Syncenator

That actually sounds very interesting. My first idea was actually to get an old used office computer, since it would have been cheaper than building a brandnew system, but unfortunately the older systems integrated graphics are not as powerful. What I saw is that people who use i3s etc. for their Unraid build made use of the c step options to even reduce the power consumption further, but I never really did anything with it before, so I have no idea how well it works.

Yeah, true it would make more sense as I will back everything up anyways and it would make me safe some power. True, the i3 has a lot of power in comparison, but I am worried about the Idle power draw. It really should not be above 20w with the drives spun down, around 10-15w would be ideal. Because over a year it would be a bit pricey and I don't know how worse it will now get with the current energy crysis. Replacing the small 2TB are my plan, but for now the 2TB space are more than enough for me, so I still have enough time to replace them one day. I saw you can set up your own timer for that, so that will be very useful. So basically my main concern is high power usage with over 15-20w during idle, which makes me debate whether to get the i3 or the lower performance, but also less power consuming J5040.

Budget (including currency): +-450€ Country: Germany Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Unraid NAS Hey everyone, I am new to Unraid and would like to build my first new little low power server to mainly use as a NAS. Currently I am just using a FritzNas, which is way too slow and can only handle like 1 or 2 drives, since it runs over a FritzBox router and was never really meant to be used as a NAS. That is why I was always planning to get a real one and came across Unraid years ago, which offers much more than a prebuild NAS like Synology, QNAP etc. My Budget would be around 450€ without Unraid included. My plan for now is to use: HDDs: 2x2TB WD Blue drives that I already have & use with a USB HDD docking station (and back up with another 2x2TB by using FreeFileSync) Parity: 1x 2TB or up to 6TB parity drive to be able to replace my old 2TB drives with bigger ones in the future, if needed. (Needs to be bought) Cache: 1x 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD I have laying around as cache drive But of course it should have room to maybe add a second parity and second cache drive for more protection + 1 or 2 more data drives if needed in the future. The system should mainly be used as a NAS and streaming videos to my TV. Besides that I plan to run a few dockers and one VM here and there, so it shouldn't be too slow for that, while consuming the lowest amount of energy that's possible to avoid high cost when running it 24/7 here in Germany. I was already researching builds myself and came across two potential builds: Build 1: CPU & Mainboard: ASRock J5040-ITX J5040 Gemini lake Refresh RAM: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4-2666 CL18 SO-Dimm Case: Fractal Design Node 804 Power Supply: Pico Power Supply / Modular 400 Watt Be Quiet! System Power 9 CM Modular 80+ Bronze (Kinda scared to use a Pico PSU, that's why I would prefer a normal one, even though it uses a little more power) HDD: 2TB HDD Planned to be bought later: SSD: 500GB Samsung 870 Evo (As second cache drive) PCIe Expansion Card: PCIe to Sata Expansion Card (For more than 4 drives later on) Build 2: CPU: Intel Core i3 10100 Mainboard: ASRock B560M Pro4 RAM: 16GB G.Skill Aegis DDR4-2666 CL19 Case: Fractal Design Node 804 Power Supply: Modular 400 Watt Be Quiet! System Power 9 CM Modular 80+ Bronze HDD: 2TB HDD Planned to be bought later: SSD: 500GB Samsung 870 Evo (As second cache drive) RAM: Another 16GB (to complete 32GB) The price for both builds is around the same +- 10-20€ and lays within my budget of 450€. If you have any advice for alternative builds, please feel free to share them. My big question is if the J5040 build is enough and the only way to archieve low power usage or if the more powerful i3 10100 would also be possible with similar power usage, since I have seen people got it down to similar idle usage, when making use of the different c states. I hope people here on this forum with more experience about Unraid builds and low power consumption can help me out with finding a proper solution and I want to thank everyone who is helping out in advance for their advices and help.

That's true could maybe even run Pihole next to other stuff. 6 SATA ports are always quite nice, but I guess for me 4 would be already enough, since I don't collect that much data normally. I would take 10-20 years to fill another 2TB for me I guess. Kinda sad that the case is discontinued, it looks pretty nice for storing all the drives. Yeah, the Synology NAS are quite nice. I already checked out the used PC idea and 200€ would be enough, I often saw pretty good Office PC's getting sold for about 45-50€ with 4-6 SATA ports. Then I could use a free NAS software or get something like Unraid for about 50-55€. For now I don't really need another HDD and if I would then only need one new one and it is also about 40-50€, so it would work fine. But yeah the power consumption of this idea would be higher. Unfortunately it seems like anything more than 2 bays is like 300€ and more for a Synology NAS, while a 2 bay one is just 150€. I would have to either pay a lot more to get something like a 4 bay or also pay a lot and get 2 new drives bigger than 2TB, so I can use them in a 2 bay Synology and have enough space in the future. I guess I have to run everything through my mind and do some calculations and think about what I prefer and then decide what to get.

That would work too. I guess I could also just copy the files over very quick and then plug it into the USB of one of my routers, then I don't have to buy a Raspberry Pi. But I will still look up, if there is a way I can maybe run a used PC because it would be nice to have a real system just for such a purpose and it would also be a very interesting and cool project. So maybe I can do both things then, so I have another copy in case something goes wrong.

I am from Germany and 8TB drives are slightly over 200€, only USB ones are cheaper around 130€. The cheaper price for external ones is kinda interesting, I will take a look into it. It's totally fine, even a rough value is better than none. I was refering to the energy settings in Windows and totally forgot that mine is running at high speeds most of the time because I set it to max performance, so that question was a mistake from my side, but still thanks a lot for the information. Leting the HDDs spin down will probably be a good idea for the time I am not using my PC or won't acess it, so it will probably make some difference over time, especially when having like 2-4 drives. I think I will maybe also try to do a step by step upgrade to more TB drives, once I have set up a NAS system, like 4TB and that should be enough for me even in the future. That doesn't sound too bad, if I would get around the same power consumption. Maybe I could even improve it a little by getting a more power efficient CPU and even undervolting it and with letting the drives spin down I could maybe get it a little lower in total. There is one thing though, I have heard that you could turn off your NAS, if you wanted or put it on some kind of standby mode, where it consumes even less? I guess something like that could be useful for me. Yeah, I already assumed that you want to have a smaller system. For myself I think I don't really care that much for now, since I am just looking to get a cheap system that I could use and has enough SATA ports for potential extra HDDs. Maybe instead of looking for an i3 or i3T, I should look for a PC with an Intel Atom or Pentium then, so it doesn't use much power, because I only want to store and access my files on it and not do anything else with it.

So to summarize it so far: Either I have to get a used system off Ebay, which I can use as NAS / Unraid server and be able to add more cheaper 2TB drives in the future or I have to get one of these prebuild solutions, like a Synology NAS and WD Cloud with like more expensive two 4TB drives, since I can only get bigger drives but can't easily upgrade to more drives. The last solution would be just getting a 2TB USB HDD for now so I can do another backup on it, but has the problem of one day not having enough space I guess.

But dual 8TB or 12TB are well above my total budget for this, it would cost almost a 1000€. I might have to take a look at 4TB and less, they are not too expensive. That's true, but it would be kinda useless in my case because I have to know it beforehand, since when I already have the system then it is too late.

I am willing to spend about 200€ maximum for now. I also already thought about a Synology NAS, since they are quite nice indeed, but the downside is they are not easily upgradeable, like if you need more than 2 bays for example. If I use my smartphone I just meant accessing it from at home not on the go, so the network speed should be fine enough for watching a video or checking out a photo or something. The files themselves are really important and I would like to be able to access them whenever I use my computer, in case I want to check them out or work with them etc. Talking about that makes me think about something. Maybe it could also be useful to separate the most important data from less important one and put the important one on an external HDD, since I will probably use it less than other data on it. Since there are really important files on it I can never get back again then yes I would spend several hundred € to recover them in case something happens. Like I said I already thought about it but the Synology NAS is not really upgradeable, if you want better specs or more bays you probably have to buy a new one. That is why other ways might be better that way, but I am not sure. That sounds very interesting, I wonder if the motherboard formfactor makes a big difference in power consumption. I also wonder what power settings you can set up for your own NAS, like can you set the drives to go on standby or something when they are not needed and the CPU to reduce the clock speeds whenever it is not used to reduce its consumption? Because that could probably also make a big difference over time. Yeah, it's very expensive over here, like almost 0,30€ per kWh, so it makes about 130€ per year when running it 24/7 at 50w. Yeah, I also thought about it, but it has the same problem like the Synology NAS solution, that you can't really upgrade it to more bays or better specs and then have to buy something new again. That sounds more reasonable, if that would really be the case. I thought about something like Synology or WD Cloud very often, but I don't like the feeling of not being able to upgrade it very well, if you need like more drives or better hardware for whatever reason over the years. I wonder how I can somehow check or be sure about how much a NAS out of a Office PC would consume.

I read that an Office PC like that would use around 50 Watts most of the time, which would be over 100€ a year, unless you meant a similar system with other less consuming hardware. Two very big drives instead of many smaller one are probably a very good idea, but sadly it is very expensive to buy two 8TB drives at once, like it would cost as much as a CPU upgrade to a decent Ryzen with Motherboard & RAM and maybe even a case and it would be also very pricy to replace one in case of a failure. It seems like it is very difficult to find a good solution without having to spend so much more money for electricity over a year. I don't know if it would make sense to just do it and turn it off whenever I don't really need it or if that is a bad idea or not even possible.

Almost all types of data, like photos, videos, textfiles, documents, project files etc. You mean renting cloud storage? But that is probably very expensive for 2TB over time and it takes a long time to upload the existing 2TB. Also very interesting I didn't know about the Amazon Prime thing, but jpeg only is kinda useless.

The 2TB drive only contains all the important data and no games or anything else that I don't really need.

Hello everyone! I am looking for advise for a good and cheap budget way to safely store all my data and also have access to it whenever I am using my PC and maybe also via smartphone. At the moment I am doing it on a suboptimal way by using two separate 2 TB drives in my gaming pc, where I use the second one as backup drive in case of a drive failure. My original plan was to run them in a Raid 1 mirror, but after reading a bit into it and often reading that it could go wrong and break everything, if you are very unlucky and I didn't really want to take that risk. Therefore I decided to just mirror the files once a week or two and turn off the SATA port of the backup drive in the bios after I am done. I know it is a very strange way and not secure against anything else than a simple drive failure of the main drive. If anyone is wondering why I didn't just get a 2TB USB drive and do backups on it, it's just that I already had the second SATA drive, before I realized that I didn't want to do a Raid 1 mirror and I am also not a big fan of having to get the USB drive and plug it in and off again put it away, whenever I want to do a backup. Since the way I just mentioned is not really optimal and I might also want to reduce the amount of drives in my PC, I already thought about different solutions for my home storage, but I am unsure which one is the best and makes sense and hope that I could maybe get some help and advise. I also want to add that I am fully aware that a Raid or anything similar is not a backup, but in my case I mostly just want to secure my data from a simple drive failure. My ideas: Get a cheap used Office PC with something like an i3 and enough SATA ports from Ebay and use it as some kind of NAS with Unraid or something, where I could also easily add another 2TB drive, if needed in the future Get a 2 TB USB HDD and plug it into one of my FritzBox routers and use it as a network drive, so I could back up my data on there, remove the second drive in my PC and have 24/7 access Get a Raspberry Pi 4 and use it as something like a Cloud or NAS Somehow build a cheap NAS with hardware that doesn't consume a lot of energy Problems: I can probably run the Office PC only whenever I need it, like when I am using my PC because of the high electricity cost here in Germany, which will add up over time and would make it super expensive Both of my FritzBox routers only have a USB 2.0 ports and might be a little slow for bigger transfers Every solution, except the Unraid one is difficult to upgrade to more drives in the future with having some kind of protection I assume building an energy friendly NAS is probably the most expensive solution Please feel free to add any ideas or suggestions and I already want to thank everyone who is helping me out!

Since everyone seems to be upgrading to Ryzen 6 & 8 core CPU's to get prepared for next gen, I was thinking if I should upgrade or still wait for another generation or two. I currently not really sure because I turned more into a casual gamer and are also very budget oriented. Therefore I would only like to upgrade, if it is really needed and makes a big enough difference to justify the price of switching out all the parts. I play games in 1080p with 60 FPS and lowest settings I would go for keeping 60 FPS are medium graphics. I checked out several benchmarks and saw that there is currently not that much of a difference in most of the games, except very multicore CPU demanding ones like AC or Battlefield V, but that will probably change once the new consoles come out. The only games I have and where I noticed some CPU bottlenecking are a little bit in Star Wars Battlefront 2 & a lot in Battlefield V, where the FPS can drop below 60 from time to time, when the CPU is hitting high usage over 90% and causing the GPU usage to drop a lot. On one hand I would like to wait until more games are affected, but on the other hand I would like to be prepared and also make use of the current worth of my old parts, making the upgrade a little less expensive. ---------------------------- Since MSI is currently having a cashback deal, it would be in my budget of 430€ to upgrade to a Ryzen 3600 non X on a MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max, where I would get back 50€ for buying the board with that specific CPU. The total upgrade would cost me around: 168€ - Ryzen 3600 110€ - MSI X470 Gaming Plus Max 70-90€ - 16GB DDR4 RAM @ 3200 Mhz = 368€ minus the 50€ cashback making it "only" ~ 318€ Selling my old PC parts, which would get me around 100-130€ on Ebay, will make it "only" a ~ 200€ expensive upgrade. My current system: CPU - Intel Xeon E3-1230 V3 @ 3.3 GHz (Stock) GPU - 8GB Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Nitro+ MB - GIGABYTE - GA-H87-HD3 RAM - 16GB RAM @ 1600 Mhz PSU - Be quiet! Pure Power CM BQT L8-CM-630W