New Hardware Question for server running Win10VM with Photoshop and PLEX

[kuroshouten]

Hi All,

I'm new to the Unraid scene.  I jumped on the Black Friday deal and decided it's finally time to get serious about actually storing my data instead of using Windows to do it.  Thank you for looking at my request and I hope to hear from you all soon!

 

Budget: $1,000-1,500

Drives supported: 10-12 (6 SSds included in that count as cache)  I need about 10-15 Terabytes of space and room for expansion

Apps looking to run: VM of Windows 10 capable of doing Photoshop, Premier, and Illustrator.  Currently my Windows 10 JBOD/Raid5 storage space is struggling to run Photoshop 2022 (I'll link the Specs to that at the end of this post) and I want to be able to run this smoothly.  Secondly I want to store my photos/PSDs/movies and have them backup to my Dropbox/Amazon Glacier. Thirdly I want to run some dockers like raspberry pi running HOOBS/PiHole, PLEX, NextCloud, BitWarden etc.  I do want this to run quickly/smoothly over the 10GB backbone of CAT6 in the House.  Right now my hard drives seem to run slowly when accessing photos over the network, or when copying to them.  I'd like for that process to be sped up quite a bit.

 

I currently run WD Red Drives, and am open to anything that will run faster but are solid long term drives.

 

 

My Current hardware:

Operating System
            Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
        CPU
            Intel Core i5 3570 @ 3.40GHz    49 °C
            Ivy Bridge 22nm Technology
        RAM
            24.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
        Motherboard
            ASRock Z77 Professional (CPUSocket)    31 °C
        Graphics
            DELL U2520D (2560x1440@59Hz)
            Intel HD Graphics (ASRock)
            1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 (MSI)    28 °C
        Storage
            223GB INTEL SSDSC2CT240A3 (OS)
            1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0 (SATA )    26 °C
            11162GB Microsoft Storage Space Device (made up of 4x 6TB Red WDC WD60EFRX-68L0BN1)  3 for data and 1 parity.

      Case

            My current case is a Fractal Define R6.

 

 

I want to continue using my same case and the same 4x RED drives as well as the 6x 2TB Samsung SSDs as cache drives (with parity or raid? not sure which).

Basically my questions are these: 

What motherboard would be good to get for my purposes?

Do I get a a SAS card or a motherboard that has enough SATA ports?

What graphics card would be good for my VM of Windows 10 that can do Photoshop/premiere/illustrator and PLEX encoding?

How much ram would be recommended to run a VM like this as well as by my main storage?

What CPU would be best to handle this load?

Given the hardware I want plus the potential for more drives/potentially more dockers/VMS what PSU would be advised?

Thank you again.  I will try to answer any other questions I may have missed!

 

[kuroshouten]

Do people run Photoshop/Premiere Pro on a windows 10 VM on Unraid?  Any build recommendations for that?

 

[Naldinho]

My GF uses a Windows 10 VM as her business computer at a print shop so yes to Photoshop although her main software is actually Corel but obviously still a lot of Photoshop necessary. Been doing that for ~4-5 years with no complaints.

The graphics card she is using is a 1050 Ti with a S2600CP mainboard and two E5-2670 CPUs. I can't remember if it has 128GB of ram or 512. This was a configuration a lot of people on here bought a few years back so dated I am sure but it works great for her purposes. The one thing I changed as about a year in I moved her main VM to a dedicated SSD. The rest of the VMs run off the cache drive but for the one she uses for graphic design it has a SSD on pass-through.

Wish I could help more but i made two builds ~5 years ago and after that didn't really keep up with things but I can say Photoshop is not a problem.

[kuroshouten]

Oh good to know that a 1050 Ti is something that still works well enough for Photoshop and that people are doing it.  Thanks for the reply!

I'm going to try and  stick to 1 CPU, but not sure which one would work well  for this.