Thoughts on my plans for a server "upgrade" to an Intel NUC?

[Zhono]

Wasn't sure this post deserved to be in a more specific place, so I figured I'd toss it here.

 

TL;DR version: Have Intel NUC. Wanna run Unraid on it with 5 x hard drives in a USB 3.1 5Gbps external enclosure. Good plan?

 

The long version:

 

Once upon a time, I ran my Unraid setup on my main gaming rig. Ryzen 7 something or other, 64GB memory, RX 5700 XT and RX 590, case capable of being loaded up with with hard drives, and a mobo with all the features to support everything. Serving up file, running all the media-related docker stuff, and Windows/MacOS VMs with GPU passthrough, etc. Bunch of other stuff setup on it. Worked great.

 

But things changed, jobs were lost, GPUs became valuable. So, I ended up downgrading to a laptop for my general computer usage and gaming, and parted out my desktop. Laptop does its job fine. For my server, I scoured eBay, spending quite some time watching like a hawk for what I had in mind. Got a TerraMaster F5-421, new in the box, for like $150. I don't remember exactly why I needed that specific model, but I remember that it was important for running Unraid on it the way I wanted). Might have been because the other models with the correct features all ran ARM processors. Specs are at https://www.terra-master.com/us/products/f5-422.html if you're curious. They don't list the 421 any more, but the 422 is identical, except it has a 10 gigabit port and a couple of gigabit ports, where my 421 has 4x gigabit ports. It's also way more money. Never even booted up to whatever OS TerraMaster runs on these things. Cracked it open, yanked their flash drive, popped in my existing Unraid drive, added an extra 8GB of memory, dropped my hard drives in the 5 drive bays, and about 20 minutes of checking settings and stuff later, I was good to go.

 

And now with that long backstory/info-dump out of the way, let's move on to yet more info-dumping fun, but this time in the present. The TerraMaster works great with Unraid for file serving, DelugeVPN, Sonarr/Radarr/Jackett, etc. Works mostly okay with Plex, but can chug if I'm trying to add a ton of stuff and get metadata (large anime and music libraries, with more being added frequently). I was trolling around Craigslist and FB marketplace, looking at listing for older servers, as you do, and started wondering if I could find anything super cheap to mess around with and possibly move my Unraid setup to. The current setup has a pretty slow Celeron CPU; 4 cores, no hyperthreading, etc. And it occurred to me, I have a perfectly good, and importantly perfectly-sized, computer just sitting here doing jack squat. An Intel NUC model NUC6i7KYK. Specs at https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/89187/intel-nuc-kit-nuc6i7kyk.html. The CPU in this thing puts the Celeron to shame. The other hardware in it, ports, etc, is several universes beyond what I have in the current setup. Now, it has a Thunderbolt 3 port, but ever search I do seems to point to TB3 being useless to me on Unraid, unless I missed something. Thankfully, it can also be just used as a type c USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps port. My plan at the moment, is to buy yet another TerraMaster product and plug it into that port. Specifically, a TerraMaster D5-300 (https://www.terra-master.com/us/products/homesoho-das/d5-300.html), which is basically just a big hard drive enclosure with 5 bays, 2 fans, and a type c USB 3.1 Gen 1 5Gbps port. My hope is to run Unraid on the NUC, drop a couple of SSDs into the 2 M.2 ports that it has, and then put my existing hard drives into the 5 bays of the D5-300, and plug that into the aforementioned port on the NUC. For what I do, I figure the bandwidth of that port is plenty, and those two SSDs can be used if I want to mess with VMs or whatever. Which I should also be able to do again, considering the massive bump in hardware (compared to what I have ATM).

 

So finally,  we get to the damn point already. Thoughts on this idea? Anyone know of any technical reason why it won't work? Like Unraid not wanting to add HD's that are in a USB enclosure to the array or something? Some other concern about why this would or would not work correctly? Simply disgusted at the idea of such a setup lol? Again, nothing I do needs blazing-fast file storage or anything, and I don't even have a parity drive(or cache drive), since nothing is all that important. For the 200GB or so of actually important, irreplaceable files, I have Duplicati backing that up to cloud storage nightly. So really, this is mostly a "because I can" upgrade, to make use of the NUC that's doing nothing, and maybe mess around with some other docker containers or VMs again. And yes it would be nice if Plex ran smoother.

 

Wow, what I mess of a post I have written. How long was I even doing that? Oh well, just the way it goes. Leave your hate mail (hate messages?) below. Or, you know, useful information and/or interesting ideas and opinions. That works too. Time to eat.

[JorgeB]

8 hours ago, Zhono said:

Good plan?

We strongly recommend not using USB for array or cache devices.

[cat2devnull]

I just published a post about my NUC server build which might give you some food for thought.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/110427-unraid-intel-nuc-firewall-and-application-server-build/?tab=comments#comment-1007912

 

If you use the dual M.2 drives as data and parity for Unraid and then just connect the USB drive array as a big share then that should work fine.

You would be relying on the hardware raid of TerraMaster with all it's pros/cons, rather than Unraid and XFS/BTFS.

 

[Zhono]

3 hours ago, cat2devnull said:

I just published a post about my NUC server build which might give you some food for thought.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/110427-unraid-intel-nuc-firewall-and-application-server-build/?tab=comments#comment-1007912

 

If you use the dual M.2 drives as data and parity for Unraid and then just connect the USB drive array as a big share then that should work fine.

You would be relying on the hardware raid of TerraMaster with all it's pros/cons, rather than Unraid and XFS/BTFS.

 

 

I found a few other enclosures that are 3.1 gen 2 / 10Gbps (also cheaper), so double the potential bandwidth for half the cost. I might just buy one a 2-bay one and mess around with it, even if it's supposedly "not recommended". Worst case scenario, I can still use the enclosure with my laptop directly. After some more searching, I did find some posts in various places of people talking about doing exactly this, and how it did/didn't work out for them. I think if I get the right enclosure, and considering I don't need/want parity/cache drives, it might work fine for what I want. But I may just leave my existing server as-is, and setup Plex on the NUC, feeding it the media files over the network from the existing server. Maybe I'll use the NUC to finally get around to messing with Proxmox. When I bought Unraid, it was/is so good that I ended up just never playing around with some of the other stuff that's out there.

Edited June 22, 2021 by Zhono