New ex-raid, ex-wd-nas, Unraid user

[MeatAnd2Veg]

Hi all,

 

First off I hereby swear to try to keep the mear mention of raid to a minimum, now and in the future 🙈🙉🙊 ... Promise

 

Decided it was finally time to foray into the world of the home based, home built NAS Server, and after months of dithering on and off, have decided Unraid is definitely the way to go.

 

I have loads of options for what use to build the final Unraid build, but for now having read loads of threads and replies, have decided to mess about with a simple Media Nas using some of the piles of kit I already have to hand...

 

To start:

 

AMD Ryzen 5 3400G

Asus B450 Prime M-A Mobo

16 Gb Corsair 3200Mhz Ram

1 x Corsair 256 Gb M.2 Pcie SSD for cache

2 x 3 Tb and 1 x 2 Tb Hdd's

Corsair TM550M Gold PSU Semi Modular (brand new)

Antec P101 Silent Panel, Silent Series Midi Tower Case (which will be used for final build)

Kodi as Media Server to internal devices only, all on Ethernet

 

Planning on just running headerless using Web Gui on my old AMD 2700X / GTX 1070Ti Gpu / Asus Prime X470 mobo / Corsair RX750M ext 1080p games rig, so I can use an internal bluray drive, MakeMkv and Handbrake.

 

Eventualy, hopefully, will be using the old games rig as a Windows 11 / Unraid / Plex Media Server / VM's + lots and lots more, with the 2 x 18 Tb, 2 x 8 Tb, and 2 x 3 Tb drives I have at the moment... May get a 3rd 18 Tb Hdd by then, either as 2nd Parity drive or external backup... Don't know which yet lol

 

In the meantime it's play around with and learn with a basic system 🙂

 

So I will try my best not to be a pest... To late 😆 ... And read, read, read and ask for any and all help that isn't already available, with which I will be eternally grateful.

 

Many thanks in advance

 

 

 

Edited May 14, 2023 by MeatAnd2Veg
Edited to include full PSU info

[JonathanM]

6 hours ago, MeatAnd2Veg said:

First off I hereby swear to try to keep the mear mention of raid to a minimum, now and in the future 🙈🙉🙊 ... Promise

Now that pools have ZFS and BTRFS RAID options available, feel free to mention RAID whenever the need arises. 🤣

Unraid is so much more than just the way it handles disks.

[MeatAnd2Veg]

9 minutes ago, JonathanM said:

Now that pools have ZFS and BTRFS RAID options available, feel free to mention RAID whenever the need arises. 🤣

Unraid is so much more than just the way it handles disks.

 

Yes, I was looking forward to seeing how the file compression works, along with trying out 'snapshots', but I'm not sure if I would use that in a Raid environment.

 

To be honest though, I think to start with at least I will stick with EXT4 or XFS for my test build, although your knowledge of this with Unraid is much superior to mine, so I'd be very interested to hear what you would suggest to use, especially for the big build I will eventually be using with 18 Tb disks? Speed, encryption, loads of small files thanks to metadata, multiple simulations read/write operations, etc... There are pros and cons of both XFS or EXT4, but I'm leaning towards XFS and Unraids plugin use for encryption?

 

And yes, Unraid is so much more than just the way it handles disks, as you said. Having been trying to gleam as much information before I even touch any hardware, by reading loads of threads, articles and watching videos of how to set it up, and what else you can do with it... Just amazed and can't wait to get stuck in.

[JonathanM]

Unraid doesn't support EXT4 for the array or pools, so that's one choice out of the way. 🙂

 

Multiple simultaneous writes are better suited for pools, the legacy "Unraid" parity array is more suited to write once read many, like media archives and such. The single or dual dedicated parity disks are the limiting write performance factor in the "Unraid" array.

 

Be very careful using encryption, it limits recovery options if things go wrong, so be extra careful with your backup strategy if you decide to use encryption. Good news though, each disk in the Unraid main array can have a different filesystem, so you can have XFS, encrypted XFS, BTRFS, encrypted BTRFS, ZFS, encrypted ZFS, all protected from single or dual disk failure by 1 or 2 parity drives. Parity in the Unraid main array is file system agnostic, it recreates the entire disk regardless of filesystem.

 

ZFS is only available in 6.12

 

Pools can be single volume XFS, or RAID BTRFS or ZFS. So, your storage can be tuned to your needs, fast SSD pools for high I/O, and mix/n/match disks in the parity array.

[Lolight]

15 hours ago, MeatAnd2Veg said:

Corsair TM550 Gold PSU Semi Modular (brand new)

Corsair TX550M?

[MeatAnd2Veg]

2 hours ago, Lolight said:

Corsair TX550M?

 

Sorry, yes the Corsair TX550M for my test system with the Ryzen 5 3400G, which may be the way I finally go, as it will just use the iGPU.

 

If I go the whole hog with the Ryzen 7 2700X etc, it will use a 750W PSU... Should have added that... In fact I will 🙂