Thinking about taking the jump

[uktz]

https://rover.ebay.com/rover/0/0/0?mpre=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ebay.com%2Fulk%2Fitm%2F153755883837

 

I'm currently running my server on my daily driver (7700k, 1080ti, 32GB 3200 DDR4, with an EX4100 as my storage house) but am wanting the option to increase my storage space. I guess my concern is with this being my first actual server, besides the obvious rack, what else would I need to make sure this transition is smooth? Primarily running 1080p streams, 7 users, and I'm worried about how playback would be with this particular server. I'm in between unRAID and FreeNAS in terms of OS - which do you like more and why?

 

Any advice is greatly appreciated

[Windows7ge]

So it comes with the X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard. That has a lot of potential and a great upgrade path. Overkill for your application but hey whatever you don't find yourself using the rest you could donate to things like medical research .

 

I'm a big supporter for FreeNAS but with hardware like this you'll probably want UnRAID. You could host A LOT of Virtual Machines on something like this (not what you said you planned on doing but...) which UnRAID could do well.

• It supports mixing drives of different capacities (FreeNAS doesn't, easily)
• It doesn't use RAID so a disk failure only takes out the data that was on the disk that died (FreeNAS uses more traditional RAID where if you lose too many disks all the data is gone.)
• It allows single disk addition (Still in the works for FreeNAS)
• It allows disks to spin down when not in use. (FreeNAS does allow this but it's not set by default)

The only real redeeming features when comparing the two are FreeNAS is free and that it uses ZFS. If you can live with neither UnRAID will likely provide a better experience for a server like this.

 

As for streaming content. That's outside my field of expertise. I believe PLEX prefers faster cores over more cores so you could look into CPU's like the E5-2690's but the included ones aught to be fine for 1080p streaming. Let someone double-check me first though.

[Jarsky]

So by running streams, are you talking about using it for Plex/Emby?

 

It should run just fine. I'd possibly look at upgrading the CPU's from E5-2620 to E5-2670's for the extra 2C/4T per CPU and especially the speed increase.

Also i'd look at getting another 16GB of memory for supporting other functions you might want to run. 

 

OS - I really like FreeNAS for pure storage, but unRAID is typically better for your average user and for flexibility. 

unRAID's downside is that you're limited to read speed of an individual drive due to the way it works, but you have flexibility in the way you can add drives one at a time. It also has excellent VM & docker support being based on Linux which along with all its plugins and community plugins makes it far easier to manage from the GUI. 

If you are more technically savy and want ZFS (larger investment in drives up front) then i'd consider Proxmox. Better support for VM's & LXC's while being an almost enterprise level storage solution. 

[uktz]

19 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

So it comes with the X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard. That has a lot of potential and a great upgrade path. Overkill for your application but hey whatever you don't find yourself using the rest you could donate to things like medical research .

 

I'm a big supporter for FreeNAS but with hardware like this you'll probably want UnRAID. You could host A LOT of Virtual Machines on something like this (not what you said you planned on doing but...) which UnRAID could do well.

• It supports mixing drives of different capacities (FreeNAS doesn't, easily)
• It doesn't use RAID so a disk failure only takes out the data that was on the disk that died (FreeNAS uses more traditional RAID where if you lose too many disks all the data is gone.)
• It allows single disk addition (Still in the works for FreeNAS)
• It allows disks to spin down when not in use. (FreeNAS does allow this but it's not set by default)

The only real redeeming features when comparing the two are FreeNAS is free and that it uses ZFS. If you can live with neither UnRAID will likely provide a better experience for a server like this.

 

As for streaming content. That's outside my field of expertise. I believe PLEX prefers faster cores over more cores so you could look into CPU's like the E5-2690's but the included ones aught to be fine for 1080p streaming. Let someone double-check me first though.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. Plex is one of the applications I'll be using, I'll also be running a camera system + storage, local storage/backs, and would like an option to dive deeper into other applications/home automation/Virtualization as well with this upgrade. I was leaning towards unRAID because the simplicity of adding drives one at a time if I so wished as well, and having party/caching drives for my own sanity/paranoia is a huge plus as well. 

 

If I remember correctly (don't quote me) unRAID v6.0 is a ZFS system as well. I might be wrong though, and I'll be looking into that as well. 

 

You're correct about Plex preferring more/faster cores -- Going off of Plex's benchmarks/recommendations, a single 1080p stream you should be around a 2k passmark score. With dual Xeon ES-2620s I SHOULD be looking around a 12k passmark score without overclocking. Eventually, with the more common 4k titles, I'll naturally want to upgrade but I believe that we need to advance just a tiny bit further in terms of processors. A single 4k stream you're looking at around 12-17k passmark scores. Which isn't something I'm looking at as of right now

 

17 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

So by running streams, are you talking about using it for Plex/Emby?

 

It should run just fine. I'd possibly look at upgrading the CPU's from E5-2620 to E5-2670's for the extra 2C/4T per CPU and especially the speed increase.

Also i'd look at getting another 16GB of memory for supporting other functions you might want to run. 

 

OS - I really like FreeNAS for pure storage, but unRAID is typically better for your average user and for flexibility. 

unRAID's downside is that you're limited to read speed of an individual drive due to the way it works, but you have flexibility in the way you can add drives one at a time. It also has excellent VM & docker support being based on Linux which along with all its plugins and community plugins makes it far easier to manage from the GUI. 

If you are more technically savy and want ZFS (larger investment in drives up front) then i'd consider Proxmox. Better support for VM's & LXC's while being an almost enterprise level storage solution. 

 

Yes, sorry, I should have specified a little bit better. Running streams via Plex, camera system + storage for it, local storage/backups. I don't have much planned for the future as of right now but we'll see where this takes me. 

 

Yeah, like I said earlier in the reply, I'll likely go with unRAID just because of functionality/ease of use. I really like the idea of adding a drive here and there when I need the extra space, not having to add an entire array of drives all at once - my wallet is screaming at me already lol.  I really  like the idea of having two parity drives, and a cache drive available to me. I'm super paranoid and I'm a data hoarder (memories, etc) so if I can save a failed drive's contents, it would be better for me in the end. 

 

I'll look into upgrading to the 2670s, I messaged the seller because I had a question about the revision of the motherboard, I'm hearing reports that while yes, it's a rev 1.10 board, even with the upgraded BIOs it can support V2 chips. I'm no expert when it comes to server components, don't get me wrong, but when I've seen hundreds of people reply saying "yeah, working fine with the updated BIOs with v2 chips." it's a little confusing to say the least. 

 

I was also going to be expanding the memory quite a bit. Probably 64GB if I can find it cheap enough. I was also considering grabbing either a 1050 or a 1060 to help with transcoding. What are your thoughts about it?

 

 

In general, if I do end up buying this, I know by default I should probably get a server rack. Is there anything else, realistically that I should get to further help this transition be seamless? I would have about 35TB of data to transfer from my current storage house to the new server. It would be over a 1gig connection.

[Windows7ge]

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

Sorry, I should have been more specific. Plex is one of the applications I'll be using, I'll also be running a camera system + storage, local storage/backs, and would like an option to dive deeper into other applications/home automation/Virtualization as well with this upgrade. I was leaning towards unRAID because the simplicity of adding drives one at a time if I so wished as well, and having party/caching drives for my own sanity/paranoia is a huge plus as well. 

 

If I remember correctly (don't quote me) unRAID v6.0 is a ZFS system as well. I might be wrong though, and I'll be looking into that as well. 

 

You're correct about Plex preferring more/faster cores -- Going off of Plex's benchmarks/recommendations, a single 1080p stream you should be around a 2k passmark score. With dual Xeon ES-2620s I SHOULD be looking around a 12k passmark score without overclocking. Eventually, with the more common 4k titles, I'll naturally want to upgrade but I believe that we need to advance just a tiny bit further in terms of processors. A single 4k stream you're looking at around 12-17k passmark scores. Which isn't something I'm looking at as of right now

If you want to turn the whole thing into a VM server that does everything I would look into PROXMOX first. It does have the same limiting factors in terms of adding disks as FreeNAS but it's a great hypervisor. (you don't have to buy it to use it). Uses ZFS. I wrote a beginners guide on it.

 

I have not heard of unRAID supporting ZFS but then again I'm not paying a lot of attention to the latest and greatest unRAID features. I don't use it myself.

 

If you were to upgrade I'd personally stick to the 2690v1's. The E5-2670v1's are the sweet-spot for price:core count but if you need higher single core performance I'd look at the 2690v1.

[Jarsky]

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

If I remember correctly (don't quote me) unRAID v6.0 is a ZFS system as well. I might be wrong though, and I'll be looking into that as well. 

It's not ZFS, but they do have a community plugin to add that functionality which creates an interface to ZFSonLinux within unRAID. 

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

 

You're correct about Plex preferring more/faster cores -- Going off of Plex's benchmarks/recommendations, a single 1080p stream you should be around a 2k passmark score. With dual Xeon ES-2620s I SHOULD be looking around a 12k passmark score without overclocking. Eventually, with the more common 4k titles, I'll naturally want to upgrade but I believe that we need to advance just a tiny bit further in terms of processors. A single 4k stream you're looking at around 12-17k passmark scores. Which isn't something I'm looking at as of right now

Plex only requires those faster cores really for transcoding and for Library scanning. 

I can easily get plenty of streams running on my old dual X5650 so im sure the E5-2620's will be able to handle at least a good 8 streams with some of those being transcoded.

But yeah, a 4K stream would kill the server. You'd be able to add a GPU like a GTX1050Ti and passing it through to your Plex container if you want to support 4K by using nvenc

 

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

Yeah, like I said earlier in the reply, I'll likely go with unRAID just because of functionality/ease of use. I really like the idea of adding a drive here and there when I need the extra space, not having to add an entire array of drives all at once - my wallet is screaming at me already lol.  I really  like the idea of having two parity drives, and a cache drive available to me. I'm super paranoid and I'm a data hoarder (memories, etc) so if I can save a failed drive's contents, it would be better for me in the end. 

Dual parity is a common feature, its in ZFS, StorageSpaces/ReFS, BTRFS, Hardware RAID, etc...not exclusive to unRAID. 

As for the cache, in unRAID thats only used for writes, and a timerjob writes the files back to your array from the cache by default around 2AM off memory. There is no read cache for unRAID. Also keep in mind that the data is not safe against a disk failure while its in cache, unless you have them in their own RAID e.g RAID1 2 ssd's. 

 

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

I'll look into upgrading to the 2670s, I messaged the seller because I had a question about the revision of the motherboard, I'm hearing reports that while yes, it's a rev 1.10 board, even with the upgraded BIOs it can support V2 chips. I'm no expert when it comes to server components, don't get me wrong, but when I've seen hundreds of people reply saying "yeah, working fine with the updated BIOs with v2 chips." it's a little confusing to say the least. 

The defining difference in the E3/E5 range of Xeon's is V1 & V2, and V3 & V4.

Basically an LGA2011 board will support V1 & V2, while you need a LGA2011-3 board for V3 & V4, and theres generally BIOS updates to support the generation of CPU's. 

Supermicro X9DRi lineup will support V2 CPU's fine. 

 

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

 

I was also going to be expanding the memory quite a bit. Probably 64GB if I can find it cheap enough. I was also considering grabbing either a 1050 or a 1060 to help with transcoding. What are your thoughts about it?

Depends what you need. Plex doesnt really use a lot of memory. One of my VM's has Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, qBitTorrent, Tautulli, Organizr, and about 4-5 other small applications in it, it has 8GB of memory assigned and barely breaks half of that even with 6 direct streams + 2 transcoding streams running.

 

But as im an engineer I do utilize the memory for many test VM's that I run, like creating nested ESXi hosts with domain controllers + machines, etc....so I do utilize the extra memory doing that on mine. 

 

4 minutes ago, uktz said:

In general, if I do end up buying this, I know by default I should probably get a server rack. Is there anything else, realistically that I should get to further help this transition be seamless? I would have about 35TB of data to transfer from my current storage house to the new server. It would be over a 1gig connection.

I would probably just look at the open racks like the StarTech or Rosewill ones as you can get some fairly small 12U racks. 

I'd also consider a PDU and possibly a UPS at some time as well to assist with shutting it down properly in the event of power outages or brown outs. 

 

You should also consider your network. Make sure you have 2 spare ports so you can connect both up (the board has 2 x 1gbE nic's).

Ideally you'd want a managed switch so you can trunk both ports with a single IP to give you 2Gbps, but even if you connect them up seperately unmanaged, at least you have a backup link as that amount of copying can hit the network port pretty hard. 

[Jarsky]

Discussion here about the board, seems like pre ECO boards may not support v2 BIOS updates: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/supermicro-motherboard-x9dri-ln4f-rev-1-10-dual-socket-lga-2011-r.14906/page-2