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Bug, to be fixed for RC3+ https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=50344.msg484087#msg484087

my cyberpower UPS just works (over usb). So its slightly more than JUST APC units.

Regardless of what everyone thinks you need for the transcodes, that would be a major improvement: Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz 9303 AMD A6-5400K APU 2138 Doubt you'll see cpu pegging for a transcode stream to your xbox & ipad anymore Keep in mind, stream plex to something like a roku/etc often uses directstream, and doesn't have to transcode anything, so it can handle a lot more that way.

Are you sure the ASUS supports VT-d well? I assume you have looked it up and/or have found fellow unRAID users that report it working properly? I recall that all skylake cpus now have vt-d support (or did when I was looking into it a few months back). So its really the MB you need to be concerned with.

They probably have it already, since the newest bios is from 2010, but here: http://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/speed/raid/aar/fw_bios/1430sa_bios_b2507_exe.php

There are nvme support in 6.2 beta, not in 6.1.9 Yes you can create a TimeMachine share. https://i.imgur.com/8vVOpOT.jpg[/img] Man, I can never get my timemachine share to work more than once. I guess I'll give it another go and use your screenshot. I only have the one macbook, and its always on wifi, so maybe that initial backup never works right, I dunno. I've actually started using crashplan on it, and timemachine to an external drive. But its always nice to have it on the network as well.

Funny enough, the only drive I have that isn't xfs is my cache drive. I just dread breaking the dockers and having to rebuild them again. I should really go find that thread about backing up cache to the array, and then just swap the filesystem on the cache already. (Or get really sneaky and just upgrade the cache at the same time!)

Agree ... however, "used" is far less important than what CPU it is. An older generation should certainly be worth less; but if it's a current generation CPU it's not going to functionally any different than a new one. The only thing you're losing relative to a new one is the warranty ... clearly it will expire before a new one would. Yes, but when someone (not on this forum) expects no less than $280 for a used i5-4690k, that's nuts. http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117372, they are $299 right now. I offered $240 cash, 80% retail value. I've made my peace with it and I'm moving on with a i5-4460 for $239 NEW. /rant Ya, exactly. I recently went with a G3258 to get to a newer platform ($50), but now i'm really wanting vt-d, so I'm holding out hope for a good price on an i7. Looks like the best price wise though, is just getting an i5-4590 for US$160 (still), since i7s are $250+. Only $90, but that could be another hdd (or a pci-e card for my htpc VM)!!

Does anyone reverse proxy the unraid GUI? Could you even do that? I got this setup and going (sickrage was more annoying to get right than this entire docker!). Just wondering which apps I should bother to reverse proxy instead of using my VPN and accessing the unraid GUI/dockers that way.

Why don't you just check the cpu usage while you have a large copy going (that is holding steady at 20MB/sec)?? That'll tell you for sure its the cpu.

Nice build, I cheaped out for my upgrade and went haswell instead of skylake. Looks pretty solid, I guess you like the set it up and forget about it that you are probably at now? Are you doing any dockers/vms/etc on this? Seems like you have plenty of resources to do some other stuff?

Not sure what you are asking here? He has a supermicro mb, it has built in video (which is more than good enough for console access/etc). If you want to do something similar, you don't need a cpu with built in video. Now, if you get a MB what doesn't have video (or more specifically, requires video from the cpu, like most consumer level motherboards), then you'll want to get a cpu with video or supply an extra video card in a slot (a waste of space/etc). If you are just concerned about VMs, the onboard graphics usually cannot be passed to a VM anyway, so it doesn't really matter. get a mb with onboard video get a mb that uses the cpu graphics, and a cpu like you suggested (E3-12x5 v5 for skylake) if you want a VM with passthrough (like a windows gaming VM), then get a GPU to put in a pci-e slot (in addtion to one of the above optoins)

I just upgraded (lol) to a z87 extreme4 & G3258, love it so far Anyway, if you are set on upgrading, here are my ideas: Skylake: Get a skylake mb (there is a Z170extreme6 which has 8 onboard sata, and tons of slots for your your addin cards), then any skylake cpu you want. Bonus, almost all skylake cpus support vt-d, if that was important to you. Add in some DDR4, and off you go. Server grade: Get server hardware this time, like a supermicro server MB and a xeon. You can do 1150 now (mb/xeon cpu) and recycle your ram, then later buy some ECC and use it instead. Or just get it all now. You can probably even find some server MB's with enough sata for all your drives, and retire/resell the aoc/ibm cards (or save them for later for even more hdds!!) The ASRock C226 WS ATX Server Motherboard can recycle all your current stuff (CPU/RAM) and then you can replace upgrade with xeon/ECC/etc as you feel like it, and has 10 sata ports. There is also a nice supermicro that has even more sata, don't remember which one right now. I'm not sure what the latest skylake server stuff is, but its out there, and if you want ECC & skylake, you'll need a server MB (whereas with haswell, you could find consumer mb's that supported ECC if you looked). Any more specifics?

I don't think you can future proof that well, unless you are already planning on spending a lot for a current generation of higher end equipment (like, you are willing to drop $1000 on a mb/cpu combo, then ya, you should make sure its going to last, or you have some path to take with it down the road). Buying too old means that you are using more electricity that you probably need, but if that isn't an issue (ie power is cheap for you), then its a fair idea. Right now, if you wanted consumer hardware, I'd get a haswell setup of some sort, go cheap on the cpu if needed, then swap in a faster one as the rest of the world upgrades to newer skylake/etc/etc. If you wanted server hardware, i'm not as sure, since even an entry level e3 haswell still has good value. You could always get a nice server mb, and if it supported something like an intel G3258, use that until you get a good deal/etc on a nice e3-xxxxv3 cpu to swap it, etc. Since DDR4 is out there, unless you are buying something very new, you aren't future proofing, since any major upgrade right now means new RAM (from ddr3 to 4 by the time you upgrade). At least with unRAID, you can do a mb/cpu/ram swap and other than maybe a new nic or order of your hdds, its pretty easy to swap it all out. Can't do that in windows

I'll just add, that even some skylake i3s now have vt-d support, so the price point is getting lower if you don't mind a dual core (with vt-d) support. I think the i3-6100 even has HT. http://ark.intel.com/products/90729/Intel-Core-i3-6100-Processor-3M-Cache-3_70-GHz Not bad for $130 (microcenter has it even cheaper, and a $20 discount for getting a combo).

For what you described, the GHZ of any E3xx-v3 xeon probably makes no difference. The different models ARE difference (some have intel video, some have hyperthreading, some are newer tech, etc). While a higher ghz will be faster, only if its the same generation/type of xeon, so you'd be fine going with pretty much any E3xx-v3 cpu. Comparing ghz on an i3 v i7 v xeon is a different matter entirely. For your MB, they also have a supermicro that has a built in SAS, so you could skip adding another card to the unit, the X10SL7-F. And what did gaming server mean? Like you want to play games on it as well (in a VM with passed through gaming GPU?) or something like a minecraft server? Regardless, I think you are on the right track, just put some serious thought into where you will go with Hdds. People often see the ability to HAVE 24hdds, but NEVER get anywhere close to that. If you are buying 8TB hdds (even just two, 1 parity and 1 data), but you only currently have 3/4TB of data, no need to add in a handful of 500gb/1tb/etc drives when you could just copy all your data to the 8, and then buy another 8tb every year until you get to something like 6 drives (1 parity, 1 cache/vm/etc drive still leaves 4 data drives, 4x8=32TB of usable space). This idea convinces some people to go the exact opposite of what you are saying, a small m-ITX case/setup that sips power, and doesn't even need its own shelf in the closet.

What else are you going to use the PLEX for? It just seems way easier to run a client (roku/fire/apple tv/etc) to be a frontend for PLEX, than spinning up a VM just for plex? At that point (running the VM) just use KODI via OpenELEC since it'll just play everything for you, and you don't need to have anything fancy. For the record, I run plex, but its mostly for my iphone. I just use shares and KODI (on raspberry pis) for watching the content around the house. I've just never heard anyone spinning up a VM JUST for a plex front end?

Your intel system is nice because that MB works with VT-d, so in the future, you can upgrade to a cpu that supports it, and enable VM's with passthrough. (if i'm remembering my model numbers right). I'll also try to steer you to larger hdds, or at least, a larger parity. For example, if you got a 4TB parity NOW, then you can add 2tb/3tb or 4tb drives down the road (keep adding until you run out of sata slots) to increase your space, but keep your costs in check. But if you wanted to add/replace some 2tb drives with 4's, you'll have to buy two, one for parity, then one to upgrade/etc. You don't need ALL large drives now, but try to splurge for as big of a pairty drive now, so that you can add bigger drives in the future without too much effort.

Do you have a VM running as well?

Correct. Depending on the board and your setup, you might need a cable (sas->sata or something similar) to use them, but its just more ports. Looks like either MB will fit, but the ASROCK is mITX, so its very small, and has 6 sata slots. That means you'll need to use the only pci-e slot on it for an additional controller to use additional hdds. While I don't think you'll get to 14 hdds the supermicro can do, it is probably better suited to the case you are already planning to use. (sata port wise). The supermicro also has two pci-e slots (an x8 and x4) which you could use for other expansion, like a video card to pass to a VM/etc (assuming all the hardware supports it). If you ever think that you'll go SMALLER with your server/nas, then get the mITX mb, and scale down your hdd count (by replacing them with bigger capacity). This way, you could also move to a mITX case if you ever needed. I have 5x2tb drives, and 2x1tb drives (and a cache/app drive) and I really want to move to fewer 4/6TB drives, I just haven't budgeted for it yet...

If you want to have a NAS + gaming machine, then you need to run unRAID as your primary OS (via a flash drive). As noted, you can then make a VM (win7/10/etc) in that OS, then boot that. If you want to have it be as close to bare metal performance as possible, then you want to pass your current video card through and give the VM exclusive access to it. This means that unRAID won't have a video card at all. This is fine, since your mb/cpu has built in intel video (and a vga port for your current monitor). Since you only have one hdd right now, you'd use it as your primary data drive, and it would also need to store the VM. Ideally, you'd want to use an SSD to store things like VM images, dockers, other misc apps (for unRAID), etc. That would leave your other disks for your storage array, to store files/movies/games/etc. Once you get unRAID up and going (easy, but i'd find some more hdds, spring for an spare SSD for VM/etc storage), you just run your VM(s) to do your normal stuff. Since you'll do a win7 vm, you'll just boot it, connect to it, and use it like a normal computer. Need to restart, just restart it. unRAID will never stop running/etc. Want to try out win10? no problem, just start a new VM, and boot into that. Want to learn linux? Just start a linux VM. Can they all run at the same time? Sure, if your hardware will support that. Can they all share the video card....well no, thats the tricky stuff. So you'll want to do something called passthrough for your video card (the 750) and for some usb ports/controller. This is also called IMMOU, and for intel, it needs VT-d support (cpu/motherboard). Then you assign the devices (the 750 and some usb for your keyboard/mouse) directly to the VM, and only the VM can access them. (this gives you a dedicated keyboard/mouse for unRAID (not that you need it) and one for your VM/etc. Then you should be able to get near perfect gaming performance from the VM. You can also assign the video card to another VM later, but you might need to reboot/etc to actually make that swap (like if you wanted the 750 to be available to a win7 vm and a win10 vm, though only ever one at a time). BTW, you can always have another VM with an emulated video card, it just won't be fast for gaming, etc. For dual monitors, if you pass the 750 through to the VM, then it can support as many monitors as it normally would, so you can still have your win7 vm (on the 750) and dual monitors. If you wanted to have like 5 displays, and needed additional video cards to support them, then they'd all have to get passed through, and now you are just getting overly complicated Your 2TB wd black will make a great parity drive, except that it is only 2TB. If you wanted to buy bigger drives later (say a few nice 4TB drives) then you also need your parity to be 4TB. But you could easily buy 2 4TB hdds, make one parity, one data, and move the 2tb to data, and still have 6TB of storage space. All in all, I think you'll learn a few things if you move forward with this, and to me, that's always worth trying it out.

Did you verify that your mb/cpu/etc support passthrough? It all needs to support VT-d and have it enabled. If that is good, then go for it. I'd probably make your SSD a cache drive (whether you setup cache shares or not) and use it to store your VM's etc. unraid will boot from a USB drive, and you have enough hdds there to at least setup some shares/etc. If it works reliably, and you want to keep using it, you'll probably want to invest it a few larger 3.5" hdds (say 3 4TB+ drives) to make your storage worthwhile. You can make as many shares as you want, it will spread the data across the drives. You should have enough to test it out, assuming you don't mind tinkering/reimaging as needed.

That card is a solid choice for a htpc. The issue is, whether it plays nice with passthrough to a VM (some amd cards are good, some nvidia, some are good for htpc/w hdmi, etc). I don't have any VMs with passthrough, but I recall that card, as well as the NVIDIA 710 (i think) are good options for openelec vm's. You can search the forum a little more, and find some specific examples if you aren't willing to just deal with trial and error. For SAS cards, I'd get the M1015, then the H310, then the AOC (you'd actually want the sas2lp). The AOC has some issues with doing parity checks lately (there is a long thread around here) so thats why I listed it last. It works fine, just seems to have some bug that slows parity way down. The M1015 is a staple, and I guess you can reflash the H310 as well. Kinda depends if you are getting new/used/refurbed and on newegg/ebay/etc which one you'll actually go with. I think they are all good.

You don't need anything too special for playback of media these days. You can use a pi2, nexus player, firetv, etc. Since you mention plex, you can actually use anything that supports plex (which is even some smart tvs). The only real reason I see to build 2 boxes, is that one will be a very robust/capable HTPC, with built in tuners for OTA/etc, PVR and other more involved tasks. If you don't already know what this box would do special, you are probably ready to make just the one. In fact, thanks to the VM capability of unRAID 6, you could even spin up an OpenELEC VM (with the right hardware for passthrough) and still get full x86 based power for a primary tv/etc. Now, if you meant you wanted two servers, both unRAID, and one will be a backup of the other, thats different. That is a solid idea. Also, keep in mind how much storage you REALLY need. Lots of people want to build 24 bay systems, but 6-6TB hdds is still 30TB or parity protected storage. Lots of small footprint, but powerful systems in the UCD forum. TL;DR Sounds like you should just make one machine, either with enough storage upfront (or enough free bays/sata ports for reasonable expansion), and if you want to do VM's, multiple plex transcodes, then go with a solid haswell (or newer) based i3/5/7 system.