UNRAID Nas Build

[storageisfun]

Budget (including currency):  Around $600 USD

Country:  United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:  Storage Server

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

This is my part list. I already have drives so that won't be included.

 

CPU: Intel Core i3-12100 3.3 GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($113.60 @ Newegg) 
Motherboard: Asus PRIME B760M-A AX Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($120.00 @ Amazon) 
Memory: Patriot Signature Line 16 GB (1 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 Memory  ($34.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($140.96 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($89.00 @ Abt) 
Case Fan: Thermalright TL-C12C-S X3 66.17 CFM 120 mm Fans 3-Pack  ($13.59 @ Amazon) 
Total: $512.14
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
 

[ChrisLoudon]

48 minutes ago, storageisfun said:

This is my part list. I already have drives so that won't be included.

That will work nicely but UNRAID is very light weight and doesn't need much in the way of grunt to run. Mine is on an old 3770k with 6 storage drives, 1 parity drive and an SSD cache disk plus a few docker containers including PLEX and it never runs out of steam.

 

Not that what you've specced isn't perfect for the job but if you have a box of old bits and bobs in the attic, don't be afraid of using them for a storage only NAS.

 

If you do insist of getting something more modern, I'd advise against Intel and LG1700 as its a dead platform. If you can go for anything AM5 then that will have another few years of support and upgrade paths. Heck, even AM4 has got more life left in it that LGA1700.

 

The only real benefit with Intel is their iGPUs have Quicksync and make for good PLEX transcoders if you don't want or don't have the space for a dGPU.

[porina]

1 hour ago, storageisfun said:

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:  Storage Server

Just storage, and no other server stuff?

 

1 hour ago, storageisfun said:

Motherboard: Asus PRIME B760M-A AX Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard  ($120.00 @ Amazon) 

You could knock the total cost down by going H610 chipset mobo. I got a DDR4 one to reuse old ram and cut costs even further, however mine only has 4 SATA ports so if you plan to go past that, you'll have to check how many are included.

 

1 hour ago, storageisfun said:

Memory: Patriot Signature Line 16 GB (1 x 16 GB) DDR5-4800 CL40 Memory  ($34.99 @ Amazon) 

If pure storage you don't need that much ram, although it probably doesn't make much sense to go lower unless you went DDR4 mobo.

 

34 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

If you do insist of getting something more modern, I'd advise against Intel and LG1700 as its a dead platform. If you can go for anything AM5 then that will have another few years of support and upgrade paths. Heck, even AM4 has got more life left in it that LGA1700.

AM5 will bump up the cost quite a bit. AM4 is more dead than LGA1700 in the sense that the best CPU you can ever get on AM4 will be worse than options on LGA1700. However, for a pure storage system that will never need much CPU, it could still be a low cost option.

 

I'm also making the assumption the use case is pure storage, so upgrades outside of drives will be extremely unlikely.

[storageisfun]

37 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

That will work nicely but UNRAID is very light weight and doesn't need much in the way of grunt to run. Mine is on an old 3770k with 6 storage drives, 1 parity drive and an SSD cache disk plus a few docker containers including PLEX and it never runs out of steam.Not that what you've specced isn't perfect for the job but if you have a box of old bits and bobs in the attic, don't be afraid of using them for a storage only NAS.

 

If you do insist of getting something more modern, I'd advise against Intel and LG1700 as its a dead platform
. If you can go for anything AM5 then that will have another few years of support and upgrade paths. Heck, even AM4 has got more life left in it that LGA1700.

 

The only real benefit with Intel is their iGPUs have Quicksync and make for good PLEX transcoders if you don't want or don't have the space for a dGPU.

Thank you for this information. What do you mean by "perfect for the job". I don't have old bits and bolts in the attic to use. I don't need a super powerful iGPU for my Plex server, as the computer I use for everything else can pre-transcode fairly well. 

 

Does UNRAID use lots of RAM as a read cache? 

 

i made an alternate parts list that uses an AM4 platform.

 

 

CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 3200G 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($70.59 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: MSI A520M-A PRO Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($69.99 @ MSI) 
Memory: Patriot Signature Premium 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 CL19 Memory  ($14.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($140.96 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($89.00 @ Abt) 
Case Fan: Thermalright TL-C12C-S X3 66.17 CFM 120 mm Fans 3-Pack  ($13.59 @ Amazon) 
Total: $399.12
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-12-23 15:26 EST-0500

[storageisfun]

4 minutes ago, porina said:

Just storage, and no other server stuff?

 

You could knock the total cost down by going H610 chipset mobo. I got a DDR4 one to reuse old ram and cut costs even further, however mine only has 4 SATA ports so if you plan to go past that, you'll have to check how many are included.

 

If pure storage you don't need that much ram, although it probably doesn't make much sense to go lower unless you went DDR4 mobo.

 

AM5 will bump up the cost quite a bit. AM4 is more dead than LGA1700 in the sense that the best CPU you can ever get on AM4 will be worse than options on LGA1700. However, for a pure storage system that will never need much CPU, it could still be a low cost option.

 

I'm also making the assumption the use case is pure storage, so upgrades outside of drives will be extremely unlikely.

It isn't PURE storage. I will be using it for Plex, Immich Photo Library, maybe some home automation as well. 

[storageisfun]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

AM5 will bump up the cost quite a bit. AM4 is more dead than LGA1700 in the sense that the best CPU you can ever get on AM4 will be worse than options on LGA1700. However, for a pure storage system that will never need much CPU, it could still be a low cost option.

I found an AM4 systme for even less than the LGA1700. See my post earlier for the part list

[ChrisLoudon]

11 hours ago, storageisfun said:

What do you mean by "perfect for the job"

I suppose, 'a great job'. As previosuly mentioned, storage servers, especially when built around backends like TrueNAS and Unraid don't need much power to run so whether you go for the original spec, an AM5 system or AM4, you'll be just fine.

 

11 hours ago, storageisfun said:

as the computer I use for everything else can pre-transcode fairly well.

Do you run local access only to other PCs or do you stream 'offsite' to things like phones and tablets? Having a half decent GPU to do tanscoding 'on-the-fly' is really handy. It also saves space given the fact that PLEX no longer needs to store different copies of the same content for different players.

 

11 hours ago, storageisfun said:

Does UNRAID use lots of RAM as a read cache? 

So Unraid actually runs from RAM. Its not installed on a HDD as other OSs are. Its installed on a USB flash drive, which the NAS boots from. The 16GB of RAM my NAS has seems to be just fine for my storage and docker needs.

 

When you are setting up the array, a typical setup would have a few drives set as storage, another (maybe a 2nd) setup as parity. This / these parity drives allow for one or 2 drives in the storage array to fail. The only caveat to the parity drives is one or both of them need to be the same size or larger than the biggest disk in the array.

 

Mine is 8TB (Parity) - 6 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 + 1  = 21TB Storage then to speed up my writes I have a 4TB SSD.

 

When setting up your shares, you can specify how you want the data to be written to the array. Most of mine hits the cache first which is nice and fast. At a scheduled time of the day a 'mover' runs and flushes everything to the slower spinning metal disks.