UNRAID

[AMDKilla]

I have a Windows 10 Pro rig set up as a server at home (Plex, FileHistory etc). Currently running 5x2TB HDDs in Windows Storage Spaces with parity and a 320GB HDD for OS. The parity mode in WSS takes a huge hit to write speeds (25MB/s), and I'm getting the bug where I'm losing space due to the chunks being set at 256MB (so even 1MB files take up 256MB on the drive). I was considering swapping out the 320GB HDD for an SSD and running it with UNRAID as the primary OS, with the 5x2TB drives in a parity array and the SSD as a cache, and then running Win 10 Pro as a virtual machine.

My motherboard and CPU both support virtualisation, but I'm not sure if the motherboard supports IOMMU. I currently use the onboard graphics to steam stream to my TV, so from my understanding, I'll need IOMMU support to passthrough a PCIe GPU for Win 10, as UNRAID will take the onboard for itself.

I know that UNRAID will tell me what's supported once it boots, but my question is can I create the boot drive and test this without affecting my current install in any way?

[porina]

Unraid will only run from a USB flash drive. See their site for more details but the drive must have a unique serial number. I use the tiny sandisk ones. From there, you can boot from the USB drive with unraid on it without needing to alter your existing installs.

[leadeater]

You can use an SSD to cache writes with Storage Spaces to get much better write performance, set an SSD to journal mode to do this. It has to dedicated to this task so it cannot be an OS SSD.

 

As for the chunks I have never heard of that bug and the default interleave size is 256KB not 256MB. As for files smaller than the interleave I can't remember exactly what happens but they don't get inflated in size. What your thinking of is file system allocation unit size which does inflate files, bar less than 1kb files as they get stored in a special way.

 

Also are you aware that parity configurations in Storage Spaces is only really intended for archive workloads? You can use two-way mirror on as many disks as you like, it functions similar to RAID 10 and has excellent read/write performance.

[LinusTech]

5 hours ago, AMDKilla said:

I have a Windows 10 Pro rig set up as a server at home (Plex, FileHistory etc). Currently running 5x2TB HDDs in Windows Storage Spaces with parity and a 320GB HDD for OS. The parity mode in WSS takes a huge hit to write speeds (25MB/s), and I'm getting the bug where I'm losing space due to the chunks being set at 256MB (so even 1MB files take up 256MB on the drive). I was considering swapping out the 320GB HDD for an SSD and running it with UNRAID as the primary OS, with the 5x2TB drives in a parity array and the SSD as a cache, and then running Win 10 Pro as a virtual machine.

My motherboard and CPU both support virtualisation, but I'm not sure if the motherboard supports IOMMU. I currently use the onboard graphics to steam stream to my TV, so from my understanding, I'll need IOMMU support to passthrough a PCIe GPU for Win 10, as UNRAID will take the onboard for itself.

I know that UNRAID will tell me what's supported once it boots, but my question is can I create the boot drive and test this without affecting my current install in any way?

It sounds like you have a pretty good understanding of how unraid would work in your setup, but one thing that is kind of a bummer about running an unraid VM with GPU pass through as a daily driver is that USB plug & play is only supported if you stub and pass through an entire USB controller. Not sure if you plug USB drives into your media Center very often, but it comes up for me from time to time. 

 

So so I usually recommend either a board with two controllers or an add in card. 

[AMDKilla]

7 hours ago, LinusTech said:

It sounds like you have a pretty good understanding of how unraid would work in your setup, but one thing that is kind of a bummer about running an unraid VM with GPU pass through as a daily driver is that USB plug & play is only supported if you stub and pass through an entire USB controller. Not sure if you plug USB drives into your media Center very often, but it comes up for me from time to time. 

 

So so I usually recommend either a board with two controllers or an add in card. 

I don't usually plug anything in directly to it, the only current USB device is a wireless keyboard/trackpad. My only issue would be finding space enough to store everything on the current array while I rebuild it in unraid

[LinusTech]

1 hour ago, AMDKilla said:

I don't usually plug anything in directly to it, the only current USB device is a wireless keyboard/trackpad. My only issue would be finding space enough to store everything on the current array while I rebuild it in unraid

Yeah that IS one of the biggest challenges when migrating between storage solutions...

[AMDKilla]

5 hours ago, LinusTech said:

Yeah that IS one of the biggest challenges when migrating between storage solutions...

To be fair, most of it is Bluray rips that I can put back on for Plex. I have a 1TB HDD in both mine and my wife's PC dedicated to steam games, so I could always wipe them, store stuff on them and then set steam to redownload everything onto one PC and copy the common files over the network

[Electronics Wizardy]

On 1/29/2017 at 4:16 AM, AMDKilla said:

I have a Windows 10 Pro rig set up as a server at home (Plex, FileHistory etc). Currently running 5x2TB HDDs in Windows Storage Spaces with parity and a 320GB HDD for OS. The parity mode in WSS takes a huge hit to write speeds (25MB/s), and I'm getting the bug where I'm losing space due to the chunks being set at 256MB (so even 1MB files take up 256MB on the drive). I was considering swapping out the 320GB HDD for an SSD and running it with UNRAID as the primary OS, with the 5x2TB drives in a parity array and the SSD as a cache, and then running Win 10 Pro as a virtual machine.

My motherboard and CPU both support virtualisation, but I'm not sure if the motherboard supports IOMMU. I currently use the onboard graphics to steam stream to my TV, so from my understanding, I'll need IOMMU support to passthrough a PCIe GPU for Win 10, as UNRAID will take the onboard for itself.

I know that UNRAID will tell me what's supported once it boots, but my question is can I create the boot drive and test this without affecting my current install in any way?

have you considered just running desktop linux on the system like ubuntu or fedora?

 

You can do easily run a raid 5 with md or use a storage pool with snapraid and union fs(basically the same a unraid).

 

You can then use it a media center without using a vm.

[VolkovBrad67]

Streaming your game using a VM can work, I've been doing this for a few months now, and playing Witcher 3 on my 65 inch TV is fantastic.

I have a water cooled UnRaid server in a rack, with 2 8TB Ultrastar Helium as main storage and 2 1TB 850 EVO as a cache pool (BRTFS RAID 1). My VMs are stored on the cache pool only and I also have a "Game" vdisk as Shared on the cache pool too, which I assign as a second drive for the W10 VM and I use as the primary location for games in Steam. I have a GTX 780 Lightning that I passthrough the W10 VM (and one of the USB controller on my mobo, which gives me 2 hot swap USB ports). I have another server in my rack which is running Guacamole, so I can simply start the W10 VM from UnRaid, log to that VM from any browser (using Guacamole), and then on my W10 desktop I have a batch file that makes it so that the screen stays unlocked even if I close the Remote Desktop connection. Your screen must be unlocked to be able to stream your games, so using that trick I don't even have to get up to the server room, I can just do everything from my HTPC (Linux Mint) from my living room. I use a Steam controller and I have the official Steam client installed on my HTPC. Using Big Picture mode, Steam Controller works perfectly, I can launch and stream any Steam games I want directly from my couch and the performance is exactly the same as local (except a ~35ms network delay, which is acceptable for single player games). The game looks amazing, I stream it in 1080p even if my TV is 4K the resampling is still very good and the compression is not that noticeable (I'm using GPU compression. since Witcher 3 has a lot of environments with foliage, it's not perfectly sharp because that's very difficult to efficiently compress but still, it looks way better than a console version). So yea, if that's what you want to do, it can be done, but it does require a lot of fiddling around to get it exactly as you want it.