Hey all- I've been lurking here for quite a while and finally have some cash for a server. I was raised to be frugal with power and am torn which way to go. I'm considering the Super Micro X7SPA-HF-O for reliability and power usage,but the ram requirements have me concerned as a newb. My other thought is to go with the budget box in the reccomended builds. This would be cheaper and seemingly easier at the expense of power usage and long term usage. I already have a cm 590. I run a sage tv server + hd200 extender and am eyeing the supermicro as a possible sage tv server as well.

what would you do?

 

Hi. No doubt the Super Micro mobo's are thus far the best board for a unraid server ( or for any server or work station too). They are rock solid, very reliable, some models have additional remote control management to even have BIOS level control and have loads of expansion capibilities (of course I propbably didn't need to tell you the above ).

But this also asks the question too, are you going to have this serve running 24/7 or just a few hours a day? For a rig to be used several hours a day or even a week, I'd simply buy a home standard mobo (Asus, Biostar, Asrock, best aviod Gigabyte for unraid builds, search HPA on this forum for more information why) get an AMD CPU for the budget, 2GB RAM will be plenty and choose the disks you like. I'd worry more about the case as well and the Cooler Master CM 590 like you suggested is a great case though be weary of the metal grooves between the 5.25in bays as then can prevent you installing certain disk enclosures. If your building a rig for light use, go Asus and AMD bundle, you'll save heaps and will be happy with it. For a 24/7 server, spend the extra cash and go for a Super Micro and a Intel CPU.

CPU horse power is another thing as well. If your going to purely use your unraid server just for file serving and no to small or light addons, get a Seperon or light Athlon II CPU for AMD or get a Celeron or i3 CPU for Intel based board. If your planning to runa full Slackware destribution, install VMware Server and get heaps of VMs running, don't skimp on the CPU power. Good Luck and I hope this helps you to building the right unraid rig.

I think you made my decision much easier.I will likely not even access the server daily, a few times a week probably, at least for the foreseeable future. For the cost of the budget build hardware I can upgrade later if needed and not feel bad at all really.

thanks.

Exactly, see your usage patterns on a year by year basis, if your work load increases on your server, most likely you'd want more disks and would eventually want to upgrade the server, when or if your reach that point, build a bigger and better server, until then, go for the budget or mid-range kit for your rig. Keep us posted on the parts you get, and I'd refer to the unraid Hardware Compatibility listing before you buy any parts to insure the chipsets, NIC and SATA interfaces are compatible with unraids OS, it'll save you pulling out any hair on your head after . All the best.

A Supermicro build with an i3 would use less power.  However, I designed the Budget Build to be as power efficient as possible, given the budgetary constraints.  Using only green drives will help with that as well.  My server (which is almost identical to the budget build, check my sig) idles around 40 W, runs around 60-80W with drives spun up, and peaks around 110W during boot.  That's at least 30-50W less than my desktop uses, on average.

 

Also, I do encourage you to double check my work as unraided suggested, however, I designed the budget build to be as 'plug and play' as possible as well.  Everything on that list is compatible with unRAID.  As long as you don't stray from it too much, you shouldn't have to mess with updating BIOS, making changes in BIOS (save for setting your USB flash drive as your primary boot device), or anything like that.