unraid rebuild - recommendations?

mechanicalfluff · February 25, 2019

i'm running unraid on my old 4930k and x79 deluxe. it's starting to take a poop (instability/crashing at stock clock without added voltage).

32gb ddr3 1866

4- 8tb seagates (yanked from cheap externals)

2- 240gb toshiba best buy special ssd's

Currently running out of space

It's in a cheapo $50 case from microcenter (out of cages for 3.5" drives)

i have a 7700k and a gigabyte hd3p that is just sitting around. Figured it'd be a slightly faster and a much more power efficient build overall, but it lacks sata ports, only has 6.

To do this build, i'll of course need to get some ddr4 but i'll just get whatever is cheapest at the time. just enough to run 2 or 3 VMs, plex and a butt load of other dockers. only using ~60% of the 32g most of the time. none of the vm's are mission critical.

Sata expansion: Haven't ever delved into raid cards, which i assume isn't needed with unraid; i guess could just run in jbod? Good/cheap one? not looking for amazing hdd performance - ssds are caching anything important and are going on the mobo.

Case: I haven't worked in one before, but I've been looking to find a rack mount case since my unused hall closet is just under 20" wide. Would be nice to hide it somewhere and have fast front access to the drives. Cases with backplane built in maybe? Possible to get them that way with pcie connection?

Any suggestions/recommendations are appreciated

Been down the 'project' rabbit hole before and spent money i didn't need to, far too many times

bloodthirster · February 25, 2019

Supermicro made/makes https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16816101792 . That's what I use in my in home server for my ZFS array. There might be better and newer solutions now though.

As far as cases... You don't want to be sticking one in a closest unless it gets airflow. You'll cook a system if it doesn't get air flow. Most rack cases come with LOUD fans and server style PSUs (which can be loud too). It might be better to get a normal case with a lot of 5.25 slots and use those hot swap adapters.