shrimants

Question 1 was self-answered, somewhat. only 5 drives (plus 2 SSDs) were showing up because the other 7 had the 3.3v sata issue. I've fixed that, also purchsed unraid, and all disks show up as expected. Question 2 was answered more or less with what I was expecting. Might be something to play with. Probably way easier to spend 100 or so rewards points on amazon and get a "free" nvidia shield, or maybe wait for gen2 at this point (though gen1 has INSANELY sufficient hardware even for 2019).

I just got my server built. There are 2 questions I have. 1) Is there any way to view all attached HDDs, even if I cant use them with a trial license? Just want to verify my onboard SAS and SAS expander are working as expected. Its a really heavy server and i have it in my workshop right now, so i'd rather not be forced to work on it in the living room where it will eventually sit. 2) Is there a plex frontend for Unraid? My idea is to use the GPU I added for HDMI output and plug the server directly into my home theater system, and play stuff directly from that. Ideally, it would be awesome if it was an always-on thing. Normally I use it for web browser (youtube, prime video, casual browsing), netflix (windows store app) and Plex (plex media player). I'm assuming the only way to do this is to run a VM and have that autostart, which seems to be a waste of computing resources. I dont have any issues simply removing the GPU from the build entirely if theres a better way to get high quality playback though. BTW, if number 2 is a stupid question and I shouldnt be doing it that way, totally fine. But i'd appreciate the logic behind that rather than just telling me not to bother. I prefer high quality bitstreaming audio and untouched video, which is why I normally connect the "server" (used to be a desktop that just got out of hand) directly to the AVR. I have a couple windows laptops and a tab S4 (which supposedly does multichannel output via hdmi) so its not a crazy huge deal. I'd just rather remove the GPU now on my workbench before moving the whole server to its final location.

the parts are coming out pretty cheap honestly so theres no reason not to go for that build. theres plenty of expandability room. All the parts together cost less than the 5-7 150 dollar hard drives im throwing in, case included. im not doing plex hardware transcoding because ive had horrific luck with it, and theres almost 0 diagnostic available to figure out why it decides to transcode when it does. my biggest issue is that on my current windows plex server, on a monitor hooked directly to that server, plex still insists on transcoding. it cant even bitstream audio when ive explicitly told it to bitstream. most of the time I end up watching a movie with VLC (locally), which has no such issues. Plex transcodes when it should, but also insisnts on transcoding when there is no reason on the planet that it should. Might end up ditching it for emby in the future. I'd love to skip it entirely and host my own but i dont think there is a software that lets any client device (android, ios, etc) choose the format/transcode quality automatically. theres also a weird pleasure i get from vast amounts of overkill, so theres that.

I'm gonna watch those videos, but in the span of time between the post and the reply, my potential build was critiqued and modified by others with more experience. My initial (incorrect) understanding was that i should be using latest/greatest hardware for plex transcoding but due to the price of DDR4 RAM, such a build would still show up wildly over budget and would also be complete overkill. I am now planning 2 separated machines. One will be an unraid server running on 2 old xeons, no VMs, just some containers/apps like plex, sonarr, radarr, ombi, organizr. I may add additional services in the future. But this sort of build would be used as the NAS and transcoding powerhouse unraid server. The secondary build would be a dedicated gaming machine and htpc frontend. So i think half of my questions are no longer relevant, and the other half are basically answered simply: do i REALLY want to deal with windows' BS for a server? or would I rather use an OS designed for actual server grade usage? And i think at that point the answer becomes clear. The rest is just speccing out hardware and whatnot, for which I am leveraging serverbuilds.net guides. Still a little unclear on the sas expander part but i think the board im selecting has an onboard sas controller so i dont even need to worry about buying a dedicated raid card, basically just need a sata port replicator and/or sas expander to connect the drives up.

Currently, i have a 3570k processor, a gtx 1080ti, and 5x 8TB drives under windows. The 5 drives are pooled using Stablebit DrivePool. I have an SSD for OS stuff and 2 more HDDs that used to be for a temporary download landing location but are more or less unused. They just have my usual mydocuments/downloads/whatever. I am running plex, sonarr, radarr, and plexpy currently. I have plans to run multiple other services like ombi, organizr, reverse proxy, something to stream audiobooks, something to make file access available externally, something to share ebooks/comics with friends/family. Plex has been doing an AWFUL job at hardware accelerated transcoding with the 1080ti. I figured rather than keep spinning my wheels, id sooner just throw a beefy CPU at it and transcode using CPU instead. Initially the plan was to run hardware raid6 with a dedicated card+sas expander. I was goinog to run everything under windows so i could support gaming with the 1080ti, and i figured i might move to a dedicated gaming rig in the future or forgo gaming entirely and go the console route when the 1080ti no longer got the job done. Currently, that is not in scope for this rebuild project. My data is backed up using a bunch of 8tb external drives, again using drivepool so right now, once a month or whenever i feel like ive made significant data changes, i'll run teracopy or a simple robocopy /mir z: y: and and drivepool handles the placement of the files across the drives. In the future, drivepool was only going to be used to manage the external drives so backup wasnt a huge chore and i could swap out/add disks as needed. The raid6 internal drive array would be managed by the raid card. However, recently it came to my attention that there arent really any performance impacts to running a windowsVM under unraid and passing through the GPU. I could even dedicate a GPU to a specific container, meaning i could have a quadro card added in and passed to the plex container, and i could have the 1080ti passed to the windows VM. Of course, this is all provided i have enough PCIe lanes to service the 1080ti in full x16 mode, the quadro card in x16 mode (or x8, doubt it will need x16), plus the hardware raid card or sata port replicator or whatever. * Why is there no performance impact to running a windows VM through gaming? How is it different than running a VM under regular linux or regular windows? * how stable is it to run windows as a VM with a passed-through GPU? I've noted some people having issues doing this, but they didnt say what the issue was, yet. * What kind of (sata) hardware do I need for Unraid to plug in 12x 8TB drives along with additional cache SSDs? * Can cache drives run on motherboard Sata or do they need to be on the same raid card/port replicator that the unraid volume is on? * Where would the VM "live"? on a dedicated OS SSD? Or in the storage space defined in Unraid, which may include the OS drive? To clarify "gaming", i play some single player non-online games for long periods of time a few times a year. Basically just binging story mode single player games. nothing i do is competitive or anything. I'm only playing on a 1080p60 monitor (projector, actually). My initial thought was a ryzen 2950x due to the number of PCIe lanes, the 1080ti, a hardware raid card + sas expander, and windows as the overall OS. however, if there truly is no performance impact to running windows in a VM under unraid, and i'll certainly have the cores/threads to spare the vm, i could easily do that instead. My biggest fear is paying for unraid, setting everything up, going through a 5-10 day data transfer off of my backups, and then finding out that gaming doesnt really work and having to start over again with windows. Not to mention, if i go the windows route i need a hardware raid6 card but if i go the unraid route i THINK i just need some decent sata port replicators or something. unclear on that. Obviously the raid card can operate in jbod mode but why waste hundreds of dollars on that if unraid does just fine?