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I've read that moving a typical Unraid environment to a new system is fairly straightforward. Move the drives to the new system. Move the OS flash drive to the new system. Boot new system. If that's truly the case, I feel pretty good about the prospect. However, I'm going to be moving from an Intel platform to AMD. Does that introduce any additional factors for which I need to account? Current: Xeon E3-1265L V2 (4c/8t) on an Asus Z77 mATX motherboard, DDR3 RAM (non-ECC) New: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X (12c/24t) on an Asrock X570 ATX motherboard, DDR4 RAM (non-ECC) I'm running Unraid Pro v6.11.1 and just running NAS, VMs and a (relatively) meager Plex library with just a few convenience plugins.

I figured it out. I was trying to configure all four NICs at once, and it was only saving one. Turns out I had to configure them one at a time and hit the Apply button on each one. Thanks.

Can someone point me to any detailed documentation on the settings in network.cfg? I'm trying to enable a quad-port NIC and not having much luck through the GUI. My networking game is a little weak, and some of the variables in the config file aren't quite clear to me.

I've removed the 512GB and 2-128GB SSDs from the cache pool and formatted them as unassigned devices. I now have a couple VMs running quite happily on them. Thank you again for the advice.

Yikes, completely forgot about the parity writes. I also didn't know trim is not supported in an array. I hadn't considered using them as unassigned drives. That may be the way to go. Thanks!

My Unraid implementation is intended to provide storage for media, documents and various workstation backups as well as host a few VMs for home lab use. My storage needs aren't all that huge. The 3x 4TB HDDs I have set up (1-parity and 2-pool) should be more than enough for quite some time. Over the years I've also accumulated a bunch of SSDs: 1-500GB, 4-256GB, 2-128GB, all SATA3, and I'm debating on how to use them. My first thought was to dump them all into the cache pool and run all my VMs from there. I'm just not real keen on giving up half their capacity in doing so. Then the idea occurred to me of using just the 4x 256GB drives for the cache pool and add the rest to the storage array. That would provide some fault tolerance and if it's not housing my VMs, 512GB should be plenty of write cache. I'm guessing that I could then set my VMs up to run from the SSDs in the storage array and turn off caching for those drives. Is that correct? Are there reasons this may not be a good idea? What it boils down to is I'm trying to maximize the amount of fast SSD space available for VMs while still providing reasonable caching. Any suggestions or insights would be appreciated.

Here's some - spend less time on the internet and more time dealing with people face to face. You may be surprised to learn that the same manners are expected in both cases.

I've been seriously considering it as well. The only downside I can find is that you need to drill and tap some standoff holes yourself, if you are wanting to put an SSI-EEB or extended ATX motherboard in it (it does support XL-ATX). That's not a show-stopper, though.

Ahh, that makes sense. Just connect both to separate inputs on my monitor. Will the keyboard/mouse plugged into a passed through USB controller be accessible in the unRAID GUI at that point? EDIT: Wait, are you talking about accessing the unRAID GUI at boot time on the unRAID system? I wouldn't want to reboot unRAID (to get to the local unRAID GUI) every time I needed to start my Windows VM.

1. Can one GPU be assigned to multiple VM's as long as they are not used concurrently? 2. Can a motherboard's on-board GPU (e.g. that found on the SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSH-LN4F-O) be passed through to a VM? Ok, I lied, I have one additional question regarding running my Windows 10 desktop in a VM. If the VM shuts down, is accessing unRAID from another device still the only way to boot it? I would typically leave my Windows VM running, but in the event that it does shut down...

Thermaltake Core W200 CaseLabs was super peeved about it.

Do you void the warranty on the drive, when you take it out of the MyBook?

Glad to see I'm not the only OCD-afflicted with a color-coded, formula-laden, conditionally-formatted HDD capacity spreadsheet.

In researching drives for my first unRAID build, my first thought was to buy three of the biggest drives I can afford - one parity and a couple for storage (plus a couple SSD's for cache, but that's not important for the purposes of this discussion). "Wow, the 8TB WD Reds look great, kind of pricey, though I may be able to swing it...OOH! 10TB IronWolf! (drool) Probably run kind of hot, and three would be $1500 - OUCH! It would be 18TB+ to start out, though..." ...and so on. Then I realized that bigger disks means *very* long times for preclear, rebuilds, etc. If one drive goes down, I'm looking at days just to preclear a replacement, and that's *after* I get it through warranty replacement, and *before* throwing it in to be rebuilt - all while the remaining disks remain unprotected. "No problem, I'll run dual parity, but that means I then have *two* drives not counted in my total available storage capacity. Ugh. Not great, but maybe worth it for peace of mind. I could just go with 4x6TB drives, I guess...less than 11TB of space. " I guess it's just a balance that everyone must strike according to their own preferences. Of course any important documents and photos will be backed up someplace online, but I don't particularly enjoy the thought of re-ripping large numbers of my Blu-ray movies. What are everyone else's thoughts? Is high capacity the top priority? Are you willing to use smaller drives, if it lets you go with dual parity? Do preclear/rebuild times with 8-10TB drives concern you at all? I suppose I could go with dual parity and keep a precleared cold spare on hand...if I went with 2 or 3TB drives.

Excellent! That did the trick. Plus, now I have a means of preclearing future drives from within the unRAID GUI. Thanks!

While researching options for my unRAID build, I decided to throw together a test box with a couple 160GB laptop drives, a 74GB WD Raptor and a Kingston 64GB SSD. I've got 1-160GB drive set as parity, the other 160 and the 74 as storage and the SSD as cache. I'm currently waiting on the parity sync to complete. The problem is that the SSD used to be the OS drive in a Xen test server. I didn't reformat it or anything, before putting in this box, and unRAID is showing it with a 4GB capacity. I reformatted it in unRAID, but it didn't repartition it in the process. What's the easiest way to get it repartitioned to its full capacity? I guess I could just pull it out and do in on my Windows machine, but I was wondering if there was an option to do so within the unRAID GUI that I was missing. Using unRAID 6.2.0-r3, btw.

Good to know. Does unRAID provide a means of preclearing disks?

When I start up my unRAID server for the first time, will all the disks I assign to storage/parity/cache automatically get precleared, when I assign them and start the array, or do I need to do that beforehand? In other words, on a brand new unRAID system, can I just pop in 4-drives and an SSD, assign 3 to storage, 1 to parity and the SSD to cache, start the array and let it do its thing?

Seagate NAS HDD ST8000VN0002 8TB 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" With coupon code ESCEMFK75 - ends 8/22.

HGST Deskstar NAS H3IKNAS600012872SN (0S03839) 6TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" With promo code ESCEMFM23 - ends 8/24.

I would guess such benchmarks aren't designed to take advantage of 24-threads. If it's limited to 2 to 4 threads (about the best you can expect from most games), then I'd say the E5 is doing pretty well for itself. The i5 has a 28% higher per thread Passmark rating. Still, I might expect the gaming experience to be similar between the two. I hope the gaming performance drop you are perceiving isn't a direct result of the virtualization.

This is the sort of insight I was hoping to hear. At this point the only need I can think of for VM passthrough would be if I were to run my workstation/game station environment in a VM (requiring GPU and/or USB passthrough), which I won't be. Are there other scenarios that would require hardware passthrough? At this point I don't yet know of all the things I *can* do with unRAID, to allow me to determine everything I *will* be doing with it.

The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to go with a mid-tower case. All things being equal, rack mounted would be my preference. When I add a second server at some point for virtualization, it would be nice to have them both racked. However, all things are certainly *not* equal in this case (no pun intended), as going with a mid-tower would save me a good four hundred bucks or more.

I've been wanting to build a NAS server for some time, now. As it stands I need it to serve the following purposes: Store and serve up my ripped Blu-Ray movies (.MKV format maybe? Haven't decided for sure.) Store family photos/videos Provide a backup destination for family computers - have yet to decide on a backup method Run Plex and whatever other dockers I need to display movie box art and such - usually won't be transcoding, but I would like to have the resources for transcoding a couple of streams, in case someone decides they want to watch something on a portable device or something. At some point I plan to purchase an HDHomerun or some other CableCard solution to record programs off of my cable service, stripping commercials with nightly scheduled tasks. Git repository Provide some room to grow. I'm just starting to learn of all the cool dockers and other functionality that is available. I doubt I will go crazy with it (this is a network storage solution first and foremost), but I know I will find at least a few to be useful. One thing I *know* I'll be looking into is a means of backing up important files to some commercial service or at least some offsite location. Light VM hosting. I plan to build a separate virtualization server, so there would be at most 1 or 2 VM's on this box, and none of them would see heavy use. I want to build in some room to grow. Like I said, I haven't seen most of the things I could be doing with unRAID. That said, I don't want to go crazy with it. Cost is certainly an issue, as I expect to be dumping $1,000 into the drives, alone, just to get started. Noise and heat are concerns. I can deal with some noise, but my office is fairly small, and it doesn't take much to heat it up. I've got a couple of emails out to some refurbished server vendors, just to see what they may be able to offer me. I owned a Dell C1100 at one time and really liked it a lot, but it was a 1U home lab server, and I was pretty limited in how I could expand it. My preference would be to build this server, myself. Here are the motherboard and CPU I'm currently considering: SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSH-LN4F-O Micro ATX Server Motherboard LGA 1151 Intel C236 Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 SkyLake 3.5 GHz 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1151 80W BX80662E31245V5 Server Processor Are there any gotchas that jump out at anyone with those? They seem to tick all the boxes (ECC, HyperThreading, VT-x, VT-d, acceptable TDP). I'm not sure which ECC RAM I should be looking at for that motherboard (2x8GB). I know I could look at the approved memory list, but that turns into a game of bouncing back and forth between the SuperMicro memory list and Newegg/Amazon, trying to find the models that I can even buy. Maybe someone knows of some "safe" memory that works well? I'll be starting out with 2- or 3-data drives and 1-parity drive (all HGST NAS 6TB) as well as a couple of SSD's for the cache pool. Considering future expansion, I think it will probably max out at 10-drives total at some point down the road. Criminy, anyone have a source for best prices on those drives? I'd like the case to have trayless hot-swap drive bays, whether by design or by adding multi-3.5" to multi-5.25" drive cages. Trayless isn't a requirement, but it would be a nice convenience. Does anyone have any experience with the IcyDock or StarTech solutions? If I go with trays, the SuperMicro boxes look promising. Cases. I don't like doors. I want to see HDD activity lights. I know the Norco's are fairly popular. They're also at the very top end of what I would be willing to spend on the case. I hate to skimp anywhere, but cost is, unfortunately, a concern, and I need to save where I can. Any other case options that would satisfy my needs? I'm also planning on a 500-600W gold or platinum certified ATX PSU. I would love to get some feedback on my thinking so far. I'm learning a lot from reading up here on the forums, but my head is starting to swim a bit, and I'd like to know if I'm going about anything wrong or failing to consider something important. Thanks!

Hello. I'm brand new to unRAID, and I've been considering the hardware for my first installation. The more I read about utilizing the same rig for unRAID and gaming, the more compelling it sounds. I've been toying with the idea of updating my gaming PC, and this would give me a good reason to do so. I have one big question, though. I've come to understand that ECC RAM is *highly* recommended for data integrity on NAS. Unfortunately, none of the high end gaming processors support it. This would lead me to believe I am limited to a Xeon processor with integrated graphics (unless it's simple enough to just install a second, inexpensive discreet GPU for use by unRAID, while I pass through my souped up gaming GPU to my gaming VM). Then I see Jon post his specs and notice that he isn't using ECC memory. Is the use of ECC RAM not as critical as I thought?