unRaid vs Windows

Xplo1t · December 9, 2018

Currently, I have a Synology 5-bay and a 5-bay addon. It's used to store documents, photos and media amounting to roughly 20TB. Of the total storage, the important documents make up a much smaller amount and are routinely backed up off-site to a NAS at a family members house, Google drive and OneDrive. I'm finding that the Synology is starting to struggle with Plex playback and general remote storage of transient files (4k video, desktop backups, etc).

I have a bunch of decent used parts laying around so I picked up a few rack mount server chassis and entertaining the idea of movie the media over to another server. Benefits would be greater expand ability of storage and 10Gbe. I also would like to use the server as a home theater gaming machine. Have a few extra 1080 Ti's laying around which would be sufficient.

So the question is, do I setup something like unRaid to segregate the storage systems from the OS or is Windows 10 sufficient for media streaming and gaming at the same time? The server is comprised of a 2700X, 32GB ram, NVme SSD, WD Red 8TB drives and a 1080 Ti powered by a 1000w PSU.

Electronics Wizardy · December 9, 2018

If you also want the system to be a gaming pc, id use windows, that would be much simpler than using vms and trying to get that working. Then use storage spaces to manage all the drives. windows 10 will work fine here.

manikyath · December 9, 2018

i'd dare put down the blanket statement that you shouldnt use unraid if the machine's main purpose is not virtualization.

as for windows 10 being sufficient.. in a sense it'll be better to just run everything under windows, because you'll be able to allocate more resources to windows, resulting in better performance.