I thought I was ready to order everything but now I am looking to the future.  What mobo, cpu etc would you guys recommend, my case can support up to 20 drives (Norco 4220).  Now I don't plan on having 20 drives anytime soon but I would like to have the option to add that many if I need to.  I prefer, Asus and Supermicro but will consider all mobo's

 

Would like to keep it round $500 or less.  Will be used strickly for unRaid to store Music, Photos and Movies.

Thanks

I'm liking the Supermicro X7SBE.

 

You can expand with 2 PCI-X 8 port Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8? SATA controllers or 2 PCIe 8 port  AOC-SASLP-MV8  Supermicro SAS/SATA controllers.

If you have Promise TX4's around, these can be supported also if you set the bus speed to 66mhz.

 

The PCI-X drivers are more mature.

 

I'm sure there are cheaper boards, what I like about this one is the IPMI expandability which would provide KVM over IP.

 

Look here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5812

I'm liking the Supermicro X7SBE.

 

You can expand with 2 PCI-X 8 port Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8? SATA controllers or 2 PCIe 8 port  AOC-SASLP-MV8  Supermicro SAS/SATA controllers.

If you have Promise TX4's around, these can be supported also if you set the bus speed to 66mhz.

 

The PCI-X drivers are more mature.

 

I'm sure there are cheaper boards, what I like about this one is the IPMI expandability which would provide KVM over IP.

 

+1.  I built one unraid server with the X7SBE and a couple of MV8's: not a single problem, it's a very stable board (I don't have the IPMI option so cannot comment on that). I also recently built a backup server, and had trouble finding a second X7SBE locally.

 

I ended up buying the slightly cheaper X7SBA, which I understand is the same board minus 2 PCI-X slots (the SBE has 4 PCI-X slots, the SBA only 2).  I have 1 MV8 card in this server. So far so good. Like its sibling, this board seems perfectly compatible with unraid 4.5.3, including the nics. I just finished copying >8TB of data onto it and run a parity check, no problem.