I'm doing this on an extreme budget.  I need a NAS for a variety of purposes but it's only for home use so I'm starting out with a 3-drive server.

 

I'm using/following the required hardware for the most part.  There is lots of really helpful information (sometimes not so easy to lay eyes upon) on the Unraid site.  And so far the forum support has been stellar.  But for someone starting out with a modest build it's a lot of ground to cover.

 

I know my choice of PSU isn't on the recommended list and it's only 70% effecient but I already have it and I think it's good enough for now.  

If the recommended Corsair 400 Watt 80+ gets a little cheaper with free shipping (just a matter of time) I'll buy it.  

 

I'm probably going to check if the MB will unlock the second core on the cpu but will likely not run it unlocked even if it can be.  As far as I can tell Unraid only uses one core.  I bought the case on sale $19.99 + free shipping in December -couldn't pass it up.  I always keep an unopened extra PSU laying around for emergency.  I can't see my server ever growing beyond 6 drives and even that would be a stretch given that any new drives I buy are 1.5TB now.  But if it gets beyond 4 drives I'll change out the PSU for certain.  

And because it's a Gigabyte motherboard I'm going to need to remember to disable HPA in bios.  http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA

 

Hardware compatibility page:

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Compatibility#Motherboard

 

Stuff I already had and decided was good enough to make a small Unraid (3-drive) server.

PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171046

Case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147111  

RAM: 2x1GB DDR2 800 Kingston

Sata: 3 Seagate 7200.11 500GB

 

Stuff I decided to purchase  (all recommended)...

Motherboard:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128342

Cpu:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698

USB flash drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191269

It all looks fine to me.  The only thing I will mention is that your PSU has two 12+ V rails, meaning that you will have to give a bit of thought to what you plug in to each rail (you will want to balance the load).  Since you are only using it for a 3 drive build, I doubt you will have any problems with this.

 

Also, I'm guessing you already own those hard drives?

It all looks fine to me.  The only thing I will mention is that your PSU has two 12+ V rails, meaning that you will have to give a bit of thought to what you plug in to each rail (you will want to balance the load).  Since you are only using it for a 3 drive build, I doubt you will have any problems with this.

 

Also, I'm guessing you already own those hard drives?

Typically, one of the two 12Volt rails will be used for the motherboard leaving the other for the disks.  It still won't matter as it looks like they are both 18Amp 12 volt rails... the disks typically draw about 2 amps when starting up, so you good for 6 or 8 drives if the manufacturer published good specs.

It all looks fine to me.  The only thing I will mention is that your PSU has two 12+ V rails, meaning that you will have to give a bit of thought to what you plug in to each rail (you will want to balance the load).  Since you are only using it for a 3 drive build, I doubt you will have any problems with this.

 

Also, I'm guessing you already own those hard drives?

 

Yep, I already have the drives from other machines.

All the new parts arrived and I assembled the machine.  It booted into Unraid on the first power up. 

 

I do have a concern about the motherboard so please read that below.  But first things first; I didn't change any of the bios settings prior to booting the first time and it went into unRAID automatically after not finding bootable OS on any of my other drives.  unRAID is installed on the Lexar Firefly USB flash drive.  I did a memtest86+ for an hour and it passed that. 

 

All 3 hard drives had come from a different unRAID machine and I was able to add them into the array and press the Restore button.  I had installed unRAID on the flash drive and then copied the "config", "packages", and "unmenu" folders from the older unRAID machine to it.  All the shares on the drives showed up as expected.  Unmenu comes up in the browser.

 

I ran the parity sync without errors.  I ran 2 parity checks in a row without sync errors.  I'm running a 3rd one now.  The drives are maintaining temps between 28 and 31 celsus when active. When doing a sync check the estimated speed shown on the unRAID main page starts out at 100MB/s, drops to around 80MB/s at the half way mark and gets down to 54MB/s as it nears completion - nicely demonstrating the drive speeds are fastest on the outer tracks gradually decreasing speeds towards the inner tracks.

 

The cpu cooler doesn't feel warm.  One of the RAM chips is warm but the other isn't.  Not sure if it's because so little memory is required that the second isn't being active or something else.  I'm going to try swapping them around as a test.

 

GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2: 

The motherboard that arrived is a rev 4.0 and unexpectedly has only 4 sata ports instead of the 6 that rev 3.0 and older had.  I haven't decided yet whether I'm annoyed enough to return it.  Had I understood that before I purchased I probably would have opted for a different board.  However, now that I have it I'll try to determine if it's really the same board with fewer ports or a different board.  It looks like rev 4.0 and rev 4.1 have only a single bios apiece.  Bios FA is only for Rev 4.0 and bios FB is only for rev 4.1.  If it's a different board then what passed unRAID level 1 test might not count.

Being a Gigabyte board I wanted to check that HPA is disabled but found nothing in the bios settings or the manual about it.

syslog-2010-02-18.txt

That is pretty lame about the board only having 4 ports instead of 6.  Was it incorrectly advertised?  That is certainly grounds for a return if you feel like going through the trouble.  Newegg may even cross-ship you a new board if you whine loud enough...  In the long run you will be happy to have the two extra SATA ports.

 

Gigabyte doesn't refer to it as 'HPA' anywhere that I've seen.  In your BIOS settings on, I believe, the 'advanced settings' page (or something with 'advanced' in the name), look for an option called 'Save a copy of BIOS to the hard drive'.  Disable it (it was actually disabled by default on my latest Gigabyte board, surprisingly enough).

Lame is right.  I'm checking out the RMA process.  They might not even have any rev 3.0 boards.  I'll post what I learn.

 

I looked in the advanced section of the bios and there is a "Save bios to HDD" that is disabled so that must be the HPA setting.

 

I also couldn't figure out what to do to see if I could unlock my second cpu core.  Any ideas what to set in that regard?

 

If Newegg doesn't have any older rev 3.0 boards I'll likely keep it.  It has two PCI slots and one PCIe x1 for expansion cards.  Would I see any great loss of performance using a PCI card (I already have one from the hardware compatibility list) if it comes to that?

Lame is right.  I'm checking out the RMA process.  They might not even have any rev 3.0 boards.  I'll post what I learn.

 

I looked in the advanced section of the bios and there is a "Save bios to HDD" that is disabled so that must be the HPA setting.

 

I also couldn't figure out what to do to see if I could unlock my second cpu core.  Any ideas what to set in that regard?

 

If Newegg doesn't have any older rev 3.0 boards I'll likely keep it.  It has two PCI slots and one PCIe x1 for expansion cards.  Would I see any great loss of performance using a PCI card (I already have one from the hardware compatibility list) if it comes to that?

 

Short answer is yes.

 

I just switched to a board that has 4 PCIex1 and 1PCIex16 plus two PCI.  I am going to avoid adding drives to the PCI if at all possible.  I ended up getting this motherboard and some SATA controller cards.

This is not a topic I wanted to see, I missed this thread earlier and it would have stopped me from making the purchase I made today. I will be very curious to read how the RMA process goes on this since I just ordered the same one. Maybe I will be lucky enough to get the version that has 6 ports!!

I contacted Newegg to discuss the RMA.  Results are not great.  

They state:

   1. they cannot guarantee revision on items.

   2. The technical information tab is provided by the manufacturer unedited by Newegg.

 

They allowed my RMA to be for refund and are waiving the restocking fee.  I still have to pay return shipping.  

 

I'm kinda bummed out.  

 

I called Gigabyte about the problem and results were even less helpful.  They don't have any revision 3.0 boards to replace it with. 

 

 

I also couldn't figure out what to do to see if I could unlock my second cpu core.  Any ideas what to set in that regard?

 

I really don't know much about overclocking, unlocking cores, etc.  However, I can tell you that as long as you are running unRAID stock or with minimal add-ons, then it is better to NOT unlock your second core.  You won't notice any performance increase, but I believe you will be using more electricity (and potentially voiding your CPU's warranty).  Unless you are using your server for video encoding or something CPU-intensive, there is no reason to bother with unlocking the second core.

I also couldn't figure out what to do to see if I could unlock my second cpu core.  Any ideas what to set in that regard?

 

I really don't know much about overclocking, unlocking cores, etc.  However, I can tell you that as long as you are running unRAID stock or with minimal add-ons, then it is better to NOT unlock your second core.  You won't notice any performance increase, but I believe you will be using more electricity (and potentially voiding your CPU's warranty).  Unless you are using your server for video encoding or something CPU-intensive, there is no reason to bother with unlocking the second core.

 

I agree that unlocking your second core is not a good idea for the simple fact that you want complete stability for a server and you don't know whether AMD simply locked it or if it is sold as a single core due to the second core possibly not passing their testing.