Hi there!

Im looking to get started with unraid and I would like some help checking compatibility before I start. I also have two options of hardware and wasnt sure which would be the better choice. I plan to use this server for file storage, backups, and plex. I currently have 2 12TB drives and 2 4TB drives available to me. I want the ability to eventually have 8 12TB drives running in my NAS but this is what I have for the start.  I would also like to use 1 (maybe 2 in raid) 120GB SSDs as a cache.

 

My 2 options are as listed:

I can use the old hardware from my first PC. I have a Z77 Extreme 3 motherboard from asRock, 16 GB of ddr3 and i5 3570 processor. 

I was going to use this card for the 8 HDDs (HERE) and use the 2 SATA 3 ports on the motherboard for the SSDs

I was also going to get THIS or something similar for 10gig.

 

The case bleads into option 2 as I wanted something rack mounted. I found this site HERE that sells old server hardware. I already asked and I can just buy the case and power supply and retrofit my parts into the case.

I also have the option of just ordering the case with server parts for ~$50 or so. I was looking at 16GB or ram, 2x Xeon E5-2407V2, and the board that comes with the case. 

I was not sure which option would grant me the better performance. I am also not sure if the board for the Xeons supports SATA 3 considering its age.

 

Am I on the right track here? Which build would give me more bang for the buck? Will I initially be able to be able to start with 2 12TB and 2 4TB with cache and be able to replace the 4TB drives later or just start with only the 12TB drives? I also understand that unraid works off of parity and that isnt necessarily as safe as running raid 1 for example. Is there a particular raid configuration that would be recommended for my setup? 

 

1 hour ago, Shadowwrath5 said:

I was going to use this card for the 8 HDDs (HERE) and use the 2 SATA 3 ports on the motherboard for the SSDs

Do not use any SATA card based on a Marvell chipset.  They are very problematic with unRAID/Linux.  The preferred cards use ASMedia 1061/1062 or JMB582 for 2 ports, JMB585 for 5 ports or several LSI chipsets for 8-16 ports.  There are lots of posts in these forums regarding options based on LSI chipsets.

 

You can start with HDDs of any size and replace them very easily with something larger or add additional HDDs as your needs grow. 

 

The one thing to keep in mind is that the parity drive(s) must always be as large or larger than the largest data drive.  One of your 12TB drives would need to be a parity drive, but you you could add or replace drives up to 12TB in size as often as you need to. 

 

If you ever want to go larger than 12TB, you would first need to replace the parity drive with a larger drive (the old 12TB parity could then be reused as a data drive) and then the data drives can be larger than 12TB up to the size of the new parity drive(s).

 

Just my personal preference, but I would not mess with Xeons that old if you have other options.  If I had the choices you explained, I would start with the i5 3570 setup.  As your needs grow, then you can determine what you really want and need and not box yourself in with the old Xeons, motherboard and chipset.

 

I started with an i3 2105, moved to an i5 3370, then to an i5 4590 (now in my backup server), then to a Xeon E3-1245 V5, and finally to a Xeon E-2288G which is my current main server. 

 

I considered AMD Ryzen in the last couple of iterations, but I have stuck with Intel for the iGPU.

Edited December 28, 20205 yr by Hoopster

16 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

Do not use any SATA card based on a Marvell chipset.  They are very problematic with unRAID/Linux.  The preferred cards use ASMedia 1061/1062 or JMB582 for 2 ports, JMB585 for 5 ports or several LSI chipsets for 8-16 ports.  There are lots of posts in these forums regarding options based on LSI chipsets.

Is the card I choose going to have a great impact over performance? I found a few on ebay that look like they have already been flashed to IT mode and should be ready to use HERE and HERE. I dont want to waste money on a 10Gbit nic if Im going to be throttled elsewhere. 

 

 

Thank you for all the other information and answers. Im glad I can recycle my old hardware and not take a performance hit.

The Art of Server is generally well regarded.

When I will need an HBA, I will probably go through him even if I have to pay shipping to Europe.

1 minute ago, Shadowwrath5 said:

Is the card I choose going to have a great impact over performance? I found a few on ebay that look like they have already been flashed to IT mode and should be ready to use HERE and HERE. I dont want to waste money on a 10Gbit nic if Im going to be throttled elsewhere. 

No HDD is going to come anywhere close to using the bandwidth of a 10Gbit NIC.  10Gbit NICs are really only useful when transferring between fast NVMe SSDs.  Frankly even with the majority of SATA SSDs, 1Gbit is enough. 

 

If you happen to have NVMe SSDs in the machines from which you are transferring files to unRAID and NVMe SSDs for unRAID cache, then knock yourself out with 10GBit NICs. Even if you have that scenario and you are write caching your unRAID shares in cache, the mover will move the files to HDDs on the array at speeds around 100 MB/s if you have turbo write enabled.  Normal and usual speeds are more like 40-60 MB/s in a parity-protected array without turbo write.

 

Art of the Server cards are good deals and that is a very trustworthy seller.  I have the same card (Dell H310 in IT mode) in my server.  It's PCIe 2.0 but that is still more bandwidth in an 8x slot than HDDs will ever need; some even put them in an x4 slot and still have enough bandwidth as that will provide around 200 MB/s for and HDD.

 

SATA SSDs should always be attached to motherboard ports for TRIM support.  Some recent LSI chipsets provide that, but, all the older ones like the SAS2008 do not.

6 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

Frankly even with the majority of SATA SSDs, 1Gbit is enough

Alrighty! Im gonna order the case and LSI card and start putting things together. Thanks for all the help.

 

Id assume when I replace those 4TB drives with 12TB in the future, the parity drives will rewrite the data to the 12s without having to rebuild my raid?

10 minutes ago, Shadowwrath5 said:

Id assume when I replace those 4TB drives with 12TB in the future, the parity drives will rewrite the data to the 12s without having to rebuild my raid?

First of all unRAID (as its name suggests) does not support RAID in the array configuration.  It provides RAID-like protection from disk failures via the parity disk, but, it is not RAID.  Each disk has its own independent file system and can be read outside the unRAID array.  For this reason you can add and replace disks as needed of any size less than or equal to parity and not deal with the problems caused in RAID configurations where if you lose one disk and cannot rebuild it you lose ALL your files on ALL disks.

 

If you replace a 4TB drive with a 12TB drive, unRAID will automatically rebuild the contents of the 4TB drive onto the new 12TB drive.  It does this by reading simultaneously from the other data drives and the parity drive to figure out what is missing and it writes that to the new drive.  For this rebuild scenario to work, all of your other data drives need to be in good shape and readable.

 

There is a dual-parity option which protects against two drive failures (or disk rebuilds) but most of us don't consider that necessary until you get up to 8 or more data drives in the array

Edited December 28, 20205 yr by Hoopster