unRAID mobo has died - need help with new build

[Roscoe62]

Hi all,

 

I've been running unRAID 5 for years now without any issues. I've just come back from a 10 day vacation (I'd turned the unRAID machine off before leaving), fired up the unRAID box - BANG! The power supply blew up! I purchased a new power supply (an 850E EVGA - an upgrade from my previous Enermax 565W) only to find that hasn't fixed the problem. The MB power LED is lit, but the fans, HDD's are not spinning up. I phoned the new PS supplier who suggested I tried to 'jump-start' the PS to see if it fires up. Luckily EVGA supplied a special connector specifically for that purpose. I connected it and all my HDD's and fans started up - so the good news is my new PS is working fine, but my MB (an old Asus P5PE-VM) is likely the culprit.

 

I'd been contemplating upgrading my unRAID rig for a while now - looking to run Kodi centrally, and setting up plex with transcoding capabilities, but thought I'd need to upgrade to unRAID 6 to do that.

 

Anyway - to sum up - I'm looking to upgrade to unRAID 6 and am looking for recommendations for a M/Board, CPU and memory suggestions to allow that. I've seen some excellent advice given to other posters, but none seem to match my specific needs so I thought I'd better start my own post.

 

What I'm looking to achieve from the new build:

 

1) Faster parity check - the old Asus board has 8 4Tb drives including parity (not currently using cache drive) and the monthly parity check was taking around 3 days to complete!

2) Support for 10 drives - preferably from the M/B itself - existing M/B only supported the number of drives I have (& the drives are in 2 Norco SS400 bays) by using a couple of controller cards, but stuck at the PCI bus speed - I think that was the main cause of the parity check slowness

3) Want to be able to run unRAID 6 to support Kodi (I run a couple of Kodi boxes and it's a pain having to update both of them - want to run them centrally from unRAID)

4) Want to be able to support PLEX transcoding for up to 3 devices simultaneously (iPads and iPad minis) - Most of my movie files are from Blu-ray discs backed up as 1080p mkv files with original video and audio (DD TruHD or DTS HD Master Audio) intact.

 

So the big questions are - what would a suitable M/B / CPU combo be? Also, how much memory will I need? Might be good to also allow room for some expansion but, at this stage, I can't really see what capabilities I would need.

 

Looking at some of the other posts SuperMicro M/B's seem very popular for server duties, but I get completely lost with which CPU's should be used, and the message of using ECC memory comes through loud and clear.

 

Finally, buying options - especially for M/B's is difficult in my country (New Zealand). A number of suppliers stock Supermicro boards, but probably in limited variations. I also read a post about how picky the Supermicro boards are with the memory so it's likely I'll have to source memory from overseas.

 

Can anyone help me get started? Any information is appreciated!

[rott]

I would be interested in this also kinda same boat so I am tagging along

[HellDiverUK]

For 10 drives, you're basically looking at X99 or X299.   Ryzen only has 8 SATAs on X370, anything lower you're stuck with 6 SATA or less off the chipset.

 

After that, you're looking at either onboard or add-in controllers.

 

Looking on eBay, there seems to be lots of folks selling their X99 rigs - might be worth investigating something like an i7-5820K or i7-6800K which should be pretty common, certainly quite a few on eBay here in the UK at the moment.

[Roscoe62]

Thanks HellDiverUK,

 

I see there are also some boards based around the C612 chipset that support 10 SATA drives.

 

Locally I was able to find this MB available as an example:

 

https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/MBDSPMX10102/Supermcro-X10SRi-F-ATX-Server-Board-LGA2011-C612-8

 

Would this suit my needs OK, or would I be better sticking to the X99 or X299 chipsets?

 

If this board would work OK, what CPU would be a good match? (I'm not 100% sure which socket standard this board supports - 2011 or 2011-3 - is there any practical difference?

 

Again, thanks for any advice!