I have a pretty sweet ATX case from my Pentium II days. It holds about 9 3.5" drives, and 6 5.4" drive. It's about as tall as my dining table, and has pretty good air flow management IMO.

 

I started looking for a board that will work well with unRaid, and I know I want onboard video/audio to save on power and costs. But the majority of the boards that I find at mATX. I did a bit of googling, and it looks like I can mount a mATX board in an ATX case. Is there an advantage to do so? You'd think I'll get more expansion slots with a bigger board.

 

With that being said, could someone recommend me a board since I've been out of the hardware game for a long time. Preferably:

 

- ATX

- 6 SATA slots

- on board video/audio

- some PCI-e slots for other cards

 

Thanks,

 

Ming

As a general rule you will get more expansion slots with the ATX board. More PCI slots don't tend to help much as you will hit bandwidth and speed issues.

The ability to have 2 PCIex4 slots is also handy with some of the larger ATX boards although there are some mATX with 2. (that includes x16 that that can be used for things other than video)

 

Most people will recommend the supermicro boards and if I could get them here in Australia I probably would have. Since I don't I have the ASUS board listed below. The only issue is with the supermicro expansion card. you need to downgrade the firmware in it for it to run properly but since then it has been fine. I'm about to run some level 2 tests on it soon.

 

Josh