As it stands now I have 13 drives in my unRAID NAS. 8 of the drives reside on 2 x Skymaster PCI SATA cards which have 4 ports each. While the parity check speeds are somewhat slow because of the nature of PCI everything has been working fine.

Now as all but 2 of my drives are 1tb or larger the time has come to purchase one or two PCIe SATA cards. Currently i’m looking at the Adaptec 1430SA cards since they’re supported in unRAID and in linux in general. I have been hanging out for the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 card which has 8 ports, however linux driver support is lacking and unfortunately I can wait no longer.

After two months or so of planning, I finally completed vanguard and retired cerebro. The one complaint I have about the Norco RPC-4020 chassis is that it seems a bit noisier than my previous CM Stacker case (which had the same amount of fans). The fans in the Norco case have a higher RPM, however drives in the Norco case seem to run at about 38c while the same drives in the Stacker ran at 25c.

I also had one drive die not long after I plugged it in, however the SMART error registered about 37 days ago. I will upload some pictures later on once my parity resync completes.

After a week or so of research, I decided to go with the Supermicro C2SEE motherboard for my new fileserver (vanguard). You can check out the specs of the board here. For a quick summary, the main features are:

• 6 x onboard SATA ports
• 4 x PCI slots
• 1 x PCIe 16x slot
• 1 x PCIe 16x (@ 4x) slot
• 1 x PCIe 1x slot
• DDR3 RAM
• Onboard 10/100/1000 NIC

The main reason for choosing this motherboard was that the company who sells unRAID (lime-technology use this same board in the pre-built servers they sell, and it’s lime-technology recommended. I figure if I use this board, I won’t have too many issues.

One of the products released at the latest Macworld is the HP MediaSmart Server EX485/EX487. This new product is designed with cross platform and home users in mind.

The server itself has the following specs:
- Intel Celeron 2.0GHz CPU
- 2GB RAM
- 4 HDD bays
- Additional expansion via eSATA and 4 x USB ports
- Windows PC required for installation (Bootcamp and Virtual Machines (VMware) not officially supported)
- OSX (time machine) and Windows (windows home server) backups
- iTunes Server

Comparing this to my fileserver of choice, unRAID by Lime Technology I would still take unRAID. Building my own server (with 12 HDD bays) and a linux OS that runs off a flash drive lets me sleep at night knowing my data is safe.

One feature unRAID is missing that I would like is the iTunes Server which would be very handy, rather than adding the tracks to each iTunes client. Although in saying that, the “keep music folder organised” in iTunes is nice.