Wesso

Thank you for your responses. I guess I'm still not sure whether I truly need a NAS or not. I think my 'requirements' don't necessarily point me to a NAS. I'm still not sure what "Docker" is, so I need to look further into this. With regards to the other items you've mentioned I think I don't have a real need for it but like you said, coolness factor increases by 5 sure does sound good. Haha. In all seriousness, I like to try different setups and so with this all being new to me, I'm inclined to give it a go. It's like the Hackintosh community, I gave it a go including buying the hardware. Got it all up and running, everything was working (including iMessage). Though I used it for about 6 months before I got bored of it, sold it and went on to the next mini-project. Hopefully this mini-project of Unraid will last a lot longer :) You have crazy specs! I wish I could do that. I think you also understood perfectly what I was trying to achieve. After reading your post, and others I think I've decided to not worry about power consumption but instead give isolating the NAS and Gaming environments. I do have some following questions which I hope you can help me out. My specs will be as follows: CPU: i7-4770 Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5 Storage: 2 x 500GB SSD, 2 x 4TB HDD, 1 x 2TB HDD PSU: SilverStone 550W GPU: GTX 1060 3GB (Question 1) If I were to go with a NAS + Gaming setup with Unraid, with the above specs, what is the most recommended setup? LinusTechTips video had their SSD's in RAID 1 and then the HDD as NAS. Though they didn't go into full detail so I'm not sure where Unraid is installed, where the virtual OS is installed etc. (Question 2) With my CPU, since I only have 4 physical cores (8 logical cores) does Unraid only allow me to assign physical cores or does it allow me to assign logical cores too? (i.e. would it be the case where it's NAS = 1 x Core, Gaming = 3 x Cores; or NAS = 3 x Cores, Gaming = 5 Cores) (Question 3) I read that Nvidia cards has a limit of 2 streams for hardware transcoding, can my CPU's onboard graphics (Intel HD 4600) do the transcoding and is there a limit? (Question 4) You mentioned that with your NAS + Gaming setup, the NAS is on 24/7 and the Gaming environment will be turned on and off on demand. How do you turn on your gaming environment since it's a VM? Do I need another computer that has access to the network and I use a web browser to go into Unraid to activate the gaming environment? Thanks in advance.

Hi, I’ve been brought here by LinusTechTips after watching his video on converting his gaming desktop into a gaming desktop + NAS. This got me all excited because I was considering on getting a NAS and the drawback is really the price for decent specs. I planned to use the NAS for Plex Media Server so I needed a decent NAS. Then after watching LinusTechTips video I realised I could create a NAS using Unraid. Now, the main reason I considered a NAS to start with was so that my computer (which was mainly used for gaming) doesn’t always have to be on (or in sleep mode until woken up by LAN). I feel for the whole computer to turn on when there’s only one Plex activity going on is a bit overkill. So my question is, what are the benefits from using Unraid for gaming and NAS (Plex Media server) on the same computer vs just a gaming computer with Plex Media Server running? I am still fairly new to all this so I’m struggling to use the right keywords to find more info on this. So if there’s already articles on this please feel free to just point me there. Thank you.