Unraid (Intel NUC) Firewall and Application Server Build

[cat2devnull]

This is not your typical Unraid build. I needed a small server to run my firewall, internet link, smart house, etc.

It needed to be low power since it would be on 24x7, reliable with minimal moving parts that could fail and small so it could fit in my crowded rack. There is a lot of discussion in forums that NUCs are not great for Unraid but this build is proof otherwise.

 

OS at Time of Build: unRAID 6.9.1

CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-8259U (3.8GHz boost 4C/8T)

Motherboard: Intel NUC NUC8BEB (NUC NUC8i5BEH)

RAM: Crucial CT8G4SFS8266 (2 x 8GB 2666MHz DDR4) 

 

Data Drive: Crucial MX500 250GB SSD CT250MX500SSD1

Parity Drive: Seagate BarraCuda 510 500GB NVMe SSD ZP500CM30001

Cache Drive: None

Onboard NIC: Intel I219-V

USB 3.0 NIC: TP-Link UE305 (ASIX AX88179 GigE)

 

VMs: PFsense

Dockers: NextCloud, HomeBridge, Unifi Contoller, Plex, SQL Database, Guacamole, etc

Likes: Tiny, quite, fast, lower power, inexpensive, set and forget

Dislikes: One moving part (the fan) and would love a version with 2 x NVMe rather than NVMe and SATA

Future Plans: Upgrade the data drive when I need more space

 

Active (avg): ~15 W

Idle (avg): <10 W

 

I stubbed and passed the onboard Intel GbE NIC direct to the PFsense VM so it can make use of hardware ethernet functions such as checksum offloading. I'm using 802.1q VLANs to my managed switch to breakout ports for each VLAN and my VDSL internet link. All remaining services go via the USB 3.0 Gigabit NIC.

 

Costs ($AU): NUC $330, NVMe $80, RAM 85, SSD/NIC (recycled from old machine). Total $500AU or $380US

 

About 6 months in now and no regrets.

I haven't bothered with a picture since everyone knows what a NUC looks like.

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, cat2devnull said:

There is a lot of discussion in forums that NUCs are not great for Unraid but this build is proof otherwise.

This build is not typical of Unraid usage, especially using SSD's in the parity array. There are downsides to this, discussed multiple times in the past, and adding storage without SATA or SAS is extremely problematic.

 

I'm not saying this isn't a good usage of Unraid, it clearly is, I'm just saying that recommending a NUC based build is wrong for the majority of Unraid use cases.

[Vr2Io]

2 hours ago, cat2devnull said:

Dislikes: One moving part (the fan) and would love a version with 2 x NVMe rather than NVMe and SATA

Interesting build as application server. With 1 parity + 1 data, it means both in mirror, but I would swap them for read performance gain.

 

** Overlook NVMe bigger then SATA. **

Edited June 22, 2021 by Vr2Io

[cat2devnull]

20 hours ago, jonathanm said:

This build is not typical of Unraid usage, especially using SSD's in the parity array. There are downsides to this, discussed multiple times in the past, and adding storage without SATA or SAS is extremely problematic.

Agreed, this is not the deployment that the Limetech had in mind when they designed Unraid.

 

I keep reading warnings about SSDs being an issue in the parity array but everything I have read to date is not backed up by any real technical information. With the notable exception that you need to make sure that TRIM is disabled as you don't want the parity drive randomly changing bits on you.
There is a lot of chatter about the lack of TRIM causing performance issues but that is not a problem when my bottle neck is the SATA bus on the data drive. The drive can still write at full speed. I suspect that you would hit speed issues with an NMVe only array on large writes that exceed the drives DRAM cache.

I'd be interested if you can point me at any deep dives into the issues.

I suspect that in this specific case and with my workload (few GBs of disk R/W per day) I am unlikely to uncover any bizarre edge cases with the hardware.

 

I suppose I created this post just to document that it is possible to create a reliable system with Unraid on a NUC since the majority of the posts are vague warnings to the effect that it is just a bad idea.

[JonathanM]

4 minutes ago, cat2devnull said:

you don't want the parity drive randomly changing bits on you.

It's not the parity drive that's the biggest concern, it doesn't have a valid filesystem anyway so there aren't any files or file changes to trim. It's the data drives, and even then there are very few drives that have been shown to have issues. Mainly it's the big what if's that haven't been proven or disproven that cause the warnings. Imagine if Limetech made a blanket statement that SSD's are now ok to use in the parity array, and some less used models happens to break parity and cause data loss.

 

The loss of performance is also a conditional thing, and as SSD firmware and controller circuits get more mature it will probably be less and less of an issue. It's already a non-issue on high end drives, they are intelligent enough to do the needed housekeeping without interfering with performance.

 

Since the primary purpose of Unraid has always been a rock solid NAS appliance with easy storage expansion, implementations without mass storage and expandability in mind are always going to be viewed as suspect.

16 minutes ago, cat2devnull said:

I'd be interested if you can point me at any deep dives into the issues.

@JorgeB has done some serious work with SSD arrays, addressing both performance and reliability. The discussions are posted here on the forum somewhere.

[Aran]

We too have a nuc running with unraid at my parents house with only one 500gb cache ssd. It' going great for two years now without any problems.

They use it for dropbox to sync mobile images/video's.

Wouldn't it be better to use a cache drive for your dockers and assign the other ssd as an UD?
Just ditch the parity and use regular backups.

I'm just asking because we also have a similar nuc running.

[cat2devnull]

19 hours ago, Aran said:

Wouldn't it be better to use a cache drive for your dockers and assign the other ssd as an UD?
Just ditch the parity and use regular backups.

I don't need a cache drive for performance given the main array works at line rate of the SSD. I suppose my preference is to have the reliability that the redundancy provides. If a drive fails the machine will keep going until I can swap it out.

I do of course have both local and off site backups.