My UnRaid NAS

[JWMutant]

Just finished watching the latest video on LTT and thought I would share my unraid system that I built over a year ago.

 

The case that I went with was a Fractal Design Node 804 purely because I wanted a compact NAS solution that wasnt going to take up too much room.

 

As far as the internal parts, this is the good thing about unraid, while in the video on the LTT channel Linus shows using a rather new board that was purely to show case gaming on the same pc, however in most cases you can use literally parts that are laying around like I did.

 

I ended up using a Gigabyte board that was more entry level than anything else, threw in 16 GB of ram and a K series CPU, up till this point the build literally cost me the price of the case.

 

I ended up buying a sas card and cross flashing the firmware so that any drives I had attached to it could simply be pass through without the need to setup a array.

 

I'll cut to the end here, end result is a NAS that has 20TB ~ of space with a 3TB parity drive with a 256GB SSD cache drive.

 

Network transfer speeds are normally around the 140-150 MB/s.

 

I setup a VM of Windows 10 which I can tell you Linus made it look really easy and guess what.... It really is that easy. I use the Windows VM as my download OS. Handles all my "media related" downloads.

 

(No longer using the Videocard in the first image)

 

[Godlygamer23]

Moved to Build Logs.

[EposVox]

Nice! I'm doing this when I have money for drives.

[JWMutant]

I really cant complain about the NAS and have to say its my best investment.

 

I installed PLEX server on the NAS which is just a plugin for unraid and because most good TV's this days have built in apps "Plex client being one of them" It really has bought a new mean to having a system that literally does it all.

[GoldenBE]

Could you explain a bit more in depth how you used the sas card, how do you connect the drives to it exactly? I'm trying to build a nas but I'm struggling with the 4 sata port limit of some motherboards.

[JWMutant]

Sure.

 

As far as using a SAS card goes, its as simple as buying a SAS card and plugging it into one of your PCI express lanes (Depending on weather you buy a SAS card that uses x 4 or x8 will depend on what lane you use) so make sure that whatever card you get you have a lane free to use it.

 

Once the card is in all you need is the SAS cables running from the card to your drives. These cables are not like your normal SATA cables. They are a cable that has a mini sas connector on one end and normally branch out to 4xSATA on the other end.

 

So a two port SAS card will support 8 drives  (4xSATA ports running of each SAS port).

 

Side note I got the SAS controller for exactly the same reason. My board had limited SATA ports and even less SATA 3 ports.

 

So getting a SAS controller that supports SATA 3 speeds will help you for sure.

 

They are very easy to setup and depending on what if your using it in a NAS  or simple a Windows OS will depend on how easy it is set get up and running.