February 7, 201016 yr Im new here so first things first Hello All Im thinking of going down unRAID route after a rather painful media loss which resulted in implementing a backup solution with a couple 1TB firewire drives but i think i will have to purchase new storage in approx. 3-4 months if i keep up with my conversion of my DVD and CD media. My home network comprises of a couple of MPB's, Imac, Apple TV, PS3, with a gigabit & wireless network, with principle usage is Movies and Music and Photographs. I have an old windows machine which could form the initial components for my build, im thinking of using the Case (full tower) PSU 600W, and a several SATA drives. Im thinking i need a new MB, CPU and Mem to get me away, and once i have a working unRAID system i will upgrade / replace my old legacy parts to something more appropriate / suitable for use. Im hoping to put this Kit in my attic / loft, so it must be silent, and remote accessible and maintainable. I am UK based so i think the purchase of one of the prebuilt systems is out, so any suggestions for base components to get me started would be much appreciated, i dont mind spending to get the right kit to get me going if it will form a good solid base for an expandable system. Thanks in advance Phil G
February 7, 201016 yr Welcome to the forum. Unless your missing the CPU/MB and ram I would suggest you start with the hardware you now have. If you must buy look for a MB with plenty of sata ports..the more the better. Don't overlook your need to add ports in the future. Look for boards that will allow add on Raid cards. Preferably PCIE card so you can get the best possible speed. unRaid doesn't require much memory or power. A quick seach will reveal these details. cheers, db
February 7, 201016 yr Author Thanks for the reply I do have a MB, CPU and Men, but as they are all so old i made the assumption that they were prob too old this is the kit i have Motherboard - DFI LAN Party NFII Ultra B Processor - AMD Athlon 2500 Mobile Memory - 1 Gig Ram 2x512 DDR (Corsair) If this is ok to get a start then i will have a go The Spec of the motherboard is as follows LAN nVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T and ICS1893 Phy - Full duplex support at both 10 and 100 Mbps Realtek RTL8110S Gigabit LAN - Full duplex support at 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps Serial ATA with RAID Silicon Image Sil3114 PCI to Serial ATA controller Supports four SATA (Serial ATA) interfaces which are compliant with SATA 1.0 specification (1.5Gbps interface) Supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 Expansion Slots 1 AGP slot that supports 8x/4x AGP 5 PCI slots CPU Socket Socket A Chipset nVIDIA nForce2 chipset - nForce2 Ultra 400 - nForce2 MCP-T Memory Supports dual channel memory interface Supports up to 3GB memory (unbuffered DIMM) Supports PC1600 (DDR200), PC2100 (DDR266), PC2700 (DDR333) and PC3200 (DDR400) DDR SDRAM DIMM, 2.5V type Three 184-pin DDR SDRAM DIMM sockets
February 7, 201016 yr LAN nVIDIA nForce2 MCP-T and ICS1893 Phy - Full duplex support at both 10 and 100 Mbps Realtek RTL8110S Gigabit LAN - Full duplex support at 10, 100 and 1000 Mbps You should disable the nVIDIA nForce2 NIC in the BIOS. Everythig else looks just fine for a unRAID server.
February 12, 201016 yr Author Thought i would post a quick update have recovered my old PC from the attic and made a USB boot stick, and i successfully booted unRAID 4.5 final Have only got as far as the 'root' login, as i have not yet hooked the machine up to my network yet, so unable access the config, and set up section, need to do a bit more reading up on config etc.. hope to do this over this weekend. expect me back here soon for help Phil G
February 12, 201016 yr Thought i would post a quick update have recovered my old PC from the attic and made a USB boot stick, and i successfully booted unRAID 4.5 final Have only got as far as the 'root' login, as i have not yet hooked the machine up to my network yet, so unable access the config, and set up section, need to do a bit more reading up on config etc.. hope to do this over this weekend. expect me back here soon for help Phil G There is a 4.5.1 release available for download. It fixes a few tiny bugs. You might want to upgrade to it. (You just need to copy the new bzroot and bzimage files to the flash drive and then reboot)
February 13, 201016 yr I recall reading about old Nforce chipsets corrupting data when the SATA ports are heavily used. Am I dreaming or is this actually a problem? Peter
February 13, 201016 yr I recall reading about old Nforce chipsets corrupting data when the SATA ports are heavily used. Am I dreaming or is this actually a problem? Peter Yes, there were problems with them and you will find some post here on the forums about it. I believe the Hardware Compatibility Page in the wiki also has a blurb about older nforce boards and problems they might cause
February 13, 201016 yr Author Well i have it up and running, i can log in through my browser and starting to set it up. Have ran the parity check and formatted the drives, just got to work out how to access the drives from my Mac's now ! as for the Nforce issues, i will have a play for a bit, not put anything on it that is not already backed up else where, once i find my way about, i will upgrade my kit. back later with another update Phil G
February 13, 201016 yr Well i have it up and running, i can log in through my browser and starting to set it up. Have ran the parity check and formatted the drives, just got to work out how to access the drives from my Mac's now ! as for the Nforce issues, i will have a play for a bit, not put anything on it that is not already backed up else where, once i find my way about, i will upgrade my kit. back later with another update Phil G If you can do repeated parity checks, and not have parity errors on subsequent parity checks, you should be fine. The issue showed itself as parity errors after the initial parity calcs were done. They are never expected unless the server shuts down in an un-controlled way (loss of power, etc)
February 13, 201016 yr Author Well i now have access from all my Mac's - so far so good, just have to work out a folder setup now that works for me. I did a test file transfer to a share and got a peak Tx speed of 19mb/sec not really sure if this is ok for a transfer speed Once i have a built up some confidence with this, then i will fork out for some new drives , as i currently only have 200gig avail in the current build. Task List 1. Share & Folder Config 2, Apple TimeMachine Test & Config 3, New HD's 4, Optimise build for power consumption and noise (could involve new MB and case) Thanks for the feedback guys, really appreciated Phil G
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