Looking for Advise Turn GamingPC into unRAID NAS & VM for Gaming

[iDJMic]

Let me start by saying I've been using a QNAP TS-431 with 4x 4TB WD RED NAS Drives, and it's slow always needing updates, horribly slow O/S, and just been a horrible experience. I want to remove the 4 drives and start fresh in my GamingPC: Intel CPU Core 7 8700 3.2GHz | ASUS ROG Strix B360-H Gaming Motherboard | WD SSD 240GB M.2 | XPG SX8200 Pro PCI-E x4 NVMe M.2 SSD 512GB | Sapphire Radeon Nitro RX Vega 64 8GB | 2x Ballistix Sport LT 16GB DDR4 2666. There are not many YouTube videos on this subject other than from 4 years ago. I'm looking at using unRaid and creating a VM for gaming. Ultimately the NAS will be used for storage, data protection, and PLEX with one VM for gaming.

If there is anyone that has done this and could help me know if I could move forward with this or if there is something more I might need, any help or advise would be greatly appreciated.

I will eventually be maxing out the boards 6 x SATA 6GB/s ports but will I even be able to setup RAID or do I need a separate card for that? I use this pc currently strictly for gaming, and a separate pc for streaming. But don't have the funds to buy a separate pc to build a NAS and seen this video from 4 years ago, and figured this is my best solution. 

 

[Jarsky]

Setting up UnRAID is pretty straight forward, Plex you can just install the Docker through UnRAID's "Community Apps"

For configuring storage in UnRAID, you don't use a RAID card..UnRAID has its own proprietary way of creating an array. You can just plug them in and select the disks to create an array. Keep in mind the disks will be wiped of any existing data. 

 

Your most complicated will be setting up your Gaming VM. You'll want to use your iGPU on your 8700K for your primary video in UnRAID, and then use your Radeon as a secondary GPU. Make sure that VT-d (Intel Virtualization) is enabled in your BIOS, and IOMMU. I'd recommend using UnRAID 6.9.0 ; even though its in beta, the changes to its IOMMU grouping should make setting up your VM a lot easier, and use the IOMMU to passthrough the GPU to your VM in the VM Configuration. Generally you should be able to passthrough GPU, USB Devices, Audio, etc....just through the VM configuration page

[iDJMic]

Thank you for the advise, do these specs look like they'd be okay to do this?

[Jarsky]

16 minutes ago, iDJMic said:

Thank you for the advise, do these specs look like they'd be okay to do this?

Yeah UnRAID takes very little resource to run. As far as Plex if you have a Plex Pass you can use the iGPU to do hardware transcoding if you need to transcode streams which reduces the load on the CPU. You should essentially be able to assign all the cores to your VM (or you could say dedicate 2 cores to Plex, and dedicate 6 to your VM which could be more efficient)

[iDJMic]

Thanks again for the response wish me luck LL 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Do you really need unraid here? Id just add the drives and make a network share in windows. Then you can make a vm and use it for docker and user things. I think unraid will just make this more complicated when this can all be done in windows with very little config changes from what you have now.

 

You can use a hba to add more drives if you need to, but the onboard sata should be fine for a bit.

[iDJMic]

9 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Do you really need unraid here? Id just add the drives and make a network share in windows. Then you can make a vm and use it for docker and user things. I think unraid will just make this more complicated when this can all be done in windows with very little config changes from what you have now.

 

You can use a hba to add more drives if you need to, but the onboard sata should be fine for a bit.

Was wanting the unRAID for "Server Management" and network transfer speed utilizing the SSD cache I've already started I guess we'll see if it was a waste of time soon.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, iDJMic said:

Was wanting the unRAID for "Server Management" and network transfer speed utilizing the SSD cache I've already started I guess we'll see if it was a waste of time soon.

You can do a ssd cache on your windows system aswell.

 

You can also see all of the server management features in windows aswell, things like explorer show the amount of space used, and task manager for usage.

 

Id just give file sharing on windows a shot, super easy to setup, and much less hassle than unraid would be on this config. And probably faster file copies aswell, as unraid isn't know for being fast.

[iDJMic]

1 hour ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can do a ssd cache on your windows system aswell.

 

You can also see all of the server management features in windows aswell, things like explorer show the amount of space used, and task manager for usage.

 

Id just give file sharing on windows a shot, super easy to setup, and much less hassle than unraid would be on this config. And probably faster file copies aswell, as unraid isn't know for being fast.

How are you suggesting I setup the drives in windows then? As individual drives?

[Electronics Wizardy]

22 minutes ago, iDJMic said:

How are you suggesting I setup the drives in windows then? As individual drives?

You can make then all into a pool with storage spaces. You can also setup redundancy from there.

 

If you want a unraid eqv setup, drivepool and snapraid will give you a seutp that is almost the same as unraid(single parity disk, normal filesystem on all other disks)

[iDJMic]

25 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can make then all into a pool with storage spaces. You can also setup redundancy from there.

 

If you want a unraid eqv setup, drivepool and snapraid will give you a seutp that is almost the same as unraid(single parity disk, normal filesystem on all other disks)

What about when "windows" crashes or I need to install an update... when I reboot. My Plex server and all file shares will go offline. Still think just using windows would be better I'm currently just running windows 10 home.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, iDJMic said:

What about when "windows" crashes or I need to install an update... when I reboot. My Plex server and all file shares will go offline. Still think just using windows would be better I'm currently just running windows 10 home.

The updates that require reboots occure every month normally, Im guessing that amount of down time will be ok for a home nas.

 

Windows crashes are pretty rare. I have had windows systems run for years with no crashes. How often does your current system crash?

[iDJMic]

28 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The updates that require reboots occure every month normally, Im guessing that amount of down time will be ok for a home nas.

 

Windows crashes are pretty rare. I have had windows systems run for years with no crashes. How often does your current system crash?

It’s a gaming pc get game crashes 1-2 times a week. Just reboot and usually good. Regular software updates like video card. But I just booted unRaid and it’s only detecting one of the M.2 drives. This could be interesting. This motherboard also disables SATA port 2 so now only 5 ports left for drives without adding a card.

[Electronics Wizardy]

36 minutes ago, iDJMic said:

It’s a gaming pc get game crashes 1-2 times a week. Just reboot and usually good. Regular software updates like video card. But I just booted unRaid and it’s only detecting one of the M.2 drives. This could be interesting. This motherboard also disables SATA port 2 so now only 5 ports left for drives without adding a card.

Games crashing seems like that above normal,  but can't really say. 

 

I think most drives don't need a reboot, I know graphics drivers can be swapped with out a reboot in windows.

 

Id try it with a drive or two and see how it goes, and then you can decide if you want unraid in a bit.

[Falconevo]

I'm with @Electronics Wizardy here, this is going to be a whole load of pain for very little gain unless you are solely doing this to expand your knowledge.

[iDJMic]

I love the possibilities with what I'm seeing using unRAID thus far I do have 6 kids (14 and under) in the house and things like Parsec, look fantastic, only just trying to figure out my ultimate configuration of drives especially with my motherboard limitations and having a large enough parity drive for room to upgrade and add larger drives than my current 4TB in the future.  Thank you so much for everyone's input I appreciate ya'll taking the time to post your feedback and opinions. I have many hours ahead with preclearing drives, setting up arrays and moving data to the array. And yes I love learning new things especially to make life more simple down the road.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, iDJMic said:

I love the possibilities with what I'm seeing using unRAID thus far I do have 6 kids (14 and under) in the house and things like Parsec, look fantastic, only just trying to figure out my ultimate configuration of drives especially with my motherboard limitations and having a large enough parity drive for room to upgrade and add larger drives than my current 4TB in the future.  Thank you so much for everyone's input I appreciate ya'll taking the time to post your feedback and opinions. I have many hours ahead with preclearing drives, setting up arrays and moving data to the array. And yes I love learning new things especially to make life more simple down the road.

I still think running windows as the host will make it simpler. 

 

You can use storage spaces that allow for easy expansion, mixed drive sizes, and better performance on windows. 

 

Then you can use programs like aster if you want multiple users on on pc, and you can do it all with one gpu, with much less config.

 

But for drive sizes, id really try to get the biggest size you can, so they you can expand without adding as many disks.

[Loki0111]

On 10/12/2020 at 2:53 PM, iDJMic said:

I love the possibilities with what I'm seeing using unRAID thus far I do have 6 kids (14 and under) in the house and things like Parsec, look fantastic, only just trying to figure out my ultimate configuration of drives especially with my motherboard limitations and having a large enough parity drive for room to upgrade and add larger drives than my current 4TB in the future.  Thank you so much for everyone's input I appreciate ya'll taking the time to post your feedback and opinions. I have many hours ahead with preclearing drives, setting up arrays and moving data to the array. And yes I love learning new things especially to make life more simple down the road.

Few things to note:

1. I found Parsec had fairly crappy streaming image quality, if you have an Nvidia GPU I'd look into Moonlight.

2. Unraid is okay as a light server OS but it has a lot of limitations, you need to run it off a USB and it doesn't support any type of RAID setup which is going to limit your transfer speeds in larger disk configs.

 

My advice for home servers is usually this:

1. Multipurpose home server for 1 or 2 users with 5 drives or less, Unraid.

2. Gaming server, Windows 10 Pro or Windows 2019 Server

3. High performance file server, TrueNAS/FreeNAS

 

Anyway you'll figure it out as you go, learning is half the fun.