Hoopster

By the way, with these cards that have Mini SAS connectors, you need forward breakout cables that have one SFF-8087 mini SAS to 4 SATA cables. My card takes two of those. These cables are what I bought. Notice they say explicitly they are forward breakout cables. Reverse breakout cables look the same but will not work.

Not my intention. I just want to make sure you get a card that will actually work well for you. Multiple chip cards are almost always using port multipliers. This may be fine for a desktop PC where it is very unlikely that all attached drives are actively reading or writing at the same time. In unRAID, however, this happens with every parity check or disk rebuild/replacement and causes severe bottlenecks. IT mode is best. Yes this card will work for unRAID in IT mode. See this link. If it can come to you already flashed with IT firmware P20 (version 20.0.0.7) that is best. If not, there are instructions in the linked thread or in these forums about flashing yourself. You can find cards based on the same chipset that support 8 drives; like the 9211-8i. My Dell H310 uses the same chip and is a clone of the 9211-8i. Here is one that says it can be shipped to many countries. The second one you listed, even though it supports 8 SATA drives, is a RAID card. This is not always a problem if the chipset supports flashing to IT mode. I think the SAS2108 chipset is a MegaRAID chipset. Any MegaRAID based card cannot usually be flashed to IT mode and is RAID only. The guaranteed known to work with unRAID in IT mode LSI chipsets are those I listed above SAS2008, SAS2308, SAS3008. There are some others, but those have proven to be the most popular.

Yes, looks normal. I have HandBrake presets that use Intel QuickSync (iGPU) for transcoding and it does reduce the amount of CPU, however, 60% CPU usage even with hardware based encoding can be expected. Handbrake will always decode with the CPU and all audio and subtitles are handled via CPU as well. The latter two aren't a big load, but decoding is.

I think he was commenting on the difference between your prior build with the D510 and this new one with an 8-core Xeon. Your new build looks nice. I am still very happy with my E3C246D4U/E-2288G in the Silverstone CS380. I don't need more than 8 HDDs. The Antec 1200 monster will certainly give you a lot of room to grow.

I am not at all familiar with the 2 ASMedia 1093 chips on that card and it is not listed on the ASMedia site. Avoid anything that has port multipliers/PCIe bridge chips (if that is what the 1093 is) as they will cause disk bottleneck issues. The chips known to work well with unRAID are the following: ASMedia 1061/1062 - 2 SATA ports ASMedia 1064 (seems to be a new chip) - 4 SATA ports JMicron JMB582 - 2 SATA ports JMicron JMB585 - 5 SATA ports Various LSI chips - 8 or more SATA ports. Recommended LSI chipsets are the SAS2008/2308/3008 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed. There are a couple of LSI-based cards that support 16 SATA drives.

Yes. The recommended LSI chipsets support SAS or SATA drives. The name of the chipset in my card is SAS2008, but all the drive attached to it are WD Red/White SATA drives.

Nothing with a Marvell chipset is recommended with unRAID. For some they work fine if virtualization/IOMMU is disabled. In most cases they are a problem and can drop drives or cause them not to show up in unRAID. If you need an 8 port SATA card, the suggestion is to go with something based on an LSI chipset. There are many posts in these forums about good cards based on LSI. I personally use the Dell H310 (LSI SAS 2008 chipset), but there are many others from which to choose.

Free Plex, of course, will still do software (CPU) transcoding. Plex Pass is only required for hardware (GPU) transcoding in addition to its other benefits. Your current CPU has a passmark score of less than 1000, so, according to Plex, it is not capable of doing even one 1080p transcoding stream; especially since the recommendation for unRAID is an additional 2000 passmarks for system overhead. If you want a good transcoding experience with Plex, some sort of upgrade is in order. The Ryzen 5 3600 you were considering has a very good 17,000+ passmark score.

In Global Share Settings, is it set to include all disks or do you only have specific disks listed and disk 4 is not one of them? Note that you have to stop the array to make changes. Is disk 4 specifically excluded?

Well that is interesting. My flash drive has gone read-only several times and chkdsk is what fixes that and makes it writable again. The flash drive can get marked read-only with power surges, unclean server shutdown, hardware issues and other things that mess with it when trying to write to it. The flash drive is not really accessed that often other than at boot, configuration changes and using the syslog server to write to the flash drive when troubleshooting. Perhaps there are issues greater just some files system problems on the flash drive. I don't think there is anything inherently bad with a Sandisk 32GB flash drive, but something may have happened to damage it. I have been using the same flash drive for 8+ years so I don't have much experience with which flash drives are better than others.

That would indicate a problem with your unRAID flash disk as would all the other errors on the screen that indicate problems writing to the flash drive. Put your flash drive in a Window machine and let it run chkdsk on it to correct any errors. Then try booting again in unRAID server.

Cards based on the JMB585 chip have been known to work well in many unRAID servers. You should be OK with that card. I cannot comment specifically on that particular card, but the chip it uses works with unRAID.

No. Hardware transcoding requires a Plex Pass. Then you may be fine with the Ryzen 5 3600 as you could probably just assign 1 core and its associated thread to each VM leaving 4 cores and 4 threads for unRAID and Plex. The Ryzen 7 3700x is the cheapest 3rd generation Ryzen 8 core/16 thread CPU.

Yes. No problem there as your CPU is more than capable of that with 1080p content. That very much depends on what those VMs are intended to do. If they are not CPU-intensive VMs that are eating up a lot of RAM, you could be fine with this setup. Personally, for a heavy use VM, I would allocate at least 4 cores/threads to each VM and 8GB RAM. In your proposed setup, heavy use VMs would take 8 cores/threads and 16 GB RAM, leaving you only 4 cores/threads and 16GB RAM for unRAID and Plex. This might not be enough if you need to transcode while both VMs are running. The RAM is OK, but, only 2 cores and 2 threads for Plex and unRAID would push it to the limit. If both VMs are not running at the same time you need to do simultaneous CPU transcoding of 2-3 streams for Plex, you should not have a problem. If you had GPU transcoding instead of CPU transcoding, even the VMs running at the same time would not cause you a problem. It might be worth looking into a 8 core/16 thread CPU (if that is in your budget) to give you just a bit more overhead or an Nvidia GPU to do the transcoding. Again, a lot depends on what the VMs are used for.

I was just pointing out the requirements for Plex to do software transcoding with CPU only. The CPU you have chosen can do it (up to 8 1080p streams) no problem. If you want GPU trancoding (free up your CPU for other uses), you will need an Nvidia GPU as those are supported by Plex on Linux/Docker out of the box. See this chart for a list of NVidia GPUs that are supported for hardware encoding (NVENC) and decoding (NVDEC). The GeForce GTX cards listed can do up to 3 simultaneous streams and the Professional (Quadro P2000 being the most popular with unRAID users) and Server class cards have "unrestricted" streams. Some have tested the P2000 with 15-20 streams.

If one of your main uses is Plex and if you do a lot of trancoding, keep in mind the following: You should be direct playing everything locally, if possible. Transcoding should only be an issue if you are playing on some mobile devices (remote or local), remote clients over limited bandwidth or less-capable local clients that force the server to transcode. Make sure your media is in a format your clients can handle locally. Software (CPU) transcoding requires 2000 passmarks per 1080p stream being transcoded to a compatible format/bitrate. Software transcoding of 4K content requires 17,000 passmarks (according to Plex, Inc.) so you could not do that with this setup The Ryzen 5 3600 has a passmark score of >17,000 so you should be able to transcode, in theory, up to 8 simultaneous 1080p streams while allowing the ~2000 passmarks unRAID needs for its processing overhead. This, of course, assumes nothing else is eating up CPU cycles. You will not be able to do hardware (GPU) transcoding with this setup as Plex only officially supports Intel iGPUs and Nvidia PCIe GPUs for hardware transcoding on Linux/Docker. Some have got hardware transcoding to work with AMD GPUs and a fair amount of manual driver modifications, so, it may be possible, but not out of the box. If you intend to run only Docker containers and, a couple of light use VMS, this is a much more capable system than your current equipment can provide. You will not likely be able to run more than one heavily used VM, but at 6 cores/12 threads, you can have a dedicated VM (4 cores/threads, 8GB RAM), possibly an additional light use VM, a lot of docker containers and Plex with reasonable CPU transcoding capabilities when that is needed.

10,000+ is "has no life" not "has no wife!" Obviously, not even 20,000 gets you to the latter; not that it should be a goal. 😁

Most of us have the Xeon E-2288G or E-2278G processor; however, the board also supports various 9th generation Coffee Lake S Core, Pentium and Celeron processors with non-ECC RAM. Personally, I would not have bought a server board if I wanted non-ECC RAM and a non Xeon processor, but they are supported. For those of us with Xeon CPUs that support ECC RAM, most of use something similar to these modules: 32GB ECC RAM - https://memory.net/product/m391a4g43mb1-ctd-samsung-1x-32gb-ddr4-2666-ecc-udimm-pc4-21300v-e-dual-rank-x8-module/ 16GB ECC RAM - https://www.amazon.com/Kingston-KSM26ED8-16ME-Server-Premier/dp/B07BGDG5ZP 16GB ECC RAM - https://memory.net/product/hma82gu7afr8n-uh-sk-hynix-1x-16gb-ddr4-2400-udimm-pc4-19200t-e-dual-rank-x8-module/ For non-ECC RAM, I have no idea. Personally, I have the E-2288G and the 2x32GB Samsung ECC RAM

Perhaps. Plex does not officially support AMD GPUs (integrated or PCIe) for transcoding in Linux/Docker. Some say they have managed to make it work, so perhaps you have a shot, but, Plex won't help you with it if you have problems. Here is a recent post on the Plex forums from someone who says they were successful in getting in to work.

Prior versions worked fine for me as well, but, I do not have Chromecast/Google speakers. I have the Amazon version of such things with Fire TV sticks/cubes and Echo/Alexa and they work fine on all versions of firmware I have used.

Something is messed up somewhere. My servers boot in less than 2 minutes (more like 1:20) from the time the power button is pressed or a reboot is initiated to sitting at the login screen to access the GUI. There is nothing you need to do while it boots until the login screen appears. Of course, if you want a different selection from the boot menu other than the default (whatever you have that set to), you can do that, but after a few seconds of no input it will proceed with the default option. You might try posting your diagnostics; Tools --> Diagnostics from the GUI, so someone can look at your syslog and system configuration information to see if any clues can be found.

My script is located in this link. ipmitool is part of the nerd pack plugin and this what I use to power on the backup server and power it off when the backup ends.

All of my APs are currently on firmware version 4.3.24.11355. I have had no issues at all with this firmware. I believe this is the latest as no updates are showing in the controller.

When that happened to me it was because a BIOS/Linux kernel update caused my system to no longer boot in legacy mode. I had to configure the BIOS and unRAID flash drive for UEFI boot and all was well; no more stuck at loading bzroot. The quickest way to configure your flash drive for UEFI boot is to rename the EFI- folder to EFI (remove the trailing "-" character). In the BIOS, make sure the boot device is UEFI:{name of flash drive} If you are already booting UEFI, reverse this and perhaps your system needs to boot in legacy mode instead.

If you do get an Nvidia GPU make sure get one that support NVENC/NVDEC as per the table linked below: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new Most in these forums recommend at least a GTX 1050 and many use the Quadro P2000 because of "unrestricted" stream support. GTX are limited to 3 simultaneous transcodes which may be enough for you.