Hi all,
I'm very much almost decided in diving into the unraid world and doing my first build specifically for it. Now, the absolute main usage will be both VMs (MacOS, Linux, Win10, but only two of them would be up at the same time ever), Plex server (always direct-play to TV) and random storage.
My plan is to use some absolute cheapo Chromebooks for example, as they're usually the cheapest compared to Win-loaded laptops such as the following or something similar to keep it low-powered/lightweight:
ASUS C423 14 Inch Celeron 4GB 32GB Chromebook - £220
Now, my main point of concern is the VM experience. I've read accounts of people using ParSec and having an excellent experience as it's got incredibly low latency, as well as Splashtop. This is where I need to be brought down to earth on. I work remotely every week and the experience is absolutely great, it feels almost bare metal, so I'd expect the same here, and even better experience. Now, the question is if the setup below would provide such an experience. Say, with each VM having 2 cores assigned and one SSD passed-through to each.
The following build would have a second GPU, I'm still debating in discarding the GTX 1650 and going for two 750s or 1050s as there will be absolutely zero gaming, just a lot of Photoshop work and coding. No media consumption whatsoever, only the regular web browsing / Youtube or whatever.
Final pricing will most likely be lower as I'll be purchasing some components second hand. I'm still undecided whether to go ECC or not. I can get Hynix 32GB DDR4 2400 at around £80 on Ebay, hence my choice of motherboard as I ASRock supports ECC in case I'd decide to go that route. Would ECC be better to go with even though it's 600mhz slower than the pair listed below?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 3.2 GHz 8-Core Processor (£129.00 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: ASRock B450M PRO4 Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard (£66.53 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (£125.58 @ Aria PC)
Storage: SanDisk SSD PLUS 240 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£29.29 @ Amazon UK) - Passed-through to VM1
Storage: SanDisk SSD PLUS 240 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£29.29 @ Amazon UK) - Passed-through to VM2
Storage: Kingston A400 240 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (£33.91 @ CCL Computers) - Cache
Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 6 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£149.97 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6 GB ARMOR OC Video Card (£115.00)
Case: BitFenix Phenom M Midnight Black MicroATX Mini Tower Case (£73.99 @ CCL Computers)
Power Supply: Corsair Vengeance 650 W 80+ Silver Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (£65.99 @ AWD-IT)
Total: £818.55
I'm just wondering if I'm making a bad mistake and should just invest in better laptops and just one big external HDD and use that as DLNA (forgoing then the Plex experience), though then my girlfriend would also have to discard experiencing MacOS as that's what she's more comfortable with and just settle with a crappy low-powered laptop.
Going for the unraid option is attractive to me as I love building and tweaking/tinkering with computers etc so it'd be a pretty cool project that could certainly be eye-opening.