Unraid storage server + workstation


Jonathan-pas

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Hello,

I'm a photographer and videographer and I'm having more and more problems with my hard drives (I use internal drives at the moment that I change every 3-6 months), and it's starting to bother me. So I want to build an unraid server for storage. Since the server would only be turned on when I'm working, I figure it might also be worth using it as a workstation. That's about the list of parts I have.
Since I have about 16 WD red plus 4TB disks, I was wondering if it was possible to reuse them in my nas, even if they are not officially recommended to run with more than 8 disks at the same time (the idea would be to have about 8HDD red 4TB, 2x WD Ultrastar 16TB as parity, 2x 2TB blue ssd as cache, then 1x black ssd 2TB as system disk for a Windows partition). As the time goes by, keep the possibility to change the 4TB disks by 12-16TB disks.

Here is the list of parts I have found for the moment: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/MfMqcT 

Most important for the workstation: thunderbold 4 + min 2.5Gb ethernet.

 

Question: can the virtual workstation access the share without going through an internet connection, and is it a build that can work properly? What would you change?

 

Thanks a lot for your hlep.

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I believe you will be able to reuse the REDs with no problem. However.... they are only 5400RPM.... Not what you should ever want to use for video. Especially if you want to properly off load large video files in any type of reasonable time and that wont happen if you are planning on turning the server off when not in use.

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Thanks Wetafroman, the REDs are not the best performance wise and capacity too, as it would use 4 slot instead of 1 if I use for exemple 16TB (WD Ultrastar SAS). As off offloading large files, today i use HiSpeed SSD to offload the footage and work on it, and let my backup software copy everything automatically to my internal HDD. I suppose I could do the same with the nas...

Do you have any other idea ?

Thanks

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Jonathan-pas again it comes down to speed and time. I actually work in the film and video industry also. If we are talking about working with and backing up large amounts of REDCODE footage, the way Unraid works you will have to either keep the server on at all times or update the speed of the array. It wont take super long to get the footage from the working SSD to the cache drives but at 5400RPM it will be an eternity to redistribute the footage from cache to array and then to sync up parity. But then again if you are primarily a photographer that is running like an a7sIII and occasionally doing video, or even if your video is REDCODE and its small form stuff for like Social Media, it wont be as bad.

 

My rig has multiple SSD for cache and 7200RPM HDD in the array. I work off the cache during the day and at night everything safely gets pushed to the array that is not on a Cache only drive.

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1 hour ago, WETAFROMAN said:

to redistribute the footage from cache to array and then to sync up parity.

not sure what you meant from the way you worded that, but there is only one step there, parity is realtime, so as soon as the mover transfers a file to the array, parity is updated simultaneously , there is no "and then"

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