[New HBA/Sata Controller Recommendations]

Most people buy used off of eBay and flash cards to IT mode. The Art of Server on eBay has a bunch. Tested working and flashed to IT.

[Few Questions Before Ordering]

Just now, trurl said:

Latest beta supports multiple pools so each of these could be a pool managed by Unraid instead of Unassigned Devices.

I saw that through my reading and research but had completely forgotten about it mostly because I was thinking of using the latest stable version, but since I'm not putting this into full production until I'm setup and comfortable, why not. Thanks for the reminder.

[Few Questions Before Ordering]

Hi all, new here and have a few questions about the setup I plan to implement before I finish ordering drives and an UnRAID Pro key.

 

Current server is a Win7 box handling Plex and all associated programs.

 

Q9550

X48T-DQ6

8GB Ram DDR3

GTX 660Ti

Areca ARC-1320

2x Rackables SE3016

64TB worth of drives (not full)

 

New hardware (this build was supposed to be completed 2 years ago, but life)

 

X9DRI-LN4F+

2x E5-2660v2

32GB ECC

LSI 9207-8i

4U Supermicro 24 hot swap bays SAS2-EL1 backplane

GTX 1060 6GB (because it's laying around, eventually get a Quadro, about the only transcoded is to myself when we're traveling and streaming to a mobile device)

 

So the plan is:

 

1TB 860 EVO Cache

1TB 860 EVO PLEX (UD)

1TB 860 EVO Dockers (UD)

6 x 10TB Pool (2 Parity, 4 Storage)

 

The purpose behind this layout is because PLEX metadata is currently sitting at about 350gb and that's a lot of small files (currently on a 1TB WD Black spinner). Transcode would be setup to use RAM (once up and running I plan to 2x/3x/4x current RAM, because why not). The Dockers would be Sonarr, Radarr, SabNZBD and download to their own drive for unpacking then write directly to the array. The Cache drive would be available for network, FTP, VPN, transfers etc. and let Mover handle scheduling for writing that to the array, as well as any other VMs I have time to play around with. Then I'd need to figure out a nightly or weekly backup of the 2 UD devices to the array.

 

I view the SSDs as consumables and don't mind trashing them as long as they are backed up (watched flags are annoying to lose). I'd transfer the 35TB of current data to the new array without parity for speed purposes (it's gonna take long enough across gigabit network anyways), then enable Parity, make sure all my Dockers are working properly, then start decommissioning the old "server" and adding the drives from it I want to keep to the new box.

 

The SSD would be SATA off of the motherboard headers. Or, I suppose I could get a PCIe expansion card for NVMe if I'm going to see a significant improvement in speed vs expense. Or do I just buy significantly larger SSDs and create a very large Cache Pool to house everything in a RAID 1 type setup for protection?

 

The plan is to have essentially ZERO downtime. Have the new box, up and running in tandem and tested before shutting the current workhorse down.

 

Any suggestions are welcome. I have my USB thumb drive arriving soon and pending any recommendations from replies I'll be ordering the SSDs and new 10TB drives this week.

 

Thank you for your time.