I'm planning to setup my first unRaid box on some old hardware I have here, namely a gateway P3 500 with 192 megs of ram.

I have a Silicon Image 3114 PCI card to be installed and I'm going to throw a 2TB and 2x1TB drives in it.

 

Now I know this is miles below the minimum requirements but it will let me play around with it without investing in too much new kit. I see another user running a p3 800 setup so it might be doable. When the server will be up and running it will be used very little and throughput is not important, streaming SD media will be and if i can get a few megs a sec upload to it I'll be happy

 

Any thoughts on the best way to come at this setup or just dive in?

You'll need to boot it from a boot manager or kicker disk as I doubt it can boot from USB. Also make sure the 3114 can see the sata disks, hopefully you can flash it with the latest non raid bios. Have a look for PLoP bootmanager HDD install you'll need another hard drive in the box to boot from.

 

Fortunately unRaid doesnt need high spec hardware, I had it running on a via PD1000 although I did have more memory than 192Mb. 

 

Good luck!

 

I have a unRAID system running on a P3 1ghz. I do have 512Meg of ram though. I boot the system through a kicker CD disk. The motherboard can't boot from the USB drive.

 

I was the one that was running the P3 800mhz machine. I would still be running it but the capacitors on the motherboard started to leak. Made a god awful squeal. 

Thanks guys, yeah i should have mentioned that i did come across PloP boot manager so il have a go with that. Looking for ward to it now. Should get to throw it together over the Christmas Holidays.

192MB of ram is not enough ram. The root image is loaded into a RAM disk. on my system with a few packages loaded, this image is a little over 200MB.

A virgin image may be smaller.

You could add swap space somewhere, space on the initramfs cannot be swapped out.

 

So 192MB leaves very little for application usage, and then the ram an application will need to function.

 

It may boot and run for a while, but you will have all sorts of out of memory conditions with random processes failing or being killed.

192MB of ram is not enough ram. The root image is loaded into a RAM disk. on my system with a few packages loaded, this image is a little over 200MB.

A virgin image may be smaller.

You could add swap space somewhere, space on the initramfs cannot be swapped out.

 

So 192MB leaves very little for application usage, and then the ram an application will need to function.

 

It may boot and run for a while, but you will have all sorts of out of memory conditions with random processes failing or being killed.

 

My thoughts exactly!  I think the default unRAID systems when they were released came with 512MB of RAM.  I would not, unless unavoidable, use less than that.

Good to know, I'll try and round up some more RAM for me little box so.

I seem to remember 256MB being mentioned by Limetech recently as the memory requirement for running UnRaid, prior to the recent beta performance improvements?

 

I'd stick with 4.4.2 as well rather than the 4.5 stable release.

 

 

With any luck i can swipe an old dell p4 2.4 with a gig 'o ram from work to replace the gateway with