first Ryzen 5000 Unraid build - advice needed

[QuantumNinjaTerd]

Hi, I'm looking to turn my gaming pc and parts of my second pc/media server into an unraid server which should, among other things, host my new gaming pc instance.

 

Unraid build goals:

• Gaming PC
• Cloud storage
• Backup for photos/documents/iPhone/iPad/other pc's
• Plex or Jellyfin Server
• Password manager
• Docker containers and VM's (ubiquiti controller, minecraft server, ...)

 

 

Current specs for unraid build:

• Ryzen 5900X 12core
• 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4-3600 CL17
• Gigabyte X570 aorus elite
• Radeon RX 6800 XT 16GB
• 2TB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS NVMe SSD
• 2x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro
• 960GB PNY CS960 SATA SSD

 

 

My questions:

1. How much if any gaming performance should I expect to loose passing through my 6800XT to a VM?
2. Any chance features like AMD SmartAccess Memory will still work with the special GPU drivers in the VM?
3. To start out, can I have just a single 8TB storage drive and a single 8TB parity drive or do I need multiple storage drives in the pool to start?
4. I'm considering getting an 11th gen Intel NUC (NUC11TNHv5002) next to the unraid build to run the Plex/Jellyfin server just for the transcoding capabilities. Most of my movies I have are 4K HEVC 10bit HDR, will (a part of) my 5900X be able to handle transcoding these without making a ton of noise/taking forever or is the NUC a valid idea?
5. Is it at all possible to, at a later point with new hardware, just move the storage pool together with the unraid usb stick to a new PC without much hassle or does that require a complete wipe of the storage pool?

 

 

Long term storage expansion isn't on the roadmap or a concern of mine since most of my storage is Plex media and it's not really expanding ATM.

 

Any suggestions or feedback is greatly appreciated 🤓

 

Edited June 27, 2022 by QuantumNinjaTerd

[QuantumNinjaTerd]

So after a while I'm managing to answer my own questions, success?

 

1 and 2: Expect SAM and all other similar features that require bare metal and/or the CPU to talk to the GPU like in a normal PC to not work, so that would be the performance you'd lose compared to a normal bare metal machine.

3: I guess i don't see why it wouldn't work with just 1 storage and 1 parity drive, but I still added one more 8TB storage drive.

4: still don't have an answer for this one.

5: yes, Unraid just looks at the HDD serial numbers to know which one is which and it pretty much "just works" when the HDD's are put into a new machine (gotta still have the Unraid USB drive with the original config of course)

[hellasus0001]

A bit late but hopefully this will help..

 

For question 3; AFAIK the recommendations are that you add a 2nd parity drive once you have 3-4 storage ones and are going to add more - then it's just piling drives and pool drives to make certain things faster - maybe even passthrough an nvme to the gaming VM, just like passing through the GPU. The performance loss is like 3-5% on the GPU, I would assume the same for nvme ssds? Not that bad imo. The CPU obviously won't be as powerful as baremetal full usability, but given a decent amount of cores you shouldnt have the CPU bottleneck your gaming VM... Which is where my current issue is, I think my i5 12500 will struggle if I purchased a 3080 for example. So I am in the boat of either getting a setup similar to yours; and then my question becomes: what about plex transcoding, hmm? well.. I think it's certainly possible given the correct motherboard layout to use a gaming GPU, a SAS card for expanding further than the 4-8 sata slots on board and an intel or nvidia GPU that's compatible with plex transcoding.

The new option is ofc to get the AM5 build which does actually have an igpu; but still it's very new and not supported by plex to transcode with and who knows if it ever will be; so if you want transcoding done with hardware acceleration you will need a compatible 2nd GPU for that, either nvidia 1660+, p400 or p2000 etc (theres a list somewhere), or imo lets hope plex is working on adding compability with the new cheapest intel dedicated GPU (i can find it for 240 euros here in sweden even) - at least if you have 2 physical x16 lanes open, 3 if you need a sas card further down the line (preferably with x8 lanes for the sas card since the cheap ones use pcie 2.0 or 3.0 - you dont wanna buy a gen4 sas card - trust me. The 2nd dedicated GPU is likely a far cheaper option than having a second entire computer just to transcode for you.

While an 13th gen build would give you an igpu (uhd 770) which is pretty much already supported by plex transcoding wise; it's obviously kind of a lot to upgrade from your AM4 setup; just like to the AM5 : and you would lose the possibility to use ECC memory unless you found the elusive W680 motherboards in the wild.

 

I have also heard that you should be able to transcode through software using a VM specifically for plex media server, something that will require a lot from the cpu; i dont know how noticable it would be on the gaming VM if it were to happen at the same time...

 

Seeing your motherboard I would suggest looking at adding larger; like 18TB enterprise drives; they cost around 350-400 euros and is a cheap way of avoiding any sas or sata expansion cards in the pcie x1 slots etc if you were to use the 2nd x16 lane for a transcoding GPU. But that would require adding the first one to parity, then I assume it'd be just as well to remove the first 8tb parity drive and once you wanna add more you might wanna think about a 2nd parity as I mentioned.

Edited October 13, 2022 by hellasus0001