High Recommendations for the Asus M4A785T-M mobo

[unraided]

Hi all. After learning of the seriousness of the Gigabyte HPA feature (Aka Virtual Dual BIOS, aka 'Backup BIOS Image to HDD'), and the fact that it could happen, practically anytime (given the CMOS battery fails or you Factory-Default the BIOS and forget to Disable this option), it could render your unraid array useless by creating a backup image of the BIOS and writing it onto the unraid array volume disk(s). See the threads below for more information on this topic:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5820.0

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5229.0

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5632.0

 

and

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5776.0

 

Seeing that Gigabyte seems to be the only mobo manufacture that I know/heard to support this highly risky option (well bad in a unraid environment), I've decided to jump ship and buy a Asus M4A785T-M mobo. I normally buy Gigabyte over any brand as I've had no complaints personally, and being a system builder many years ago, I would always use Gigabyte mobo's (Obviously the likes of Super Micro and Intel mobo are no comparison, but Gigabyte for the masses was my choice).

I previously had the Gigabyte GA-M770-US3 mobo for my unraid server, which by feature/expansion comparison, the Asus mobo has its short comings. For now, seeing that my case (a Coolermaster Centurion 590 - 9x 5.25 bays and three my disk enclosures can hold four disks each), with this mobo with the help of two Sil SATA II 4 Port PCI cards, I could have a 12 disk setup (max 14 disks support, but not with this case obviously). I also have the option to occupy one PCIe Card, so I have other options for further expandability if I desire, though I would need a bigger case. If It came to the point of +12 disks, I would have to forgo this Asus mobo, dig deep and get a Super Micro or something with high expandibility, but again, disk sizes seem to get bigger and I could simply replace one disk with another, one by one and completely replace my current disks with bigger ones when I run out of space. See the link below for the spec's of the mobo:

 

http://www.asus.com.au/product.aspx?P_ID=LVmksAnszmVimOOp&templete=2

 

 

Asus M4A785T-M Specifications which are important for unraid's OS:

 

CPU: AMD Socket AM3 ;Phenom™II /Athlon™II /Sempron™ 100 Series Processors (I bought a Athlon II 250 3.0 GHz CPU)

 

Chipset: AMD 785G/SB710 (Fully supported with unraid's OS)

 

RAM: 4 x DIMM, Max. 16 GB, DDR3 1800(O.C.)/1600(O.C.)/1333/1066 ECC,Non-ECC (I bought Kingston Value RAM 2GB DDR3)

 

Expansion Slots: 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16, 1 x PCIe x1 and 2 x PCI 2.2 (Not heaps, but enough for a good group of unraid users)

 

VGA: Integrated ATI Radeon HD4200, DVI and HMDI ports (No complaints for Video connections, freeing up an expansion slot)

 

Storage: SB710 Chipset, 1 xUltraDMA 133/100/66, 6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports (Fully supported with unraid's OS)

 

LAN: Realtek® 8112L Gigabit LAN (Fully supported with unraid's OS)

 

I bought the board this morning, removed my Gigabyte mobo (sigh of relief that I'm free from the HPA fiasco now!), installed the new mobo, CPU, RAM and cabled it all up nice and neatly again. I booted up the server, configured BIOS, enabled AHCI, enabled boot from USB, enabled WOL and also S3 power options, saved all settings and rebooted.

All disks were detected, the unraid OS booted up fine and I jumped onto the unraid webgui. I reassigned the disk serial numbers back it its original order (good thing I printed out a copy of the order before pulling the server apart ), and after this, my unraid server was back online, like nothing happened ever to it. I stayed with unraid v4.5.1 at the moment seeing that it is running fine. I'm currently doing a burn-in test by copying about 150GB worth of backups to it and all seems well thus far.

 

The mobo cost me $93 AUD, and seems great value for those wanting to build a unraid server on a budget. The chipsets, NIC, SATA interfaces are all supported under unraid and I would highly recommend this board. I hope to see it listed on the Hardware Compatibility site. Two Thumps Up!

 

[terrastrife]

you shoudl check the clearance sections of your local stores. ie, the older M3A MVP with 4x pcie_16 is only around $120

[unraided]

Good recommendation terrastrife, but my local resellers don't have this board that you mentioned on sale. For value for money and from what my resellers have on offer, the Asus M4A785T-M mobo was the best (unless I went for a Gigabyte, which would of defeated the whole exercise of avoiding the HPA issue anyways).

Most of the Asus mobo's that are on sale which I can easily go and buy have only 5 SATA interfaces, though the 6 Port SATA mobo's jumped in price about almost two fold and these better mobo's have a mixture of PCIe expansion slots, but I was after a 6 Port SATA board, and I'm happy with PCI SATA addon cards for now, so this board fitted the bill.

 

you shoudl check the clearance sections of your local stores. ie, the older M3A MVP with 4x pcie_16 is only around $120

[Phorte]

thanks to this thread, i went out yesterday and bought the M4A785T-M, along with an Athlon x2 245 and 2GB of DDR3-1333 memory. installed unRAID (for the first time) and had my drives up and running within the hour.

 

absolutely flawless so far! loving it!!

 

only issue is, everytime i add a new HDD, the boot order likes to stick the new HDD as first boot priority again - even tho it was previously set to the USB drive only and 2nd'ary boot is disabled. anyone know how to stop this from happening?

 

small price to pay i guess because i won't be adding drives that often - but the box sits on top of a cupboard in a WIR and is running with absolutely zero peripherals. kinda annoying to have to take down and plug up at one of my workstations every time!

 

again - thanks for the recommendation on this board!

[nAffie]

only issue is, everytime i add a new HDD, the boot order likes to stick the new HDD as first boot priority again - even tho it was previously set to the USB drive only and 2nd'ary boot is disabled. anyone know how to stop this from happening?

 

Check out this solution for the ASUS M4A78L-M board, it might also work on the ASUS M4A785T-M mobo:

 

Just a quick update on the motherboard.  I found a fix to an annoying problem.  Every time I added or removed a sata or esata drive and booted the bios would change the order of the drives and the flash drive would move down the list - so it wouldn't boot from it. 

But I just discovered that in bios you can select any drive and tell bios to treat it as a (hard drive, floppy, CDRom).  Setting the flash drive to FORCE FDD then it will boot from it every time no matter how the other drives are rearranged.

 

 

[Phorte]

brilliant - thanks for the headsup, nAffie! i was trying to search for a solution before but couldn't quite get the right keywords in the search.

 

will give it a try and report back.

[unraided]

That is strange that happened to you Phorte. I've never had that problem you've mention on the boot order change, and I've have configured the BIOS to boot from USB first in the 'HDD Boot Priority' option under Advanced (I think that where it is).

I bought the board about 2 ~ 3 months ago and I've added at least one disk to the mix of existing disks in my array and it booted straight from the USB, no problems. Could be different BIOS/board revisions I'm guessing. I haven't updated the BIOS, but I'll leave it seeing it is fine.

I'm glad you like the board. It is reasonably inexpensive, good build quality, offers 6x SATA ports, VGA/DVI/HDMI, is well suited for a lite to medium range rig and it is rock solid. You can't ask for much more really for that price ($93 AUD, might even be cheaper now). Good stuff.

[Phorte]

yep - a measily AU$78 from good ol' MSY.

 

i've got the boot priority set correctly as you've noted. may be a different board revision or BIOS 'feature' (i updated the BIOS as soon as i got the board).

 

will try nAffie's recommendation shortly as i'm currently clearing a 1TB.

[Phorte]

forgot to report my results in this thread: nAffie's recommendation has worked. it boots up fine now...

 

only problem i have now is the actual USB drive i bought (4gb kingston datatraveler g2) - has died twice in two weeks sandisk's are out of stock so i had to get a 8gb toshiba transmemory too for almost double the price. argh...

 

[Blofeld]

looks interesting, thanks! I'll be looking into this one for my first UnRaid rig...(still trying to make sense of all the options though, it's a little bewildering if you've never built a system - but I'll manage!

[unraided]

Hi Blofeld. I can vouch for this board and I've had it for a few months now, and it hasn't skipped a beat. If your local retailer still stocks the Asus M4A785T-M mobo, I'd buy it.

[Blofeld]

@unraided,

thanks for the info - I actually ended up being a somewhat similar one, but with AMD socket - we'll see!

[unraided]

Hi team. Has anyone out there who has the Asus M4A785T-M board have upgraded the unraid OS 4.5.6 and WOL is still working? Or just being curious, have they ran into any problems with hardware/software after updating to 4.5.6? I'm still on 4.5.1 and wanted some general feedback before upgrading. Thanks.

 

[Phorte]

i just went from 4.5.4 to 4.5.6 last night and have not found any issues yet. however, i don't use WOL.

 

also bought a Pro license so will be adding some more drives today too.

 

absolutely no issues for the last few months that ive been using the board though. still highly recommended.

[Blofeld]

I'm using the Asus M4A785T-M EVO (eSata port is the main difference I think), and WOL is running fine on 4.5.6

[ericft]

is there a similar board that is lg 775 compatible to run an e2180 cpu? and ddr2 memory..

[unraided]

Quite strange why WOL fails after upgrading the OS from v4.5.1 to a higher version.

 

The "Asus M4A785T-M EVO" uses the Realtek® 8112L Gigabit LAN controller featuring AI NET2

 

while the "Asus M4A785T-M" uses the Realtek® 8112L Gigabit LAN

 

Same chipset so it seems. The only files I update is both the 'bzimage' and bzroot' files as suggested.

 

The BIOS is configured correctly as well. Any ideas guys or am I missing something? Thanks.

 

I'm using the Asus M4A785T-M EVO (eSata port is the main difference I think), and WOL is running fine on 4.5.6

[JetShred]

Just bought a Asus M4A785T-M last week.  I've really liked it so far.

[unraided]

Perhaps you could do a test for me JetShred. I want to discover the root cause of this WOL post-v4.5.3 and onwards that I'm experiencing. Could you test WOL on your build? Also, what version of the unRAID OS do you currently have, whether WOL works or not? Much appreciated JetShred.

 

Just bought a Asus M4A785T-M last week.  I've really liked it so far.

[JetShred]

Perhaps you could do a test for me JetShred. I want to discover the root cause of this WOL post-v4.5.3 and onwards that I'm experiencing. Could you test WOL on your build? Also, what version of the unRAID OS do you currently have, whether WOL works or not? Much appreciated JetShred.

 

I'll try to test it in the next few days.  FWIW, I'm running the current version of Unraid.  I just started using it though, so I haven't upgraded from a previous version.

[unraided]

Thanks, what version of BIOS are you using? I haven't upgraded it ever. Thanks.

[ThEgOg]

i'm also using this board  i'm an unraid newb

 

only just got it going yesterday with 2 drives, fitted the third today (using unraid basic) and it hangs on boot, my sandisk cruzer is showing up as a harddrive, i think this is why its hanging, that unraid basic will only allow 3 drives??

 

 

[Joe L.]

i'm also using this board  i'm an unraid newb

 

only just got it going yesterday with 2 drives, fitted the third today (using unraid basic) and it hangs on boot, my sandisk cruzer is showing up as a harddrive, i think this is why its hanging, that unraid basic will only allow 3 drives??

 

 

no, it would still boot regardless of how many hard drives you have installed.

 

Odds are your motherboard's BIOS tried to help you by making the newly installed hard-disk the boot device.  Since it is not bootable, you do not get very far.

 

It is quite normal for a flash drive to show as a hard-drive.  That is not the issue.  Check to see if the flash drive is still first in the boot order and still selected as the boot device.  (odds are it is not)

[JetShred]

I think Joe is right.  Every time I have added a new hard disk to this motherboard I have had to fix the boot order.

[Flomaster]

after I hook up my hard drives each time my bios thinks it needs to change my flash drive from the boot device to the newly added hard drive.

 

-=Jason=-