Using old FREEnas setup for UnRaid

[Zenergy]

Hello!  My story is long an boring, but I will try and do the "long story short version";

Back in 2014, I built a decent rig for FreeNAS; my goal at the time was personal storage, Plex server, and small Minecraft server;

LIAN LI PC-V354B

SUPERMICRO MBD-X9SCM-F-O

Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2

Rosewill Fortress 80 PLUS Platinum Certified -550w

Kingston -KVR16E11K4/32

8Gb Flashdrive - USB 2.0

6x WD - Red 3TB (raid6)

1x Samsung 120 SSD

 

I sucked at configuring my FreeNAS, I got the SMB share up and running within a day... but every time I want to charge or add something like Plex or Minecraft server something it took me days to weeks of reading, posting and configuring... I thought being a Weekend IT warrior would be enough to learn but alas I got so frustrated I bought a QNAP 670 Pro. I moved my drives into that. I purchased 2x 512 SSD and converted my NAS rig to a personal PC and added the following over the years;

 

Added / changed to;

GIGABYTE-6UASL3

NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti

2X SAMSUNG 512GB

 

SIDE NOTE: I installed UnRaid on my Qnap and I am very happy with the setup.  But I am lacking a lot, I can not play 4k Plex very well and I can not run any VMs at all.

 

 

MY QUESTION:  If i convert my above rig back into a NAS configuration with another UnRaid license, would the original setup (Xeon E3-1230 with my 1050Ti) be a decent enough upgrade to the Qnap 670 Pro?

 

I would like to use as many components as possible above, 6x Reds, case, PS etc.  BUT I  am willing to upgrade a little to improve my rig. In short, looking to improve my Plex experience, resurrect my Minecraft server idea again (no more then 5 players), 2 redundancy storage, a Win10 VM,, and a Linux VM for my son to learn on.  and keep to budget of $500ca upgrading if possible.

 

 Any suggestions on upgrades would be most grateful… 

(and I apologies my first post is a long winded ask for help)

[lal12]

I think it would be feasible to work with the current hardware. The CPU might be a bit weak for two VMs + storage but that obviously depends on the usage and if you use the things at the same time. I think there was nothing written about RAM but I would recommend 24-32GB.

 

I would probably go with an plain linux server where I would manage the VMs (unRAID as a VM) on my own. However if you want a more GUI experience use Proxmox. Of course you can also use unRAID directly and let it manage the VMs, but in my experience unRAID is not that great in this things...

 

But I am not exactly sure what you want to do on this thing. Is it still to be supposed to be used as a main PC (via the Win10 VM?)? What is the GPU for if not? Without that I think I cannot give much clearer advice ^^

[Mophead]

I think if you have enough RAM that CPU might be decent enough for you for unraid. It looks like the qnap NAS you mentioned has a dual core i3 - so that Xeon, which is essentially in i7-3770k without the iGPU if memory serves correctly, would be a great performance boost. 

 

You can get docker images for Minecraft servers, so that'll take a lot of resources out of the loop, ie spinning up a full VM for the server instance.

 

You could always jump over to unraid with your current setup, and if you feel like your hardware isn't sufficient for say your Windows + Linux VMs, you could always embrace an additional server, you can pick up older HP/Dell/IBM servers for mega cheap on eBay. 

 

I personally use unraid as just a NAS, though I know it can do much more. 

[Zenergy]

I have 32gb of memory. 

 

I understand running a NAS as a NAS, but in my home I do not want to me running multiple rigs drawing energy.