Hey all, 

 

I've only been looking into building a NAS system for about a day so I apologize for all the questions. I am a videographer and content creator and wondering what my best redundant options are for configuring a system using Unraid. I am mostly dealing with 1080p and 4k footage and do not necessarily need to edit off of the NAS (however it would be nice if possible). I have an older PC that has been in my closet for the past few years and wanting to turn that into my NAS (i5 4690, ASUS H97 Pro4, gtx 770 4gb, 8gb ram, 1tb hhd, 250gb ssd, 600w semi-modular power supply). I am wanting to add 2 seagate ironwolf 12tb hard drives to the system and potentially either a 2.5gb/s NIC or a 10gb/s NIC. I am the only one that will be using the NAS. 

 

Questions:

-Is the software just off the flash-drive fine enough? Or do you also need windows, linux, etc for it to work?

-How big of a HDD do you need for a parity? How reliable is the parity? 

-Any recommended cloud storage services for additional backups?

-Is one 250gb ssd enough for the cache? Should I get another one for the cache pool to have redundancy? Do I even need cache?

-Would it be possible for me to also run a VM for transcoding video files? 

-Anything I am missing lol?

 

Any and all answered questions would be much appreciated. 

 

Thanks!

Edited December 15, 20214 yr by banter

6 hours ago, banter said:

Is the software just off the flash-drive fine enough? Or do you also need windows, linux, etc for it to work?

Unraid is a Linux based operating system so no other OS is required. Unraid can host VMs so you can run another OS on Unraid as a VM if you need to.

 

6 hours ago, banter said:

How big of a HDD do you need for a parity? How reliable is the parity?

You can have up to 2 parity disks. Each parity disk must be at least as large as the largest data disk in the parity array. Not exactly sure what you mean by reliable in this context. Parity is not a backup. Parity has none of your data. Parity (whatever system it is used in) is just an extra bit that allows a missing bit to be calculated from all the other bits. Parity disk plus all other disks allow the data for a failed disk to be calculated and rebuilt. Dual parity allows 2 simultaneous failed disks to be recovered.

 

6 hours ago, banter said:

Is one 250gb ssd enough for the cache? Should I get another one for the cache pool to have redundancy? Do I even need cache?

If you think you might run dockers or VMs you should have at least one fast pool so those will perform better and not keep array disks spunup. Note that writes to the parity array are slower than single disk writes due to realtime parity updates. A fast pool (cache) can also be used to cache user share writes that are moved to the slower array later.

1. software is all on the flash drive (linux based)
2.  Parity drive must be as big or bigger than your largest data drive.  You should do a deep dive on what parity does and doesn't do before making big storage decisions.  the short version is that it will allow you to rebuild a single failed drive without data loss, but it does nothing for data corruption, versioning, etc.
3. Cloud services for videographer is going to cost $$ as your data amounts are likely large.  You should be doing 3-2-1 backups and consider an off-site unraid backup server or NAS as an alternative if you can't afford cloud backup. Amazon glacier might be a place to start but clearly understand recovery and pull fees before you decide.
4. Cache may not benefit you at all depending on your use case.  Keep in mind you cannot write more in a day to a cached share than the size of the cache.  Also consider that unless you have redundancy if your cache goes you lose all data.  Cache is only cleared when the mover runs.
5. VM or docker to transcode is no problem - but be aware that CPU selection and/or video card passthroughs can be an issue.