Looking to upgrade home server, did I miss anything?


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I am getting the urge to update my home storage/server and am investigating UNRAID.  I've laid out a rough idea of hardware, and use cases below.  Did I miss anything important, any of my use cases outside reality, or are any of my assumptions incorrect?

 

I would definitely consider myself a power user, developer, and have been using Linux professionally for 15+ years.  I am comfortable with any scripting or non "off the shelf" products required.

 

Hardware

  • Mobo - Asus PRIME B560M-A Micro ATX (need to investigate performance, but has the feature sets I want)
  • CPU - Intel Core i5-11400
  • Parity - 1x 8TB HDD
  • Storage - ~12TB usable
    • 1x 8TB HDD
    • 1x 3TB HDD
    • 1x 3TB USB HDD (grab and go in case of emergency)
  • Cache - 2x 512GB NVME M.2 SATA
  • Boot Device - 2x Recommended brand 32GB or less USB 3.1 device (I've seen some conflicting information on support for USB 3.1?) in a USB 3.0 or 2.0 port.

 

Use Cases

  • Plex media server for movies and TV shows, usually streaming to 1-2 Rokus and phones when away from home
  • User shares for me and the wife with remote access
  • Full/incremental backups to USB device of photos/documents
  • Pihole or some other DNS ad blocker (currently use one as DHCP would like to continue to do that) via App
  • VM or two to provide simple desktop usage such as browsing the internet, light code development, and remove any non-gaming usage from my dedicated gaming rig
  • VPN via App
  • Offsite backups to cloud storage via App

 

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Only thing I spot is the second USB drive. unRAID only boots off one, and doesn't support mirroring or redundancy there.

You could of course script a backup from USB1 to USB2, but you'd still have to pair the key to the new USB on next boot.

 

Otherwise, as Spencer said: Looks solid.

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Also worth noting, your 3tb USB hard drive won’t be included in the array. That will have to be mounted using the “unassigned devices” plug-in (that I speculate 99% of all UnRaid users use). So if you keep anything crucial on it, as you said grab & go for emergencies, you should also plan for a backup process to the main array so it’s covered by parity. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks @SpencerJ for looking over it, and I'll plan on grabbing USB 2.0 devices.

 

Great info @-Daedalus.  I think that was the use case I expected.  I just want a backup of my unraid config in the case of failure.

 

On 5/22/2021 at 7:22 PM, Cpt. Chaz said:

Also worth noting, your 3tb USB hard drive won’t be included in the array. That will have to be mounted using the “unassigned devices” plug-in (that I speculate 99% of all UnRaid users use). So if you keep anything crucial on it, as you said grab & go for emergencies, you should also plan for a backup process to the main array so it’s covered by parity. 

 

I was hoping I could rsync my documents/photos to this device so it can be grabbed quickly.  The case I'm planning on using doesn't have quick access to internal drives.

 

What is the purpose of the unassigned devices plug-in?

 

Edited by SpecialED
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5 minutes ago, SpecialED said:

What is the purpose of the unassigned devices plug-in?

Unassigned Devices allows you to mount and share disk drives that are not managed as part of the array.  Some users mount a drive specifically for Dockers and/or VMs rather than having them on a cache or array drive.  You can also mount a UNC share on another system (SMB or NFS) and have it show in the Unraid shares when browsing the Unraid shares with Windows.  

 

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