I have an aging FreeNAS server running with the following hardware:

 

SuperMicro X9SCM-F
Intel Xeon E3-1230V2
16GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC
x4 WD Red 10TB RAID-Z2
LSI 9211-8i

 

I'm out of space and I'm reconsidering if it's worth my time and money to invest in new server hardware and the hassle of setting up TrueNAS Scale considering I'm just using it to stream Plex media. I don't need transcoding as my ATV4K pushes everything through Infuse.

 

I have an older gaming rig that still has everything intact except the GPU. I would likely put it all together in the Fractal Define 7, but I'm open to other suggestions as well. Hardware specs are as follows:

 

ROG Maximus X Hero

Intel i7-8700K

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 8GB)

Corsair ax1200i

Samsung 1TB 960 EVO NVMe

 

I think this hardware would be more than adequate for my needs running Unraid. The plan is to repurpose the x4 WD Red 10TB HDDs once the data is backed up and potentially add some additional 20TB Exos drives since Unraid allows different capacity drives to be added. At the end of the day, I just want to have something that is relatively easy to configure and set up, provide some redundancy, and while not server grade hardware, at least offer some relative stability without a lot of tinkering. 

 

What does everyone think? Any suggestions? Should I make the switch? 

Seems like you're wasting quite some space there with RAID-Z2 ... considering it sounds like you don't need dual parity?

 

A big upside is the mixing of different drive sizes, that's true - however keep in mind that the biggest drive size needs to be the parity, and you can't mix drive sizes in parity. So if you're using just one array - then that means if you upgrade to 20TiB then you'll have to buy at least 2x to make use of it (or just move 1x10TB from parity to the array and live with the 10 TiB loss for the time being until you upgrade to 20 TiB drives in the array too)

 

However you have the option of multiple pools with Unraid too - since 6.12 introduced ZFS you can for example mix various levels of parity for important or less important data or not. One thing to keep in mind: Yes storage performance by default is not the highest and the system isn't architected for it - I mean absolute performance.

 

I really like the options and flexibility that Unraid has - let me throw in something unusual: 8TB 870 QVO SSDs if you want low power - media storage ... prices are still higher then spinning rust but its at a level where you can consider HDDs are becoming obsolete, especially since the newer HDDS are getting more and more into the regions of being Power Hogs in standby. This is not something you'd want to have in a ZFS-Raid by default, and its one of the places where Unraid really shines.

 

You can just give it a go with a trial - the USB-Boot-Disk design and Trial (can be extended twice) is really painless and usefull (but requires a bit time to get around it if it's about customization, something thats hardly documentable, but comes with experience only)

 

 

Edited November 14, 20232 yr by jit-010101

2 hours ago, jit-010101 said:

however keep in mind that the biggest drive size needs to be the parity, and you can't mix drive sizes in parity.

If you are talking about the classic Unraid array this is only half true. Parity drives can each be the same size or larger than any single data drive. No requirement to be equal.

11 hours ago, jit-010101 said:

Seems like you're wasting quite some space there with RAID-Z2 ... considering it sounds like you don't need dual parity?

 I don't really think I do. In hindsight, I could've probably configured RAID-Z1 and extended the life of the server another year or two. 

 

11 hours ago, jit-010101 said:

I really like the options and flexibility that Unraid has - let me throw in something unusual: 8TB 870 QVO SSDs if you want low power - media storage ... prices are still higher then spinning rust but its at a level where you can consider HDDs are becoming obsolete, especially since the newer HDDS are getting more and more into the regions of being Power Hogs in standby. This is not something you'd want to have in a ZFS-Raid by default, and its one of the places where Unraid really shines.

This is certainly tempting, but the 8TB 870 QVO still retails for $350 and I can get the Seagate X20 for $279 and get more than double the storage. It's definitely something that will likely require some serious consideration in a few years though. My next server after this one will probably be filled with NVMe SSDs.

11 hours ago, jit-010101 said:

You can just give it a go with a trial - the USB-Boot-Disk design and Trial (can be extended twice) is really painless and usefull (but requires a bit time to get around it if it's about customization, something thats hardly documentable, but comes with experience only)

I guess I can pull a couple of old HDDs from storage and tinker a bit with the trial and see if it makes sense. Thanks for the input.