techmattr

Depends on what you need. I really hate 16:9 aspect ratio on laptops so the XPS and Surface Laptop 3 are the only ones I considered. The HP and Lenovo have really bad touchpads so if you make use of the touchpad in Windows a lot then that may drive you nuts. The new XPS 2-in-1 has the maglev keyboard which is a love/hate keyboard. I love it. A lot of people hate it. The XPS 13 9300 didn't go with the maglev keyboard so it either isn't popular or its just needed in the 2-in-1 form factor. The XPS only has USB-C ports. I mean you could write page upon page on how these are different but it just comes down to your preferences and requirements.

I'm sure you'll love it. I went with the old Alcantara surface instead of the new aluminum option and I'm glad I did. The Alcantara is really comfortable to use.

The XPS 13 2-in-1 is a decent value right now. Linus has a few videos on it as I think he is still using it as his daily driver. I got my girlfriend a XPS 13 2-in-1 and it's an awesome laptop. I like my Surface Laptop 3 better though because of the taller aspect ratio and it's a bit lighter. I really like the XPS 2-in-1's maglev keyboard though. The XPS has a much better touchpad but the Surface Laptop 3 has a bigger touchpad. Can't really go wrong with either one but the XPS 2-in-1 isn't worth the extra $300 honestly.

All of those he listed have absolutely horrendous touchpads. If you're used to high quality glass touchpads then you would have absolutely hated any of those. I'm not sure why you didn't wait for the XPS 9300 though. It has everything you're looking for except upgradable RAM.

If you don't need a lot of storage or RAM then it's hard to beat the base model Surface Laptop 3. Especially if you care about functional aspect ratio. 16:10 and 3:2 are where its at. I have the base model ($899) 13" and I really like it. For me the Surface Laptop 3 and XPS 13 2-in-1 and the yet to be released XPS 13 9300 are the only options since they are the only laptops with a 16:10 or 3:2.

You can download these bootable files. If you're running legacy BIOS you can type sas2flsh -o -e 5 at the DOS prompt; and if you're running UEFI you can type sas2flash.efi -o -e 5 at the efi prompt.

First thing I'd do is remove the SAS2008 BIOS if you're not booting from any device on the card. You can sas2flash –o –e 5 to erase the BIOS.

There was a 100+ page long thread on avsforums 5-6 years ago about media storage builds and about 10-20 of those pages we dove into the compatibility issues we were facing at the time with SAS2008 cards (and other HBAs) and Z77/Z87 boards. This brings back memories... The issue we were facing at the time dealt with running 3x SAS2008 HBAs on desktop boards and found that many of them didn't work even though they were electronically capable and it was a crapshoot finding a board that worked with 3 PCIe slots. We tried board with the exact same PCB but different model numbers and one would work with only 1 HBA and the other with 3 HBAs.... it's most likely a firmware issue as @leadeater suggested but ultimately it just makes sense to buy a server or workstation board that you know will run active PCIe slots 100% of the time. As far as the drives not showing up on the expander.... how do you have it connected? It could be anything from user error to the PCIe slot not being active to bad Chinese eBay cables.

SnapRAID is what you're looking for.

It depends on your usage and width of vdevs. If you do a lot of writes monitor your usage. If writes aren't flushing and you're maxing cache.... add more RAM. If you use dedup then you need at least 1GB per TB. Moving my Plex install dir, cache and transcode directories to a SSD made a huge difference for end user client experience. No more buffereing when trying to FF/RW through transcoded material.. no more lag when loading thumbs or video previews.

RAM can have all sorts of issues that don't show up in any memory test. Ask anyone who has ever run memory tests against an HP or Dell server that just threw a bunch of un-correctable memory errors. Almost every time those tests come back clean. They don't show anything. At best they give you a little piece of mind when testing new memory that was just delivered. As far as a home build... I care about my personal data. As I said, it's implied that if someone is taking the steps to build their own NAS that they care about their data as well. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to bypass the most important check when writing that data. If you don't care enough about your data to skip a check to see if the write was valid then why store it at all? Or why not just forego the home build and use odrive?

Yeah. Doing things correctly is some nonsense.

Most people who build their own servers buy used. Who says it isn't fair? You? Okay. I don't care if you don't think it's fair. It's correct. I've only been doing DIY servers for 25+ years, working in Enterprise data centers for 15+ years and helping people on various bulletin boards, mailing lists, blogs and forums for 20 years.... but who am I to argue.

Okay.

So using hardware directly related to transferring your data on a system that doesn't have correct drivers for that hardware isn't a risk? Since when? There are plenty of systems on eBay for $150 or less. Here's the first result I got: http://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-X8SIA-F-Server-Motherboard-I-O-Shield-32G-Memory-X3450-CPU-Fan-/262740915896?hash=item3d2c9436b8:g:WeMAAOSwOyJX6Sey

Read their own FAQ. Their FAQ is littered with disconnect issues that would 100% cause data corruption. http://www.sybausa.com/faq.php?type=1 Visit any forum dedicated to storage and read the hundreds of posts from people who lose data because they used SATA multiplication. Port multipliers with software RAID (which almost every NAS OS uses) are going to fail. It's not a case of if it's a case of when. Those cards are single channel cards that use port multiplication. Any SATA multiplier is going to disconnect under heavy load. When you scrub your data you're going to under as heavy a load as possible.

Using one of those SATA cards is almost a sure fire way to lose data and using a motherboard with it's built in unsupported NIC is definitely putting your data at risk. Plus it's using inferior parts with non-ECC RAM. It's a recipe for failure. There is absolutely 0 reason to use such a build when proper solutions are available at the same price point.

If you're going to use something like a SYBA SATA card then you shouldn't be building a NAS. Use Amazon Cloud Drive or CrashPlan. You can go back and forth all day bickering about how cheap and crappy you can build a server for but bottom line is if you care about your data enough to build a server to store it then you should be doing it correctly. Not with parts that more likely to cause you to lose data than store it. If you need absolute bottom of the barrel pricing on a NAS server then you're much better off building a Supermicro X8 1366 server. You can get CPU + Mobo + RAM builds on eBay for under $200 and you'll have compatible parts supported by NAS OS's that easily saturate GbE and will be much more reliable than cutting corners with current gen budgeting.

Yeah I see this suggested all the time. Then those people come back wondering why their NAS OS doesn't work or has terrible performance. Why can't I get more than 30MB/s on my new NAS!?!?! Any of the boards in this range have 4 or less SATA ports and either Realtek or Intel I219 NICs that aren't supported by any NAS OS or virtualization.

Why? Budget office boards are meant to basically be dumb terminals with no functionality. In order to use it in some server capacity you'll need more PCIe add-ons increasing cost.

If comparing to a current gen non-ECC value build then yeah it'll get more expensive. But any mid-range to high end desktop build is already talking $135-$180 motherboards which is the same territory as single socket server boards. I just rebuilt my primary FreeNAS with a Core i3 6100T and a Supermicro X11SSM-F which cost $350 for both and then another $200 for 32GB of Micron DDR4-2400 ECC. So $550 for the primary build components is about what I'd expect to spend on mid-range gaming machine.

It's not rare. It's actually incredibly common. Just that most people wouldn't know. Especially if you have RAM with a bad IC, damaged in shipping or installation.... or a host of other different issues. If it boots to the OS and is mainly stable then you'd never know it was producing erroneous writes until you go to open the file it corrupted. ECC RAM isn't that much more than non-ECC RAM and in many cases it's the same price. There is no point in not having it. If your data is important then it is absolutely a must have. Obviously it isn't important for machine that's just used for gaming or something like that but we're in the "Servers and NAS" forum.

https://www.veeam.com/endpoint-backup-free.html

If you want to do anything more than a basic backup target and simple SMB shares then the decision gets much more complicated. But the NX series is pretty basic and comes pretty much ready to go. It even looks like at this level you can buy them from the site.

Well, the NX line is more of their entry level so if you're just using it for backups a NX430 or NX3230 is probably all you need.