GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 - Thumbs up


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It has been running for 2 weeks.  I have been adding drives one at a time and doing crash/recovery tests (while all my data is still sitting on it's original drives).

 

It's up to almost 4TB right now .. 6 SATA drives on the motherboard and 2 SATA drives on a 4 port PCI card.

 

I'll be adding a 500 Gig IDE drive tonight to the mix.

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Yea...that is what I was thinking as well but it's on the list.  I have an A7n8X that works but I don't trust it.  It is nforce2 and had SATA corruption issues when it first came out.  Currently I am still in the test phase with 3 IDE drives.

 

I would take my chances with a new board before I used an nforce2 board that has known corruption potential.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Couldn't get the non-H version - so I'm running the GA-MA74GM-S2H (which has HDMI in addition to DVI-D and VGA AIUI) - with an Athlon LE-1640 and 2Gb of RAM and a couple of Samsung Spinpoint F1s.

 

Only been running for a couple of hours - but it is talking to my PC fine over Gigabit Ethernet, and I'm getting 50MB/sec and above reported transfer rates for large files according to Vista.

 

Blown away at how straightforward the whole process was - much Kudos to the developers.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys, I just bought this board and set it up with one harddrive for testing but I can't get it to boot from the usb drive.  I am using a transcend jetflash drive.   Anyone have any ideas?  How do you have your bios set up?

 

When you go view the Flash drive in Windows Disk Management is there 1 or 2 partitions? If there is a small partition beyond the main one you need to get rid of it. I had to use a HP Flash drive formatter as Windows wouldnt delete it.

 

I also had to use syslinux -ma d: when creating the drive. Wouldn't boot without the -ma.

 

As for BIOS I just set it to boot from USB-Harddrive (I think thats what it was called) then set that as the #1 physical drive in priority.

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  • 1 month later...

I just got one of these boards last week and it is working great. I did not even really have to touch the BIOS except to set the time. I had plugged in my USB stick and was expecting to have to go into BIOS, but the thing booted so quick I didn't even hit the DEL key. Next thing I know it is booting unRAID happy as you can be. It recognized and booted from USB-HDD no touch on the first try!

 

Seems to be very good so far. Quiet, stable and easy to set up. I have not really done much performance testing on it so far. After all of my trouble with my ASUS board, I was mainly happy to see it run a clean parity sync!

 

Mobo+cpu+2GB RAM from NewEgg all for ~$100. Not to shabby.

 

Cheers,

Paul

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  • 2 weeks later...

Another Thumbs up!

 

Replaced my old A8N32-SLI Deluxe as it suddenly just died  :'(.

 

So bought GA-MA74GM-S2H + Sempron 1250 + 2GB DDR2, works like a charm, paritycheck speed is 80MB/sec on internal SATA, using Mix of Samsung 750's as data and WD Green 1TB as parity.

 

No problem at all just ripping old motherboard out, replacing with new, assigning drives in right places an start Ara. So pleased i found Unraid when shopping for raid-os.

 

Using 4.4.2 Plus (Soon Pro)

 

Mikael

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I love this board, I've been using it in my Server 08 box with a Phenom 9600 for everything I can't do with my UnRaid server (ripping, converting, encoding, SQL hosting, torrenting, etc. without doing some crazy virtual machine hoopla). I'm very happy to see that it is working as an UnRaid compatible board because I would surely use it in another build if I ever did one. This board is supposedly one of the most energy efficient (if not the most) boards you can get excluding atom boards etc. I had mine running with a BE-2400 before I moved up to the Quad and everything was very peachy.

 

Excellent news fellas, I have some friends looking to do an UnRaid build soon and the Abit AB9 Pro (which is powering my current UnRaid server) is becoming scarce/pricey to buy not to mention the company is practically dead. Drop in a couple PCI-E 2xSATA cards along with a beefy PCI-E x16 8xSATA card and you have yourself a filled out server. I always wanted to try this board in an UnRaid build because of how low cost you can do the build for (my original Server 08 build cost me under $150 for everything: $45 for motherboard, $30 for CPU, $15 for 4GB ram, $40 Case/PSU, 2xSATA drives laying around) not to mention HIGHLY energy efficient.

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