As you might have seen in my other topic other topic I probably had some issues with my PCI SATA card, so I wanna move away from that as fast as possible.

Currently I'm using 6 HDD's over SATA, and 1 SSD over SATA. My current motherboard only has 4 SATA ports, so that's why I have a extra PCI SATA card.

 

Anyway, I'm thinking I order a Gigabyte GA-H270N-WIFI motherboard, that has 6 SATA ports and a M.2 slot.

And I'll also order a WD Green 120 GB M.2 SSD.

That way I can use the 6 ports on the motherboard for the HDDs, and the M.2 slot for the SSD and so I don't need a PCI SATA card.

 

Now I'm wondering, how would I do this? I have gotten the idea that unRAID is pretty uncaring about what motherboard it runs on, as long as it have a USB port to run from, so could I just do the regular Replace A Cache Drive procedure, or do I need to do some extra step since I'm switching motherboards as well?

 

8 minutes ago, nadbmal said:

so could I just do the regular Replace A Cache Drive procedure

 

Yes.

3 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

 

Yes.

 

Cool, I ordered the stuff then.

Little update, good news bad news:

 

The good news: The motherboard swap went well, with  no data loss, and is now up and running.

 

The bad news: I could not use the WD Green M.2 SSD. If I had it plugged in it would disable one of the valuable SATA slots as it is a SATA SSD, not a NVMe SSD (this is the first time I use M.2 so I had no idea about this stuff), so I had to take it out (which in itself was a problem, because the M.2 slot was "under" the motherboard, so to take it out you would have to remove and disconnect everything, because the FD Node 304 case does not have a cutout underneath the motherboard. Because I was very pleased with my cable management, I didn't want to disconnect and re-do everything, so I just used a dremel to cut up a hole and take the M.2 SSD out that way.)

 

I'm gonna try n run without a cache and see how it works. The only thing I use my unRAID server for is Plex, so I don't write alot to it (just a couple of times per week, when new episodes come out), but I am already noticing that loading a bunch of artwork/thumbnails is much much slower.

 

As I understood from the motherboard manual, I can use a NVMe SSD, so I might buy that if things gets too slow. For now I just set "Use Cache Disk: No" on all shares, I assume that is the right procedure for disabling use of a cache?

 

But yeah, I no longer use the PCI SATA card, so I am happy overall

Edited November 3, 20178 yr by nadbmal

If I had it plugged in it would disable one of the valuable SATA slots as it is a SATA SSD

 

That's normal, WD Blues are also SATA, blacks are NVMe and relatively cheap.