inspiron.sr

New user to Unraid OS here, so forgive me if I'm asking rhetorical questions, but I like doing as much research as I can. For the longest while I've managed an extensive media collection for my Plex server/home theater PC (Kodi) out of a Silverstone HTPC case. Currently have content spread across 4 20tb drives, and 2 x 22tb drives. These are individually accessible in Windows and are accessible via network shares on other devices on my home network. I'd like to think I have a robust (albeit manual) backup strategy where I keep track of every single file in an Excel spreadsheet, recording changes to existing files and folders, new content added to drives, and tracking which files have not yet been backed up. Then once every two months I connect a set of 3.5" drives externally (have a bunch of sata cables running out of the case so I can connect directly to the PC for the fastest possible transfer rates) and run my backups. When the backups are done, I disconnect the drives and put the hard drives back into my HDD storage case. I'm rebuilding the HTPC and will be using its current parts as the parts for the Unraid server. The first question I have is surrounding Sata expansion cards. I picked up this card on Amazon recently: ( https://tinyurl.com/24v24mqj ) Amazon.com: ACTIMED PCIE SATA Card 16 Port with 16 SATA Cable, 6 Gbps SATA 3.0 Controller PCI Express Expansion Card with Low Profile Bracket, Support 16 SATA 3.0 Devices, Compatible with Windows,MAC,Linux System : Electronics Is this sufficient? I have 2 24tb iron wolf pro nas drives and 5 new 20 tb exos enterprise drives (all SATA) that I'll use with Unraid for two different storage pools, i.e... the 2 24tb for one, and the 5 20tb for the other. Will that card handle the load, or do I need to get a dedicated HBA card? I'm eyeballing this one ( https://tinyurl.com/26a8ame6 ) Amazon.com: SXTAIGOOD SAS9300-16i LSI 9300-16i16-Port 12Gb/s SAS-3 SAS/SATA PCIe HBA IT Model ZFS TrueNAS UnRAID 4*SFF-8643 SATA Cable : Electronics I have no issue buying the HBA SAS/SATA card, but if I don't need to and the ACTIMED will work, that's one less expense, and like I mentioned I already have the ACTIMED.. Other than the drives and the SATA expansion card, the parts list are as follows The only parts I'm reusing are: - Intel 5820k processor - Asus 2011 v-3 motherboard - Nvidia Gigabyte Single Fan 1660TI Graphics card (for possible plex hardware transcoding, haven't yet decided if ill use the server for plex or purely as a file server or more) - 48 GB DDR4 memory ( not ECC ... but I plan on mitigating this by hooking up the server to a ups battery backup) I've acquired the following parts (some new some refurbished) - Fractal Define 7 XL Case - Pcie SFP+ 10gb NIC - be quiet! Pure Rock 2 150W TDP CPU Cooler - Pcie nvme expansion card ( will hook up two 2tb nvme pcie 3 m.2 cards which I plan to use for cache and running vms's off of ) [I have a space 512 pcie 3 500 gb m.2 card also that I'm not sure what I'll do with yet, but the motherboard only has 1 m.2 port thus the reason for this expansion card] - A couple of additional fans for the PC case for maximum airflow. [ not too worried about noise as this is going in my utility room in basement next to my network rack) - A 750w gold+ power supply Does anyone have any concerns about any of the listed hardware above in regards to UNRAID? The other questions I have are more specific to configuration. As explained I'm going to use this primarily as a file server for all my devices on the network, and I'm thinking of rolling with two JBOD arrays. While I get the performance benefits of RAID I honestly can't think of any premium benefits over just running JBOD pools, not to mention the considerable time to rebuild the array when a disk needs to be replaced. I'm quite used to running backups 4 - 6 times a year and if I have to increase the frequency so be it. Questions (a) When configuring the pools, am I better off letting unraid write to any drive in the JBOD pools, or would it be ok to write to one drive at a time until they are full before rolling over to the next one in the pool. I've read that this could be a performance drawback especially when accessing files through Kodi. However, I store metadata for all of my movies and tv shows in each folder and I would absolutely hate to have to track down the individual files if they are spread across different disks. Appreciate any additional feedback here. In research I've come across these three different allocation methods: (i) High-Water Allocation: Balances usage by filling disks to a certain percentage before moving to the next disk. (ii) Most-Free Allocation: Writes files to the disk with the most available free space. (iii) Fill-Up Allocation: Fills the first disk completely before moving to the next. Are these pretty much the only options if so what do members typically use for managing a media collection? (b) As explained before I plan to use the nvme drives as cache drives either one for each pool, or one for both pools and the other to store some vms on. Any downsides here? (c) The fact that I'm not using ECC RAM might have been a concern if I was going down the road of ZFS, but I think I will stick with unraids XFS (d) Probably one of the most important questions here is how useful is having a parity disk? I mean I backup frequently enough and anything new I acquire that haven't been backed up I can always reacquire. What does the community think about having parity disks? I can sacrifice one of the 20TB drives, or add more, but the 24TB drives aren't cheap. YES I understand the benefit of a parity disk I'm just thinking the time it would take to rebuild data on a 20TB drive may take more time that it is for me to copy the data back from my backup drives. I am open to discussion here. (e) I know a little of link aggregation and I have additional SFP+ ports on my Aggregation Switch that I could use. Am I better off getting a dual SFP+ NIC or would that not matter given limitations of single disk volume transfer speeds. (f) Will running two different pools be better for performance overall or should I consider only one pool? (g) I've read that there's a plugin called the Unassigned Devices Plugin for drives I want to have available but not in a an Unraid Array. Does that still exist? Is it the best out there or are there alternatives to it (h) Are NAS drives really worth it? I know I have just the two 24tb nas drives, while the rest are enterprise rated drives. The NAS Drives are a premium these days. (i) Am I better off combining the two 2TB nvme drives into a raid 0 volume for higher speed cache? What kind of performance benefits would that bring? (j) I've also read somewhere there is a plugin called cache_dirs which keeps the directory entries of specified shares in cache for faster file lookups. Does anyone have experience with this especially as it relates to Kodi, and or Plex and having metadata files store on each drive? I'd appreciate if there are any other gotchas others have run into and or anything I'm not considering above. As a refresher this is purely for a file share server, and I may run one or two vms's on it for some other light weight tasks. I hope I'm not overthinking anything but I like to be as prepared as possible.