Pulling my hair out trying to piece up a low power budget unraid build

[cactus]

Nas build requirements:

I'm wanting to replace my old and slow QNAP for something that is a bit faster.. 

Specifically I want to use it mostly as a storage device.. I plan on storing 50mb photos and editing them from lightroom. I also plan on editing 2k footage from the device. Further more, I want to be able to transcode to my mobile. Mostly 1080p footage. I will also use it to stream at home.

 

I'd also like to run the following containers, maybe more, maybe less... This is just a quick on the fly guestimate. 

• Plex
• Sonarr 
• Radarr
• Lidarr
• Lychee
• OpenVPN
• Home Assistant 
• Maybe some more further down the line 

Parts being considered:

• Xeon E3-1230L V3
• 4x8gb ddr3 pc3-12800e
• SU720 adata cache SSD 
• Supermicro X10SLM±F
• (10Gig NIC I don't know what one to pick) (Excluded in budget)
• 2X 14tb NAS DRIVES WD reds (Excluded in budget)
• 3x 4tb Old repurposed seagates (Excluded in budget)
• 4X 8tb WD reds (Excluded in budget)
• Case is not relevant 
• Gold/Platinum PSU (Want low cost operation, hence platinum) 
• Cooler is not relevant

 

 

I'd not want to spend more than 500 tops. The PSU might make that difficult, but I may stretch to cover that

 

What do you all think of such a build? What could I change, what else should I consider? I've been planning this for months and can't really conclude the build... 

[MAM59]

I dont think you will become happy with this old stuff.

 

when it comes to video stuff the xeon is the worst possible choice. even a celeron is better on this. The xeon is good for vm-ing and such things that need to handle huge amounts of rams. But it lacks all commands and (de)coders for videos. All has to be done in software and thats utterly slow.

 

Also, your choice of cache drive is not really the best if you ever plan to go to 10GBe LAN. For that you need a FAST cache (and FAST means: no SATA, it must be native NVMe).

 

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2022 by MAM59

[peterg23]

Be aware that the parity drives for Unraid need to be equal or bigger than the largest data drive in the array. This means that based on those disks, at least one (and maybe both) of the 14TB disks would need to be dedicated to parity. You can have up to two parity drives in Unraid, which will allow recovery from two drives failing at the same time.

I concur with MAM59 about the choice of CPU. I suggest you rethink your budget. Expecting great performance for the tasks you are planning from older computer parts may lead to frustration and more hair pulling! 😕

Edited May 4, 2022 by peterg23

[BlinkerFluid]

Counterpoint of view to those above me:

You might as well go v4 with that xeon. Lower idle power and not much more expensive.

Add some kind of nvidia card for plex as well. If you dont' have a huge bunch of users the Nvidia Quadro P400 works great

For 10 Gbit i've been using 10gbit sfp+ for years but harder to run than ethernet

When you say case is not relevant, where are you putting all those drives? Hopefully you have a Das or Nas for them and connect through Sas 6 or 12 pcie card.

 

I'm running a Xeon E5-2680 v2 , nvidia 1070, 10gbit sftp+ and Sas 12 to a das enclosure. Easily handles anything i throw at it and idles at 75 to 80 watts with the pc and pci cards alone which to me is nothing so. You should have better idle with v3/v4s. 160 watts with the 60 slot das enclosure powered on and no drives.

 

To other members points:

1. True, qsv is more efficient but Nvidia cards idle at around 10 watts or less where it will spend most of it's time. Less than $8 a year. Lets round it up to $15 because it is transcoding part of the day

2. Passmark - the intel 12100f passmark is only 2000 more than my e5-2680 v2. Plenty of compute performance there

3. cheap ecc ram. I'm running 128GB of ddr3 ecc ram in four 32gb sticks and it was cheap

4. server grade hardware vs the consumer stuff most people are running. I ran into a lot more issues trying consumer grade stuff recently before returning to the original server stuff i had already. This system (wywinn opencompute 2 nodes have had zero issues since 2016)

Edited May 3, 2022 by BlinkerFluid