how to manage future motherboard upgrades


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I'm very new to unRaid and still working through spaceinvader videos on youtube - which are excellent and a godsend to the likes of me!

I'm working on a very tight budget, trying to make use of 'bits left over' from past PC builds, while having a longer term plan of using somewhat better hardware scavenged from existing PC builds as they get upgraded.

Right now for my unRAID build I'm thinking of using a thin type 1150 ITX motherboard I was given a few years ago, but never used. This only has two SATA connectors, no PCIe slot, two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, it has an i3 4160 Haswell cpu, 8GB of SO-DIMM RAM and I have a couple of 4TB USB 3 external hard drives for storage, whose cases I can remove in future. The motherboard has a 120GB mini PCIe SSD for a cache drive. The goal is just to have a fairly decent media server and NAS, nothing high powered required - in fact the opposite for something running 24/7. My wife's severely disabled and often has trouble sleeping with chronic pain, so I'd like her to have access to all her movies and music day and night via multiple devices, including phone, tablet and her PC (hackintosh).  So  I want to sketch out an upgrade path that lets me learn and play with the hardware I have right now, without too much duplication of effort in future and reasonable continuity for media server duties.

So let's say a few months from now my current personal computer has been replaced with something more modern  - at which point I'll have an ATX board, a quad core, eight thread CPU and lots more SATA ports, to use for 'server' duties.

What are the possible pitfalls of moving from the ITX to the ATX build?

For example, I was planning on setting up the first build with the storage drives connected via USB 3.0 because there just isn't space for them in an ITX case. Those drives will have all our media on them - audiobooks, music and movies mostly. So in future when I remove the cases and put them in a tower case connected via SATA, am I starting from scratch because of the different connectivity, or will the info stored on the unRAID USB key identify those drives by their hardware identifiers rather than how they connect?

Similarly if the mini PCIe SSD appointed as the cache drive gets cloned to a regular 2.5" SSD in future will that be recognised by the system? i.e. Which drives can be re-used in the upgraded build if any? Or am I better off planning to start over when I upgrade? Right now I haven't even downloaded the unRAID USB creator, so it's a good time to have a clear plan.

I'm sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology, hopefully someone will understand what I'm trying to ask here - I want to get stuck in and learn by doing, but I don't want to end up wishing I had just waited until I had a decent motherboard to start from.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don,t think I would recommend usb hard drives.

But if you have a PCI slot you could add a sata controller card, up to 4 sata ports.

Would recommend a SSD for cache to run Docker.

MiniDLNA or Jellyfin would be my first choice.

Plex or one of the many other media servers.

I don't use transcoding. only native streaming locally.

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Thank you very much for the replies - Actually in a bizarre twist I got lucky.  I made the hardware I described above into a pretty elegant little mac mini type hackintosh for a friend who's very happy since it significantly out performs his rather ancient real mac, which he'd been assuming he'd have to shell out big money to replace. With his contribution I got hold of a mini-ITX Haswell era board, a Z97N-WIFI with a decent quad core cpu, which has six SATA ports and a full length PCIe slot - the huge problem with the H81T is that it only had 2 SATA ports and no PCIe slots, so neither a GFX card nor a SATA expansion card were possible.

The twist is that when the supposed Z97N-WIFI board arrived it turned out to be an H97N-WIFI board missing it's mini-PCIe bluetooth & WIFI card. Since I was only ever going to use the ethernet and had not planned to overclock, I didn't care in the slightest but it was wrongly described and miss-sold, so after a bit of wrangling I got 50% refunded, which made it a very good deal.

Anyway I now have a pretty basic but decent little board that can easily handle the three shucked or de-cased 4TB USB drives and a 120 GB SSD, which should be quite enough for our simple needs for now.

I'm delighted to learn that in future I should be able to make good use of my other older gear to swap parts in and out of the unRAID build given other's experiences :)

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