Just put together a desktop with this mobo (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128416) for my wife (Win7 Ultimate) - love Gigabyte quality and the SATA3/USB3/ESATA ports look great for future expansion. I know unRaid boots on the mobo, but I didn't run any tests.

 

Here's a cheaper with SATA3: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128419

 

Would the 6Gb/s SATA port and HDD make a big difference for a parity drive, over 3Gb/s?

 

I'm thinking of plugging in the lowest wattage CPU it supports.

 

thoughts?

I believe it breaks down like this:

 

Your read/writes to the server will be unchanged, since as always, the network is the bottleneck and not the drive speed.  You may see improvements if you run unRAID with any add-ons, such as torrents, or if you have multiple users writing to unRAID at once.

 

Your parity builds/checks will be faster if and only if you have both your parity drive and at least one of your data drives on the 6 Gb/s ports.  Your parity builds/checks will only be faster for the section in which the 6 Gb/s data drive is being checked, the rest of the process in which your 3 Gb/s data drives are being checked will be the same speed that you currently see.  Depending on the size of your drives, you may save a few hours.

 

Is it worth it?  In my opinion, no.  Consider the extra cost of the board itself, plus having to use DDR3 RAM.  I always run parity builds/checks overnight anyway, so reducing the time from 6 hours to 4 hours wouldn't really matter to me.  If you are running a lot of unRAID add-ons, then maybe its justifiable.

 

For a super cheap yet reliable low power CPU, check out the AMD Sempron 140

Even the best in the world rotating media can only deliver a fraction of 3GB SATA.

 

6GB SATA is only useful to RAID and super-SSD drives that are bound by 3GB SATA.

Rajahal and bubbaQ-

 

i really appreciate the informative responses. I've been reading this forum for a long time, and have seen this informatio before, and it is finally starting to sink in - thanks for repeating this in a new thread.

 

John