want to use all the IDE drives you will probably have to by a PCI IDE card for them. Your SATA drive will likely be moved onto the motherboard and help to speed things up with a new board. Personally, I would look to upgrade the pieces and parts of the server (maybe use the parts from the HTPC and build a new on of those?). Check out the Hardware Compatibility Page for a list of what boards are known to work with unRAID.
October 20, 200916 yr Author I thought about the turning the HTPC into a server and then build a new HTPC. But their it isn't that old and their really isn't anything out their any better then what I have for video and sound and it is way more expensive to build the HTPC then the server. Their is new stuff coming out in the next year for HTPC it sounds like so I would wait until then anyway. Maybe I am best to just through a new NIC in the server. If I did go to a new server I would probably just get rid of the IDE drives.
October 20, 200916 yr If I did go to a new server I would probably just get rid of the IDE drives. You could keep one around and use it on the on-board IDE ports. Use it as a cache drive so it will not effect parity calc speed and the like. I use an older SATA1 drive for my cache and it works just fine for that purpose (only 160GB in size). If everything is working now then I say don't bother messing with it if you don't want to, even the GB NIC card. unless you start to notice problems don't bother touching stuff right now. When the time comes that you want to re-purpose the HTPC or build a new server then you can start from scratch and build new.
October 20, 200916 yr My UnRaid server consists of Asus P4T533-C Mother board Pentium 4 2.26ghz 512kb RDRAM On Board 10/100 Network 2 UltraDMA Ports (no SATA ports) 3 Western Digital 120gig IDE Drives 4 Seagate 1.5TB SATA Drive (1 is parity) This is used as a media server; DVD, BluRay, and Music. Up until now I have only had a 10/100 network in the house and it has served well, most of the time never a problem when watching BluRay but once and a while you get a little freeze. Well now we have a new house and I ran CAT6 for everything, Gigabit switch is coming today and the HTPC already has Gigabit in it. So my dilemma is should I pick up a gigabit NIC for the server or start over with a new Motherboard, which will require new CPU and Memory I am guessing. My current mother board will not boot from a USB so I do use a kicker disc, which with the reliability of floppy disc is always a little scarry, but has never ben a problem. So what is a good Gigabit NIC that fits a PCI slot and will work with UnRaid? Or what is the best Motherboard right now to use with UnRaid, fastest drive write/read speeds? Based on your other posts in this thread, I'd say easiest option is to wait until you build a new HTPC (next year?) and at that point reuse its parts as the basis of the new server. This is, of course if the storage capacity of the existig server suits your needs, or if it has sufficient ports for expansion. Since you said you only get a minor freeze or two when watching blur-ray over the existing LAN at 100Mb/s speeds you can probably go until the other MB becomes available. (this assumes you keep the HTPC case for the new HTPC) Next easiest is to pop in a cheap 1000Gb/s NIC. (A lot of people seem to like Intel NIC cards and they are well supported) Something like this might work for your needs: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106121 Joe L.
October 20, 200916 yr Author Thanks for all the replys. I think I will wait like most have said because what I have does work. The server is at its limit with out adding another SATA card but I should be OK for a little while. I think I will go ahead and put in a new NIC though as it is a pretty cheap upgrade. With the new house it is possible that more then one device could try and stream from the server which would really tax the 10/100 connection I would think.
October 20, 200916 yr I'd buy a Gb NIC for the current unraid server, worst case you'll have a spare NIC for the new server if it doesnt help. This may not cure your problem though, I suspect the occasional stutter is due to all your devices being on the PCI bus (ide, usb, vga and nic). When it comes to Gb NICs, Intel can't be beaten (Pro/1000T MT or GT). Brand new from newegg around $30 I'd guess. Otherwise drop in to your local superstore and raid the bargain bucket... For the floppy kicker issue if you were to re-purpose one of 120Gb IDE data drives as a cache drive you could use PLoP bootmanager to boot the USB drive (it is fast too). As for unRaid performance any of the latest Intel or AMD motherboards south bridges (ICH8, 9 or 10 or SB700, 710 or 750) should be good for 6 or more sata ports and 70+MB/s parity check performance over the entire array. Either SKT775 or AMD2+ or AM3 motherboard with the cheapest lowest power CPU and a gigbyte or two of DDR2 RAM should be all you need. Hardware compatibility page shows plenty of good candidates. A word of caution, most of the latest MBs I have used recently only have only one IDE port (2 IDE devices max). This means you'll need to migrate the data from at least one of those 120GB IDE drives or buy a PCI or PCI-e card with an IDE port. Given their size and likeley performance I'd buy another sata drive and migrate the data.
October 20, 200916 yr This may not cure your problem though, I suspect the occasional stutter is due to all your devices being on the PCI bus (ide, usb, vga and nic). Exactly my though.. My experience is limited to the NMT area but I would think a 100mb nic capable of supporting mutiple HD streams. Adding another device on to the pci bus could make things worst. I would look to remove what I can. If you have not already done so disable any unused devices in the bios. Remove any hardware that you don't absolutely need. db
October 20, 200916 yr Author All harware is gone other then a graphics card on the AGP port and a 4 Port SATA card in 1 PCI slot. I believe that I did disable everything in the BIOS but would have to double check that. The current 10/100 network in on the mother board. Normally the freeze up is always at the start of the movie, once is get rolling it smooths out and is fine. Almost like it is spinning up more drives then just the one that the movie is on, I would have to do some checking to see if it was..... Adding a Gigabit NIC to the PCI bus could make stuff worse instead of better I guess.
October 20, 200916 yr I had a similar experience with QoS enabled on my HTPC and VLC, not with unRaid but another NAS. Try disabling QoS unless you use VOIP or some other service on that machine that will benefit from QoS.
October 20, 200916 yr All harware is gone other then a graphics card on the AGP port and a 4 Port SATA card in 1 PCI slot. I believe that I did disable everything in the BIOS but would have to double check that. The current 10/100 network in on the mother board. Normally the freeze up is always at the start of the movie, once is get rolling it smooths out and is fine. Almost like it is spinning up more drives then just the one that the movie is on, I would have to do some checking to see if it was..... Adding a Gigabit NIC to the PCI bus could make stuff worse instead of better I guess. That would be easy to check. Simply spin up all your drives before launching a movie and see if that continues to happen. If that's the case, you could save your money and hold onto this server a while longer.
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