Unraid machine questions

[Ravendarat]

Ok so I am going to build an unraid machine so I can get all the spinning drives out of the pcs in my house and centralize all my media. I have a couple questions.

 

1. Can I just point Plex to the unraid machine, I assume so but figure I should ask.

 

2. When it comes to hardware, if I am buying current hardware out of a store am I just really looking for the cheapest igpu I can buy from either intel or amd or is there a benifit to going to something higher end. 

 

3. What about gpu, is it needed for this kinda machine or is that a waste of money. 

 

4. What about ram, whats the sweet spot there?

 

5. Anything specific to look for in a mobo besides making sure it has enough sata support?

 

6. And finally from what I understand you boot unraid off a  usb, so should I still be installing a ssd with windows on it or is all that completely useless? Any reason to have an SSD in the machine at all, if so what size?

 

I know this is a bunch of questions that the experienced guys would find simple but I am someone who has built a fair number of pcs but the only thing I have ever done in regards to this kind of stuff is simply set up a synology like 10 years ago so this one is new to me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1. Id install plex on the unraid system, but yea you can point plex to the network share.

 

2. If your not doing gpu encoding for plex or doing gpu passthough to a vm, the gpu performance won't matter at all, get the cheapest.

 

3. Id put a gpu in it. Nice for troubleshooting, and some boards need one to post.

 

4. Depends on what your doing. Without vms + docker, 4gb is fine, but if you want vms, it adds up quickly.

 

5. Depends on what your need, but for a basic nas, any board should work. Id try to get one with a intel or other good nic on board. Just less issues overall.

 

6. Unless you want a ssd for caching or for vms, you won't need one. For a gigabit nas without vms/dockers Id skip a ssd.

 

HOw many TB of storage do you need in this nas?

[Ravendarat]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

1. Id install plex on the unraid system, but yea you can point plex to the network share.

 

2. If your not doing gpu encoding for plex or doing gpu passthough to a vm, the gpu performance won't matter at all, get the cheapest.

 

3. Id put a gpu in it. Nice for troubleshooting, and some boards need one to post.

 

4. Depends on what your doing. Without vms + docker, 4gb is fine, but if you want vms, it adds up quickly.

 

5. Depends on what your need, but for a basic nas, any board should work. Id try to get one with a intel or other good nic on board. Just less issues overall.

 

6. Unless you want a ssd for caching or for vms, you won't need one. For a gigabit nas without vms/dockers Id skip a ssd.

 

HOw many TB of storage do you need in this nas?

Thank you for your quick reply. Im thinking I will start with 4 8tb dirves, one of them being used for parity. Besides the media I already have I want to rip all the dvd and blurays I have to like 1080p quality to most so they will be a bit under 2 gig each, but then a few will be 4k rips which obviously come in much higher. I already have an unused Define R6 sitting here for a case so Im just gonna use that. I have an older i7700k machine here I could repurpose but I think I might leave that as a bedroom pc and just build something new with either an i3 or a 5600g, thats why I was wondering if I needed to bother with a gpu or if onboard graphics was enough

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

Thank you for your quick reply. Im thinking I will start with 4 8tb dirves, one of them being used for parity. Besides the media I already have I want to rip all the dvd and blurays I have to like 1080p quality to most so they will be a bit under 2 gig each, but then a few will be 4k rips which obviously come in much higher. I already have an unused Define R6 sitting here for a case so Im just gonna use that. I have an older i7700k machine here I could repurpose but I think I might leave that as a bedroom pc and just build something new with either an i3 or a 5600g, thats why I was wondering if I needed to bother with a gpu or if onboard graphics was enough

Yea Id go i3 here, and the igpu is plenty.

 

Id be tempted to get bigger hdds if you can. HDD prices kinda suck now, but back a year ago, you could get 14tb hdds for about $200 on sale.

[Ravendarat]

Ya in Canada 8tb drives like IronWolf go on sale for like 229, right now they are 275 and even just basic BarraCuda are still 204.99 right now, those guys go down to like 179 sometimes. 14 tb on sale right now are $413, regular price is like $600 on them and I just cant justify spending $2400 on storage

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Ravendarat said:

Ya in Canada 8tb drives like IronWolf go on sale for like 229, right now they are 275 and even just basic BarraCuda are still 204.99 right now, those guys go down to like 179 sometimes. 14 tb on sale right now are $413, regular price is like $600 on them and I just cant justify spending $2400 on storage

Id look at shucking drive. You can get A external hdd, and then pull a internal hdd out.

 

Id start with fewer bigger hdds, esp as unraid makes it easy to expand. Then you use less power and have more room to grow.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

26 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Yea Id go i3 here, and the igpu is plenty.

 

Id be tempted to get bigger hdds if you can. HDD prices kinda suck now, but back a year ago, you could get 14tb hdds for about $200 on sale.

The beauty of UnRAID is you can always just upgrade your parity drive and then add other larger storage drives. :3  When I do this, I usually just repurpose the old, smaller, parity drive as a storage drive, assuming a physical space for that drive exists.

[Ravendarat]

Does the parity drive need to be bigger or just equal to the biggest drive in the array?

[CerealExperimentsLain]

3 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

Does the parity drive need to be bigger or just equal to the biggest drive in the array?

Equal or bigger.  So an 8TB parity drive will be fine, but if you want to add a 10TB storage drive, now you have a problem.  In that situation I'd suggest removing the 8TB parity drive, rebuilding the parity data to the 10TB drive so that you have a 10TB parity drive.  Now you'd have 10TB parity, 3x8TB storage, and 1x8TB (the former 8TB parity drive) unused.  You could then add that old parity drive to the array and now you have 10TB parity, 4x8TB storage, and the ability to add additional drives up to 10TB in size.

 

That all said, normally I buy TWO larger drives at once.   One for the new, largest storage, another as the parity drive upgrade.

[Ravendarat]

Just now, CerealExperimentsLain said:

Equal or bigger.  So an 8TB parity drive will be fine, but if you want to add a 10TB storage drive, now you have a problem.  In that situation I'd suggest removing the 8TB parity drive, rebuilding the parity data to the 10TB drive so that you have a 10TB parity drive.  Now you'd have 10TB parity, 3x8TB storage, and 1x8TB (the former 8TB parity drive) unused.  You could then add that old parity drive to the array and now you have 10TB parity, 4x8TB storage, and the ability to add additional drives up to 10TB in size.

 

That all said, normally I buy TWO larger drives at once.   One for the new, largest storage, another as the parity drive upgrade.

Makes total sense, last question, if I put a ssd in this thing with windows on it with the purpose of booting it up to rip my movies, will I be able to access the mass storage and move those movies to the NAS, or will I have to do that on a seperate machine so I can boot this thing into unraid, or is this a case where it boots unraid then you can boot windows after? I hope that question makes sense cause I went kinda crosseyed trying to ask it

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

Makes total sense, last question, if I put a ssd in this thing with windows on it with the purpose of booting it up to rip my movies, will I be able to access the mass storage and move those movies to the NAS, or will I have to do that on a seperate machine so I can boot this thing into unraid, or is this a case where it boots unraid then you can boot windows after? I hope that question makes sense cause I went kinda crosseyed trying to ask it

The store will be in a linux only format, so windows can't use it.

 

If you want to be able to run windows ot rip, why not just run windows all the time instead of unraid? Windows can do all all the network shares you need, and setup raid array like unraid.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

10 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

Makes total sense, last question, if I put a ssd in this thing with windows on it with the purpose of booting it up to rip my movies, will I be able to access the mass storage and move those movies to the NAS, or will I have to do that on a seperate machine so I can boot this thing into unraid, or is this a case where it boots unraid then you can boot windows after? I hope that question makes sense cause I went kinda crosseyed trying to ask it

So you want one drive booting Windows and another drive booting UnRAID?  Like you go into the BIOS and change boot drive to decide what you want to boot?

 

No.  unRAID is the OS.  While the drives themselves wuold show, they'd show without UnRAID they'd just be Linux formatted XFS drives.

 

What you'd want to do is run UnRAID and then have UnRAID run Windows in a VM.  You cuold assign a seperate drive, like the SSD you suggested, for the Windows VM to run in.  That VM could be given access to the UnRAID storage pool.

 

For usability though I'd suggest a second PC for doing the ripping but that's personal taste.

[Rysters Tech]

I personally do not have any experience with unraid, but i do have experience in builiding a nas.

Thing Number 1# find something that has a gigabit network controller, and uses pci express. Most socket 775 pentium 4's and all newer intel chips use PCIe. I once built  a nas out of a pentium 4 630 machine with 2gb of ram using openmediavault. Im not sure what unraid requires, but if you are just creating a nas for normal usage and not running any fancy zfs raids or anything openmediavault is relatively easy to setup, lightweight, can do software RAID, and has various addons you can use if you wish.  

GPU, doesnt matter. if you dont have onboard graphics or the igpu is broken, find some old 8500gt or something on ebay, something cheap that will display text is all you need. If you are using drives larger than 2TB, as you probably will want to, check if your motherboard supports it as not all motherboard before 2012 have support for it.

#2Power Supply: If you care about your data, get a new power supply from a reputable brand that has all the modern protection features on it. I learned this the hard way, you dont want to save a few bucks on a joe bob down the street brand psu that will blow up and fry your drives. 400 watts should be good enough for most cases.

Boot device, i havent used unraid, but for openmediavault which can do most things consumers need, find an ssd from a reputable brand, 120gb is fine, just make sure its something that is reliable. 

#3,Storage Drives: A WD Red will be fine for most people as long as you arent running a raid array, if you are, you want the wd red plus that is CMR compared to the standard red that is SMR. the SMR reds arent nessecarily bad as basic nas drives, but if you are running a ZFS raid stay away from SMR DRIVES! I do not see the point in getting a WD Red Pro over the plus models because a 7200rpm drive doesnt outperform a 5400rpm drive by enough to justify the additional cost, heat, and power consumption. Not to mention that a 5400rpm model can pull off over the 100Megabyte per second limit of a gigabit connection anyway. I have had some experience with the ironwolf drives and they generally are garbage for reliability, one last thing, DO NOT BUY USED DRIVES, LEARNED THIS THE HARD WAY TOO!

#4, Additional SATA Controllers: This WILL DEPEND on the operating system you are running, but for openmediavault, you can repurpose an old raid controller running in HBA mode and things like S.M.A.R.T will generally work fine with it.. You dont have to worry about drivers for them too much on linux because any modern linux distro including openmediavault can generally figure it out on its own. But if you are using another distribution, DO YOUR RESEARCH as to how those distros handle S.M.A.R.T reporting through a raid controller. 

#5, mounting: if your case doesnt have enough hdd mounts, if it an old case for example, you can buy a 5 and 1/4 inch to 3.5 inch adapter. Do not just let hard drives hang loose, they will die, again, learned this the hard way. Your ssd boot drive can be taped down or have one screw put through it if it comes down to it, an ssd doesnt care about movement, just tape it down or something so it wont short against anything.