colterlovette

Personally and I know this is a random in a string of posts already, but: Server sides, so far I've toyed with: Twonky (most hardware DLNA out there now), lots of random transcoder/media server installs and pairings (win & Linux), and most recently Plex. Clients: RasberryPi, Apple TV, Playstation 3 & 4, Xbox's, several low grade media fronts (samsung smarts, LG, etc etc), Boxee Box, Amazon Fire TV & Roku's. Low maintenance that plays everything in both HD and full surround without need to be micro managing file types or encoding platforms and stays super responsive, the best pair I've found so far: Plex + Roku 3's (rarflix installed). Can't beat it. Best platform for stability, speed and universal application (and trust me I've literally tried almost everything worth any salt). I virtualize and test new stuff I find probably weekly, so if anyone has a different opinion throw it at me. : -Colter

Thank you! I have ben through FreeNAS, NAS4Free, OMV, and a couple other NAS solutions for hard storage and finally just had Windows 2012 do all the work. When my friend let me tinker a bit with his UnRaid, I was excited to get home and test it on the standby server. So far, it's been wonderful. I actually have three cards available that I've used and got working (kind of). The PERC6/i Raid, Perc5/i Raid & finally a version of the PERC 6 that is simply a dumbed down controller for the backplane called the PERC6 SAS card (Part # E2K-UCS-61-(B), look it up). It's basically just a controller without any smart stuff; just hands over the HDD's like a normal SATA operation would. Indeed, it does work best to just use the SAS card without the raid layer, but I was having trouble telling if UnRaid was actually being successful in spinning down the drives or if the card would say it was, but continue managing the disks power management on its own. The lights on the front of the 2950 remain the same and the rack is too load to hear if the disks are spinning or not (I even tried the stick method mechanics use when looking for bearing squeaks.. I looked like a real red neck. ha). In the end it was to no avail, so I wasn't sure if there was a command I could run that would force a hardware report in shell... Next step is to just run a voltammeter on the machines power to see what wattage it's pulling and if it kicks down after Unraid reports spindowns. Meh.. -Colter *Edit: Grammar.

I have a question for anyone that may have experience with Dell Servers. I have three 2950 Dual X5470's, 24GB RAM and 6 2TB HDD's. They had PERC 6/i Raid cards in them with Raid 6 configured, when a friend introduced me to UnRaid (which I have since fell in love with). I changed out the Raid card for a PERC 6 SAS card without raid capability. I did it mainly to reduce the need to assign a Raid0 to each drive in order to get them to appear. Now they're just handed over. My question revolves around the spin down feature. Does that card actually allow UnRaid to spin the physical disk down completely and how can I tell? Aside from sitting next to the rack and listening for it to spin down, is there another way? Would Unraid's UI tell me if they didn't actually spin down or is it just relying on what the SAS card responds with? Some insight would be helpful and I appreciate any responses. I just want to make sure the disks are actually spinning down and the card isn't just blowing off the OS and leaving them running.