Mini PC & Synology Configuration

[ajtatum]

I have a mini PC that used to be my firewall and it has four 2.5g Ethernet ports (Intel I225) and an Intel Celeron J4125 processor with 32gb of RAM and currently a 512gb mSata hard drive. It supports one more mSata drive and a 2.5 SSD drive. However, I'm not looking for Unraid to be a NAS as I own a Synology. What I'm curious about is a couple things:

 

1. I have a managed switch with 2.5g ports, could I do Link Aggregation in Unraid to combine at least 2 ports together? What about 2 link aggregations? (So, the device would have 2 IPs with 5gb connection. Idea here being that I could theoretically have 2 web servers requiring ports 80 and 443.)

 

2. Provided that I set up an NFS share for Unraid on my Synology, could I use that NFS share as a data directory? (Similar to Proxmox.)

 

3. My biggest concern relates to #2, I likely won't be running it with two physical hard drives (at least at first). So, I won't be able to set up any RAID array. Even then my space would be fairly limited unless I spend a lot of money on mSata drives. Will this be an issue?

 

If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, etc please let me know. I'm basically trying to find a purpose for this PC and unRAID looks pretty slick and would be a nice app server to spin things up, tinker with, etc. If the apps data can be saved on my Synology, then a lot of my concerns would be covered.

 

Thanks,

AJ

[ajtatum]

Ok, so I read that I need at least two hard drives. Using the mini PC would make this kind of difficult as it only has one mSata connection and one Sata port. I know I could split the Sata port into two, possibly more, but unless I take off the cover for it, there's not enough space for multiple 2.5" drives. 

 

However, I do have an external USB dock that currently hold four 4tb SSDs. My original intent was to have them as a pool for Proxmox, but I haven't had any reason to use them yet and I've barely made a dent into the server's internal storage.

 

I may just have to try this out for myself, but can unRAID use external SSDs?

 

When I had TrueNAS Scale, it originally didn't even recognize external hard drives until an update came along, and even then they could only be used for backup purposes.

[JorgeB]

1 minute ago, ajtatum said:

but can unRAID use external SSDs?

It can but USB is not recommended for array/pool devices, it's prone to disconnects and bad at error handling in general.

[trurl]

17 minutes ago, ajtatum said:

need at least two hard drives

Why 2? Parity is not required. You just need a single data disk in the array to start. And without parity, USB disconnects don't require rebuild since there is no way to do rebuild.

 

Sounds like you want to use the other features of Unraid without its NAS capability. Just assign a single array data disk, can even be a USB flash drive, no need to even use it for anything. That will allow you to start the other services such as Docker.

[ajtatum]

15 minutes ago, trurl said:

Why 2? Parity is not required.

 

I was reading the minimum requirements from https://unraid.net/product, but just noticed that "Two hard disk drives to ensure data protection with a parity disk" is a requirement for "Data Storage and Protection" but not for "Application Servers" or "Creating Virtual Machine". 

 

15 minutes ago, trurl said:

Sounds like you want to use the other features of Unraid without its NAS capability.

 

That's definitely correct. I enjoy my Synology and it's app's ecosystem. It may not be perfect, but I definitely prefer it over QNAP and TrueNAS Scale for NAS/Backup purposes. 

 

What has me intrigued about Unraid is it's app library and I want to test out how easy it is to deploy new apps, etc. While I do have Portainer installed on my Synology and on a VM on Proxmox, I'm kind of looking for something a little bit more that can be like a PaaS such as Cloudron or Yunohost. I had Cloudron running for a year, but ended up not being able to justify the annual subscription and they didn't have a large app library. So, I'm hoping Unraid can be somewhat of a middle ground between managing Docker containers through Portainer and a fully-managed solution like Cloudron.

 

My other solution would be running Unraid through Proxmox, but I've read that's not a great idea. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to dig into the "why" more as various sub-Reddits have gone private, and that's where I typically find answers from people who have tried. 😭

 

---

 

At the end of the day, so long as I can backup to my Synology from Unraid, I'm good. I think I have enough information now to test the install on the mini PC using either a mSata SSD, sata SSD, or the 4-bay USB SSD dock. If it can work with external hard drives, I may look into a dock that has a RAID controller.

[itimpi]

26 minutes ago, ajtatum said:

, I may look into a dock that has a RAID controller.

Just a warning - RAID controllers tend to not work well with Unraid as they get in the way of Unraid managing the drives.