WhatNoise

Just to add some additional bits to this 13700k topic as I’ve recently been experimenting with my own. Capping the E-cores at 39 vs 40 seems to be a pretty significant voltage savings if you don’t want to cut performance too much, just cut out some of the more inefficient frequencies. Currently I have it mine set to up to 1/2 of total e-cores, 40, if more than that many, 39. Reducing the P-cores by 1 across the board (so say 5.4 to 5.3 for 1 or 2 p-cores) and follow the default pattern. If you keep two higher boosting p-cores, you want to try and limit them to only use the two cores that are allowed to go to 5.4. I believe these are cores 4 and 5, but verify on your own. You can see their “fused” limit or similar usually somewhere in the bios. I just reduced all the other cores to 5.2 max, so the only cores that could try and run 5.3 are the two “best” cores. If you don’t do the second part and only reduce by 1, any time you don’t use your best 2 p-cores they will be running at their default max and their excessive power use. You can likely undervolt the cpu itself. This will vary by cpu. Right now, my system on a Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX is set to “legacy” and -0.1 v for all frequencies. By using legacy instead of adaptive, I found that this also opened up another option “power saving” for load line calibration (this is when the bios increases the voltage under loads). Right now with a Kill-A-Watt at the plug I’m getting a “not horrible”, but definitely not there yet 66-70w sitting at idle with: 4x WD 14tb red pro hdd’s 3x Kingston KC3000 nvme 3x Rosewill 140mm front case fans Arctic 360mm AIO with its original fans EVGA 3090 FTW3 Ultra (fyi, dashboard reports 15w idle in p8 for those wondering) 32gb corsair ddr5 running at jedec 4800 This is an on/off again project I’ve been messing with for about a month now with the idea of trying to go more all-in-one server and use the 3090 for the paperless ngx related ai apps. I may find it not worth it for my purposes and pull the gpu and downgrade the cpu to a 13400.

Additionally, running "docker exec -i Plex-Media-Server ls -l /dev/dri" from Unraid console returns... total 0 crw-rw---- 1 root video1 226, 0 May 12 14:26 card0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root video1 226, 1 May 12 14:26 card1 crw-rw-rw- 1 root video1 226, 2 May 12 14:26 card2 crw-rw-rw- 1 root video1 226, 128 May 12 14:26 renderD128 crw-rw-rw- 1 root video1 226, 129 May 12 14:26 renderD129 crw-rw-rw- 1 root video1 226, 130 May 12 14:26 renderD130 ...which is a little odd, but I'd assume that the container is set up in a way that it would see the device.

I'm trying to figure out what I've done wrong and in all my searching, well there's a bunch of different solutions, of which none have worked for me. The iGPU that I am trying to pass through to plex for hardware transcoding is the one within the Intel i3 N305. I have tried the plugins for Intel GPU Top, SR-IOV, GPU statistics. I've tried adding "/dev/dri" to the Plex container for the igpu. I've tried adding "device /dev/dri" as additional resources. I've tried adding xe.conf with xe force_probe=46d9 with and without i915.conf having i915 force_probe=46d9 and with !46d9 instead. With and without the "blacklist i915" line. The most I've ever seen from the dashboard gpu information was with xe.conf "xe force_probe=46d9" and i915.conf with "i915 force_probe=!46d9". This then shows the widget receiving at least some data as the voltage is fluctuating at 0.1v where as without the xe force probe and with blachlist and then force_probe=46d9 in i915.conf everything is 0. In all of these different configs, I never see the checkbox for enabling hardware transcoding. Looking at the log for the Plex docker container... there is "Critical: libusb_init failed" but I think that is for trying to connect to the tvtuner and not a high priority as I haven't purchased a plex pass yet. I also don't want to go about buying a plex pass if hardware transcoding isn't going to work. Same goes for Unraid, which is currently in trial status. I came from terra-master's OS which has its own issues, but transcoding was functional there. In Plex's logs, downloaded from the app's webui, the only thing I'm immediately seeing relating to the gpu is the following: May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver imd for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/imd] Skipping download; already exists May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver icr for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/icr] Skipping download; already exists May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver imd for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/imd] Skipping download; already exists May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver icr for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/icr] Skipping download; already exists May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver imd for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/imd] Skipping download; already exists May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] INFO - Preemptively preparing driver icr for GPU Intel Alder Lake-N [UHD Graphics] May 11, 2026 19:48:03.915 [22388067126072] DEBUG - [DriverDL/icr] Skipping download; already exists ...which makes me think that Plex is seeing it, maybe?? What can I provide to help determine a solution for this? Thanks in advance!

So primary data relies on individual pcs. Then 2nd copy is stored locally on nas. Offsite is currently various cloud services to later be unified eventually. Ripped media that can be reripped, streamed via a service, etc. is really the only data that doesn’t follow that because it’s relatively easily replaced/recreated. This is a home network. Part of the hoped for goal of the nas is to unify the 2nd local storage instead of various thumb drives, external drives, old pcs, etc. to one place. Then that location can make it easier to backup to a specific cloud storage instead of iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. that individual devices may currently use. While I appreciate the desire to make sure I’m thinking beyond “raid as a backup “, I’m not really following how this question relates to drive configuration. If it’s supposed to, further explanation would be great. Now back to how would this pool(s) configuration(s) recommendations would be appreciated.

So what does that mean with regards to suggested configuration?

I currently have a Terra-Master F4 424 Pro, (i3 N305, 32gb ram, 4-bays, 2 nvme slots) running Teraa-Master's OS and I've been thinking of switching to either Unraid or TrueNas. In trying to figure out what might be the right direction for me I was wondering what would be the best way, or ways, of setting up the drives that I currently have. Use wise, currently its mostly for media storage, some form of player like Plex or Jellyfin, and storage of backups of local computers. I currently have been messing around with Home Assistant run through Docker there, but I'm unsure if I will keep running it. ZFS sounds appealing in regards to "self-healing" files and ensuring bit rot doesn't kill something like an old photo that I've been keeping, etc. but I'm pretty new to all of this (one of the draws towards Unraid over TrueNas is it's reported ease of use over the other). One of the 4 WD Red Pro 14tb drives I have already reported SMART failures with it being under 2 years old and having spent the last 8 months or so sitting on a shelf after I migrated the system to TOS 6 and had to rebuild the arrays (went down from using all 4 at once to using just 3. I had been holding onto it more of as a spare or if I needed more storage, etc. So the system, now running a version of TOS 7, is using 2 Kingston KC3000 2tb nvme drives and 3 14tb wd red pro hdd drives in Terra-Master's take on a hybrid array (where it's supposed to move things on its own between the two types). Which leads to the actual question, of how you would configure 3-4x 14tb hdd's with 2x 2tb nvme ssd's in unraid? Reading through the documentation on ZFS it sounds like I might want to consider ignoring having an pool (I may be mixing up the terms) and the 3 hdd's in a raidz1 and the 2x nvme in a mirrored array, with the intent of storing only say apps and similar on the ssd array. Is this the right direction, perhaps adding the 4th drive when it gets back from warranty replacement as its own zfs array and using it as a replication target for backing up the other 2 arrays. Going this direction though feels like I'm ignoring one of the big features of Unraid, as I'm not just adding all of the drives together into a pool. Any feedback or advice is appreciated. Thanks.