after asking several questions later I believe this is the mother board I am going to use. Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3  and I am going to use a cheap PCI video card just for local set up. I plan to also use a LSI Logic Controller Card H5-25379-00 SAS 9201-16e I have a water cool port on the back of my Fractal Define R4 Mid-tower that I can route all the cables back in I am not sure what cables I need to buy for this card. I believe it is this one? External Mini SAS 26pin (SFF-8088) Male to 4x 7Pin Sata Cable? I have plans of starting out with filling about half of this case with drives and then later as need I can add more drives  if any of these parts wont work with unraid then please tell me I don't want to waste money buying the wrong stuff.

 

Thanks Dale

I am not an AMD expert so can't speak to the CPUs it supports or their features. You will want it to support the equivalent of VT-d in the AMD world if you want to do any VMs with passthrough.

 

The motherboard contains 2 SATA ports from a Marvell Chip. I would disable in BIOS and not use those ports.

 

HBA and cables look right. The -16e card would require 4 of the SFF-8088 to SATA cables to support 16 drives. Monoprice had a deal on them a while back. Might want to check.

 

Don't forget the drive cages (SuperMicro CSE-M35T-1B).

 

What CPU and how much memory are you planning?

 

What is your primary use cases (# transcodes?, # VMs?, gaming VM?, 4K video, etc.)

1) I have 16gig of GSkill ram now might add the other 16 gig if needed

 

2) I new I needed 4 cables but I didn't know about Monoprice running specials on them I was looking at Amazon for them.

 

3) I plan mostly using the machine for Plex and maybe a couple VM's  and Dockers for different apps.

 

4) The CPU will be a AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5 GHz Socket AM3+ 95W

 

5) I have a CoolMax Drive cage to swap out for my cd bay I only have 2 cd bays not 3 or the one you posted looked really nice the one I bought had some really mixed reviews. The case has room for a  vertical drive cage just to the left of the hdd stack I was looking at the Double Wide MAGNUM Standard HDD Cage but I do not have to fill the case up soon as I start I can always add hard drives as I go

Looks like Monoprice doesn't have the 8088 breakouts any more.

 

But the 8087s are cheap! $3.52 for 3/4 meter.

 

https://www.monoprice.com/search/index?keyword=SFF-8088

so then every thing else looks good? I was reading about the FX CPU and running VM's on it should be ok to run and to also use passthrough on  them

the 8088 are for external cards like the one I bought the 8087 are for Internal connection cards and the pin count is different is that going to cause a problem??

 

 

Guide to SAS Connectors
Type	# of Pins	Environment
SFF-8087	36	Internal
SFF-8088	26	External
SFF-8482	29	Internal
SFF-8484	32	Internal
SFF-8470	34	External (also sometimes internal)

You need the SFF-8088s. But many people buy the -8i and need the SFF-8087s.

 

Sorry, l wasn't trying to confuse matters.