popping my Unraid cherry with QNAP appliance

[diewurst]

Hi all,

I'm working on my Unraid contraption right now. I have not touched NAS solutions before and was looking at the open source competition as well.

I recently bought this at a local auction, cheap: QNAP TS-879 Pro

After cleaning and function test I have upgraded CPU to an i7-2600S and memory is now 2x 8GB Kingston with ECC.
(I am surprised & happy it is supported, original memory was regular).

 

Right now my storage resides in a huge not so HTPC-like Chenbro case in the living room.
The Unraid QNAP will sit in the network closet in the garage.
The eight bays I plan to divvy up as follows: 2x parity, 1x cache, 5x storage.

 

Questions:

• Any concerns regarding the hardware and a use-case that largely involves streaming?
• What is the best way to integrate the HDDs from my current setup? I plan to buy parity drives but will have to shuffle a lot of stuff if all my existing data HDDs to be added have to be empty - I am guessing the answer but a quick confirmation would be nice.
• Despite understanding the USB-boot, running in RAM concept I had a hard time getting over the thought of using a SSD (maybe on a USB adapter). Seems to be a somewhat common theme among some (new) users. Plan to use a Samsung BAR 32GB stick. Any concerns, or recommendations?

[itimpi]

2 hours ago, diewurst said:

Plan to use a Samsung BAR 32GB stick. Any concerns, or recommendations?

That may be overkill.  unraid does not gain any significant performance advantage by using USB3 instead of USB2 as once loaded it runs from RAM other than occasionally storing small amounts of configuration information back to the USB stick.    USB2 drives have proved in practice to be more reliable during the booting process and more likely to be long-lived (probably because they run much cooler).

[diewurst]

itimpi, thanks for the input on this, I may reconsider!