Hey everyone! I am interested in using UnRAID at home on a Dell Precision 690 computer I have. I think the CPU part of it will be nice (It's dual processor Xeon 3.0 GHz, so with dual core and hyperthreaded, it's 8-bucket), and it has four hard drive slots to make it easy to set up some nice big arrays early on.

 

The part I am curious about though is this: I would be looking in the future to add on a couple of drives over and above these four or five I could stuff in locally, and prolly room for a couple more. I'd want to do this with an external 8-bay rack with its own SATA PCI-E card that would attach within, something like this:

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132016&cm_re=rosewill_sata_enclosure-_-16-132-016-_-Product

 

Would UnRAID server play nice in this kind of setup with this 8-bay rack being added via PCI-E card later?

 

P.S. - I have full confidence that UnRAID would use the dual processors nicely, but do you think I would still struggle with something like Air Video which might want more raw single-core processor performance?

Your CPUs are likely overkill for unRAID, but if you plan on transcoding with AirVideo or using other CPU intensive add-ons then they may be used.

 

Yes, you should be able add on more bays with something like you linked.  I believe you can even use eSATA to do it.

 

However, you should consider that for the price of that Rosewill external case you could buy a Norco 4220 or other large case that would hold all your hard drives in one case.  This may be a better long term solution.

You can install unRAID on a flash drive and see if it will boot.  (If it cannot boot from a USB drive there are ways to have it boot from a disk drive, or a floppy, or a CD, or, as I did on a somewhat similar dual xeon processor, hyperthreaded motherboard, boot from a compact-flash card inserted into a CF to IDE converter)

 

Then, all you need is one data drive to load a few files.  for testing airvideo you don't need a parity drive.  Just load unMENU, use its package manager to download and compile ffmpeg for AirVideo and give it a try.  You'll soon see if the Xeon is up to the task.   I'm guessing it will be, but you can't be sure until you give it a test.

 

Joe L.