Unraid build suggestions

[Bakedpanda]

I'm looking to build an unraid server for storage in a video production company.

 

I'm looking to make something cheaper or equal to a Synology DS1817 (https://www.synology.com/en-uk/products/DS1817) around £900 without the drives.

 

I like the Synology solution but I'd like the option to build the array as needed to spread out the cost of hard drives.

 

I'm looking for hardware advice such as a reasonable CPU, amount of RAM, storage controllers (up to 8 SATA connectors), 10G network card (ideally 2 ports). I'll be doing my own research and will update with a PCpartpicker list as I go.

 

As for drives, I'm looking at Iron Wolf Pro. Capacity will depend on budget available but likely a minimum of 8TB.

 

Any help would be very much appreciated.

[Jarsky]

If its for video production are you sure you want to use UnRAID? 

- It does contiguous writes so you wont have the speed advantage of having reading being distributed across multiple spindles. 

- If you use SSD caching it only writes to your array on a schedule, so you'd need a large cache and you'd need at least 2 ssd's to protect the data until it gets written out of cache to the disks. Ideally 2 x 1TB SSD's at least since its for video production. 

- You need at least the Plus key, which is $89....$129 for the Pro. 

- Synology & QNAP provide excellent warranty support & replacement for their product. 

- The DS1817 already comes with 10gbE ports so you save money there already. 

[NelizMastr]

I honestly don't see the appeal of UnRAID. It does the same thing FreeNAS does when you want to use it for storage, and as a hypervisor it loses badly to Proxmox. Both of those are free and don't have a stupid drive limit on their license.

 

Anyway, I think @Jarsky sums it up rather well. Just get the Synology. You get better support, easy management and nice creature comforts like 10GbE.

[Bakedpanda]

This would be used for medium to longterm storage, we have faster drives to edit from. The main appeal of UnRAID for me is being able to build the array as needed to spread out the cost of the drives. If the other OS options have this available, I'd be interested in them. I really like the Synology for its simplicity but it would cost over £2600 (inc. 8 x 8TB drives) as I'd need to fully populate it from the start.

 

After doing some research, I'm considering some older server hardware for the system.

 

I'm planning to use SSD's in RAID 1 for the cache.

 

If I have the processing power available, I would like to run a VM on there and use it for ingesting footage and other basic tasks.