1 HDD Server upgrade path

[Tethys]

I am going to be building a small windows 10 plex server/emulation box soon. With building a new computer I can only afford one large HDD. (Parts list below)

I've never used RAID or any other services like it, but I'm fairly competent with computers.

Down the line when I add more drives I would like them to act as one volume. My question is should I use unRAID with a win10 VM, use the Windows 10 Storage Spaces to combine drives, or use the RAID on the motherboard?

and if I use unRAID with a win10 VM, will I be able to access the array cluster locally or will I have to map a network drive? Only reason I think this is important is when I do wii emulation i'll have to load a large iso from the network.

 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/9Vw8XH
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/9Vw8XH/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i3-7100 3.9GHz Dual-Core Processor  ($119.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: ASRock H270M-ITX/ac Mini ITX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($110.98 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Patriot Viper 4 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  ($53.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: PNY CS1311 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($49.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Hitachi Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($149.99 @ Newegg) 
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 660 2GB Video Card  (Purchased For $0.00) 
Case: BitFenix Prodigy (Black) Mini ITX Tower Case  ($84.99 @ Amazon) 
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  ($46.98 @ Newegg) 
Total: $616.91
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-02-07 14:01 EST-0500

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Id use storage spaces in windows 10. No real reason to use unraid, storage spaces does the same thing. Motherboard raid sucks, don't use it.

 

For the build. Don't use a 8350, use a pentium g6420. The 8350 will use lots of power and hurt the power bill. The pentium is more than enough for 2 plex streams.

 

Don't get a wifi card, use the wifi on your router, and hardwire the nas in.

 

No reason to get a dvd drive unless you ripping with it.

 

Use the igpu on a pentium, the gpu won't be used at all and will just pull power.

 

You can't use storage spaces on the boot drive Id get a second hdd for boot

 

 

[supersonido]

Hi Tethys,

if the use for the computer is Plex Server and shared files you can use FreeNas, is easy to use and you can run VM's on it. I recommend to use the FreeNas version 10.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, supersonido said:

Hi Tethys,

if the use for the computer is Plex Server and shared files you can use FreeNas, is easy to use and you can run VM's on it. I recommend to use the FreeNas version 10.

but you cant easily expand the storage

[Tethys]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Id use storage spaces in windows 10.

It seems pretty good, the only issue I've heard from it if if a drive fails its annoying/hard to repair. I do want to have some parity eventual on this machine. id I get 2 new drives how will I go about implementing them to the current build. I've heard when creating a new pool all the drives will be wiped? Or can I create a pool with only one drive in it?

15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Don't use a 8350

I'm guessing you mean the i3-7100. For my situation a worst case would be 3 people actively transcoding through plex and playing an emulated wii game. 

[Tethys]

17 minutes ago, supersonido said:

Hi Tethys,

if the use for the computer is Plex Server and shared files you can use FreeNas, is easy to use and you can run VM's on it. I recommend to use the FreeNas version 10.

I wasn't aware FreeNAS could do VMs. I'm gonna have to look into this.
If you have experience with FreeNAS, how easy is it to add drives with some kind of parity?

[Electronics Wizardy]

14 minutes ago, Tethys said:

I wasn't aware FreeNAS could do VMs. I'm gonna have to look into this.
If you have experience with FreeNAS, how easy is it to add drives with some kind of parity?

You can't just add drives. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

17 minutes ago, Tethys said:

It seems pretty good, the only issue I've heard from it if if a drive fails its annoying/hard to repair. I do want to have some parity eventual on this machine. id I get 2 new drives how will I go about implementing them to the current build. I've heard when creating a new pool all the drives will be wiped? Or can I create a pool with only one drive in it?

I'm guessing you mean the i3-7100. For my situation a worst case would be 3 people actively transcoding through plex and playing an emulated wii game. 

I'd go pentium it performs almost the same as the i3 and will be more than fast enough. 

 

You can't use the boot drive in the pool. You need a separate drove. 

[Tethys]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can't use the boot drive in the pool. You need a separate drove. 

I wasn't considering this at all.

[supersonido]

In that article you can see all the thinks I told you and how easy is to add more drives http://www.freenas.org/blog/start-holidays-off-freenas-10-beta-2/

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, supersonido said:

In that article you can see all the thinks I told you and how easy is to add more drives http://www.freenas.org/blog/start-holidays-off-freenas-10-beta-2/

but with zfs(what freenas uses) you can't expand a vdev, and if you add a device to a pool, if any vdev in the pool fails, you lost all your data.

[dalekphalm]

23 hours ago, supersonido said:

In that article you can see all the thinks I told you and how easy is to add more drives http://www.freenas.org/blog/start-holidays-off-freenas-10-beta-2/

With ZFS, you cannot expand a pool. Once the pool is created, that's it. The only way to make a ZFS pool larger is by replacing each drive in the pool with a larger one, then rebuilding the entire pool, one drive at a time.

 

You can, however, "span" multiple ZFS pools together into a large vdev.

 

Examples

 

What you cannot do:

6-drive RAIDZ1 pool, add a 7th drive

 

What you can do:

6-drive RAIDZ1 pool, add another 6-drive RAIDZ1 pool, span both pools into a 12-drive virtual pool.

 

ZFS is great, as long as you've got the build planned out very well in advance. If you need to expand a pool, you need to back up the data elsewhere, destroy the pool, and create a new one.

 

@Tethys you could check out SnapRAID or FlexRAID. These are software level, non-destructive RAID systems. With FlexRAID, for example, the filesystem on the drive is preserved, so all data is still there. You can also expand the array at will, by just adding new drives to the pool. This is because FlexRAID uses a dedicated Parity drive, rather than mixing parity data across all drives.

 

There are advantages and disadvantages with such a system. Ease of use is a plus. Performance is definitely worse than something like hardware RAID or even ZFS.