I've been looking round and round for an affordable board that is rather future proof but only managed to come down to this Gigabyte board, and a Foxconn board.

 

I was wondering if anybody has any experience with this board and HPA, whether the xpressrecovery is disabled by default. Also, if it can boot up completely headless, without a graphics card.

I like this board because it comes with 6 sata ports, 5 PCI, and 2 PCI-E.

 

2 PCI will be used for my Supermicro controller, feeding 16 hdds.

6 on board sata will feed 4 more hdd, 1 parity drive, and 1 cache drive.

1 PCI 4-port SI sata controller that I have will power the cd/dvd drive.

1 PCI slot will be used with an intel PRO 1000 card.

 

That leaves 1 more pci slot, which could be used for another intel PRO card when unRAID support dual NIC.

 

I can either leave a cheap and low power graphics on the PCI-E 16 and still have 1 more pci-e slot for just about anything!

 

Another similar board that I was looking at is the Foxconn P41A-G, which also has 5 pci, but comes additional with onboard vga. Foxconn's web site is ridiculously crappy, and I prefer to go with this Gigabyte board if HPA is disabled by default.

 

It has to be an Intel board, since I already picked up a celeron 420, 45W cpu for $15. I am replacing my current setup (asus a8n-vm csm, 3200+) to save about 30W power

You really do not want to use PCI Bus for 16 hard drives. Your Parity Build / Parity Check times will be limited to below 8.3 MB/s.

Well my controllers as pci-x. So unless I buy a Supermicro board with PCI-X, I think this is already a fact that I cannot avoid.