tdallen

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Everything posted by tdallen

  1. Dockers like cores, and VMs love them. Since both the chips you mentioned have 6 cores, hyper threaded then there's no big advantage except clock speed. Since you are already committed to the E5 you might want to consider how many VMs you want to run and look at something with more cores. People have had the most success under unRAID pinning dedicated cores to VMs.
  2. Pre-clearing stress tests the drive, and preps it so that it can be added quickly to the array. If you have already added the drive to the array there's no reason to back and pre-clear now.
  3. What do you want to do with your server? For instance, the E5-1650 would be better choice for gaming given its higher clock speed.
  4. What Dockers, Plugins, etc. do you have running (especially Recycle Bin)?
  5. The issue you face is, how can you be sure that the event which deleted your files to begin with did not affect the mirrored copy? If it was simple user error you should be good (unless the sync has run and replicated the deletes to the mirror). But if it was malware then you'd better have the mirror heavily secured. And if it was a hardware issue, then who knows? So your strategy would work to a degree, but it will be quite limited in what real world problems it actually protects you from. Since it seems like your 3-2-1 strategy doesn't facilitate fast/easy restoration, maybe it's worth looking at that? For instance, I have an 8TB drive in a portable USB3 enclosure that I keep locked at work. Same basic principle, mirror the data with a Robocopy script, but capable of recovering from more scenarios than colocating the mirror within the same array.
  6. Hi - I'm not sure exactly what you are asking, but... unRAID *is* a NAS solution. It also supports virtualization. It's an alternative to Netgear NAS. unRAID won't pick it up, but unRAID and your Netgear NAS will be able to see each other on your network if you want to move files between them, etc. Does that help?
  7. I don't know AMD motherboards very well, so these comments are about Intel motherboards. Unless you go to a server class motherboard you aren't going to get 3 cards operating in full x8 mode because even the most modern Skylake and Kaby lake boards with DMI 3.0 only support 20 PCIex lanes. You'd have to go to a Socket 2011 board and its 40 PCIex lanes to get full support. Then again, it really shouldn't be necessary to do that. A PCIex 2.0 or 3.0 x8 SATA Controller operating in x4 mode should be sufficient for 8 spinning hard drives. So a motherboard with 3 PCIex x16 slots capable of operating in x8/x8/x4 mode should be sufficient. I tend to go with Asus, ASRock, or Supermicro boards. Do you have any brand preferences, your current board is an Asus. Also, your current board is AMD - do you want to stay with AMD or are you willing to go Intel?
  8. Are you trying to retain your CPU, or willing to upgrade that as well?
  9. It's a large, noisy, power hungry, rack mount server that could do the transcoding you want. It may be a good deal as well, not sure - that's always a local market question and I see you appear to be in Germany.
  10. I think ashman70 has the best idea, try the Plex forums. While it's possible there is an unRAID related issue going on the Plex guys can better help diagnose whatever resource Plex is getting starved for.
  11. Transcoding to Ram is possible, but it involves both settings and a little tinkering because you need to create a RAM drive. I'd try to figure out what is going on first. Was the CPU working hard before the buffering started? I'd be think it was given full BD remuxes. Try starting one stream at a time and let things stabilize before adding the next stream so we can see where things break.
  12. I like modern Xeon's and I think ECC RAM is a good idea. I think the E3-1230v5 will make a good Plex server and can probably handle 4-5 streams. That said, you could max out the CPU with that load so you aren't buying a lot of spare headroom for VMs. If you want to play with a VM or two then you'd probably be fine. If you want to get serious about VMs then more cores and more RAM would be a good idea. I'm not a huge fan of the older, power hungry first and second generation Xeons but they have their place if you need lots of cores.
  13. The easiest way is probably to download the user manual and look for things like virtualization, IOMMU, VT-x and VT-d in the BIOS settings. Many motherboards support VT-x for basic virtualization and a smaller but increasing number support VT-d for virtualization with hardware pass-through. I mentioned Intel terminology since those are the CPUs you are interested in, but there are similar concepts on the AMD side.
  14. A cache drive can be added later, in SSD (preferred) or HDD form. SSDs are generally not appropriate for the data array or parity drive. That's actually a little light. An i7 (or a Xeon) with 4 cores and hyper-threading is more appropriate for virtualization as a starting point unless you just plan to play with it. Virtualization requires support by both the motherboard and CPU. That's correct. The WD Reds are a great choice for unRAID but I'm not sure what alternatives you have, you mentioned euros... You definitely want an SFF PSU in the PC-Q25b, it's smaller and that makes a huge difference in a small case. Silverstone and Corsair make one.
  15. Have you looked at chips like the Core i7 Extreme Editions like the 6800k? Socket 2011, 6 cores, hyperthreaded, 3.4GHz with turbo to 3.8GHz. They've been available for the past few generations so there are a number of versions available. These have fewer cores than you've been looking at, but the cores are much faster (and I think more suitable for gaming). There are also some faster E5's like the 168x series - again, fewer cores but faster.
  16. For SSDs, think along these lines: Start with the idea of a single SSD. It will be your cache drive. You can use it for write-caching to the array, or not. You will use it for Docker, though. Your Docker image file will be ~20GB and then you need enough space for all the working data of your Dockers. 120GB would work, but most folks buying something new would go with 250GB. Now add another SSD. You'll probably add redundancy to your cache system by using BTRFS and picking a RAID-1 setup on the cache pool. It's easiest if the 2nd SSD is the same size as the first. Now it's time to think about VMs. By default the storage for your vdisks will be on the cache pool. That can use a lot of space though, and it's shared storage. You can use larger SSDs, or add more SSDs to the cache pool. As an alternative, though, you can host VMs on their own, dedicated SSD. You'd mount those SSDs for VMs using the Unassigned Devices plugin, linked above.
  17. In addition to dedicated cores games like high clock speeds so slight advantage to the 2683. However, you might be happier if you found something with still higher clock speed. You really want to map out what you want to do with the cores before you start this project. You also might want more than 32gb depending on how many VMs you run.
  18. @John_M I don't think I speculated, just recommended the NAS drive instead. That said, I'm glad to hear that WD Purples are working well for you, and will now report that people are successfully using them for unRAID if asked. I'm also glad they will work out for the OP given his limited selection in Ecuador. As a point of interest since there's been very little discussion on the forums about the WD Purple drives, how do you view them compared to NAS drives? I.e., use either based on price, prefer NAS but happy to use Purple, etc. Thanks.
  19. Use the money you save on RAM for SSDs. You may need several by the time you are done for your Dockers and VMs. Plan on installing the Community Applications plugin and it sounds like you might find a use for the Unassigned Devices plugin as well for the VMs.
  20. Blue was a last minute, rather whimsical colour selection for me. It seems it is a very versatile colour!
  21. I don't know of any folks who've used Purple drives. In theory they're optimized for sequential access. Do you have any Seagate options available? I might use an Ironwolf over a WD Purple just because Purple represents a bit of an unknown to me in a random access NAS. The cache drive in unRAID serves two purposes. First, you can use it to cache writes to the array. Second, it is the defacto application drive for Dockers and VMs. These days it is used more as an application drive than its traditional role for write caching. That said, people who do serious VM work also use another strategy, which is to mount additional SSDs via the Unassigned Devices plugin and run their VMs from those dedicated SSDs. You can get it via the Community Applications plugin. I keep waiting for my old setup to die so I can replace it with something new and fun . It just keeps running, though :).
  22. Lol, at least we gave him the same answers :).
  23. Hi, and welcome. A couple of thoughts. The "go to" disk for NAS is WD Red, not Purple. Since you are using VMs for business, if you are running them from the cache drive you should implement a cache pool of 2 or more SSDs for redundancy. VMs can use a lot of memory and they tend to work best with pinned CPUs. People who do lots of VM work tend to use Xeon E5s with lots of memory. It's entirely up to you - if the Core i7 is working well for you then great. Remember that the redundancy unRAID provides isn't a backup solution. Make sure your array and VMs are backed up.
  24. It would be worth swapping out the ethernet cable or moving the server to the location of a working PC and using it's ethernet cable to determine whether you have cable/hardware issues. You don't want to daisy chain switches if you can avoid it, but it's Ok to have more than one if they are both directly connected to your router.