Hi All,

 

I've been an Unraid user for several years now, but I'm currently in between setups. I moved from NYC to London two years ago and in the process I had to disassemble my server and put it in storage. Now, I'm looking to reconstitute the system, albeit with a bit of an update.

Previous Build

The old server was as follows (some are approximate guesses due to a lack of records!):

• MB: ASUS Z97-A ATX

• CPU: 4th or 5th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 (honestly can't remember exactly what I had, and I inherited it so there are no old order histories to consult!)

• RAM: 20GB of DDR3 memory (one 2x8GB Kingston kit and a random 4GB Samsung stick)

• PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower PF1 850W (PS-TPD-0850FNFAPU-1)

• GPU: GTX1080Ti

• HDDs: 8x 3.5" SATA drives (a mix of 5400/7200 RPM and a mix of vendors)

• SSD: Samsung EVO 970 Pro 1TB M2 NVME

• Extension card: LSI LSI00301 (9207-8i) SATA Host Controller Card

  • Enabling 8x SATA connections via two x4 mini-SAS connectors and mini-SAS to SATA breakout cables, running on PCIe3.0 x8

• Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card 1609

 

The setup was great, albeit I know it had some issues. It was cobbled together over time, and on a serious budget, but it did what I needed it to do.

 

Now, a couple of years later, only the underlined items have survived 😢 There's a great story about going through airport security with carry-on bag containing eight HDDs, a GPU, a PSU and a couple of extension cards wrapped in bubble wrap and being asked to "remove any large electronics" 🤣 But let's not dwell on that sad story, because out of the ashes a phoenix shall (hopefully) rise!

New Build

I've ordered some components to rebuild and I wanted to see if anyone here had any gotchas with the component list:

• MB: Gigabyte B760M AORUS ELITE AX
  • Has just enough PCIe lanes for me: one x16 for the GPU and one x4 (size x16) for the SATA controller
  • I'm aware that the SATA controller is PCIe 3.0 x8 and will be going into an x4 slot, so half the bandwidth it requires
    • It's capable of hosting 8x6Gbps SATA connections, but I'll only be using four (the other four HDDs will go into the MB)
    • So by my calculations the 4x8Gbps PCIe bandwidth should be enough to handle those four HDDs, right?
• CPU: Intel Core i3-13100
  • Went for the cheapest option here with a view that in a couple of years I might upgrade to an i5/i7 but wanted to keep the cost low.
  • Planning to use the stock CPU cooler until I upgrade or if I notice any performance issues.
  • Correct me if I'm wrong but this should be about as capable as the 4th/5th Gen Core i5/i7 that I might have had before?
  • HW transcoding: from memory, Plex wasn't able to HW transcode using the CPU - I had to make special efforts to use the GPU for transcoding. I'm not sure if this was simply because the CPU didn't have an iGPU or because the architecture didn't support it. This should be different now, right?
• RAM: 32GB of DDR5 memory (CORSAIR Vengeance 2 x 16GB DDR5 4800 CMK32GX5M2A4800C40)
  • Limited to 4800Mz by the Core-i3
• Case: Fractal Design Node 804

Questions

Now that the details are out of the way, I'll summarise the major questions:

1. Given that the MB only has four SATA ports, the SATA controller is pretty important. Are there any major reasons to think it won't work now, given that it did work before in the old system?
2. Did I sacrifice too much going for the Core i3, or will it be about parity with what I had before (4th/5th Gen core i5/i7 idk sorry)?
3. Is it really as simply as plugging everything back in and my array going back to how it was? I'd hate to lose all the data that's on those drives and have to wipe them and start from scratch, but also nothing on there is critically important so I'll survive if that's the case. Is there a strategy here?

 

Thanks in advance for reading and helping!

 

Grant

 

Just now, grantbey said:

Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card 1609

 

This tuner supports ATSC and clear QAM, which are North American standards. I'd need the version of this tuner which supports DVB-T2, DVB-T and DVB-C. As such, this will be posted in the BUY, SELL, TRADE forum but if anyone reading this is interested feel free to DM me!

On 7/18/2023 at 10:25 AM, grantbey said:

 

Now that the details are out of the way, I'll summarise the major questions:

1. Given that the MB only has four SATA ports, the SATA controller is pretty important. Are there any major reasons to think it won't work now, given that it did work before in the old system?
2. Did I sacrifice too much going for the Core i3, or will it be about parity with what I had before (4th/5th Gen core i5/i7 idk sorry)?
3. Is it really as simply as plugging everything back in and my array going back to how it was? I'd hate to lose all the data that's on those drives and have to wipe them and start from scratch, but also nothing on there is critically important so I'll survive if that's the case. Is there a strategy here?

 

 

 

1) The LSI card should be fine, it's PCI-E 3.0 so even with 4 lanes should be plenty to support 8 spinning drives. Only issue may be if there is an old BIOS on the card that the motherboard doesn't like. I have my LSI cards flashed to dumb HBA so they act as SATA ports. If you are running a BIOS on the LSI card, you may need some advice as the Disk ID's from the LSI BIOS will be different than the native (SATA / dumb HBA) ports which may cause misidentification of drives in Unraid and so risk data loss if not managed.

 

2) I3 is fine, not the most exciting CPU but plenty of perfomance for a NAS and plenty of dockers etc. It should have a decent amount more perfomance than the old system, especially if you use an NVME or redundant pair for Plex / Jellyfin index files etc. Also the iGPU is good for decoding so this can be enabled without the discrete GPU.  

 

3) Main risks I see are A) The config of the LSI card wrt the BIOS options as above. B) Mix up of drives between parity / data.  One mitigation for thsi may be to individually mount each disk either in Unraid or Linux. If it is full of readable files, it's a data drive. If it's unreadable then it's parity (or dead).  

 

 

 

 

 

I've moved drives around and I'm pretty sure that it uses the model + serial number of the drive to identify it.

 

You should be able to take apart the computer and then re-assemble it and, assuming you have the original configuration, it should be able to just pick up where you left off.

 

If you don't have the original configuration then, as Decto states, you'll need to identify the drives back into their proper place.

Edited July 26, 20232 yr by TimTheSettler