Upgrade from QNAP TS-451 to Unraid NAS

[netall]

Hello,

As the title says, I want to upgrade my current setup and after some research I ended up with a couple of options.

I'll start with what I have:
- QNAP TS-451 (8GB RAM, Celeron J1800)
- RAID5 (3+1) made out of 4 Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TGB - so a total of ~24TB available
- lots and lots of documentation, personal photos (I'm shooting RAWs and I tend to keep everything), lossless music, and some 4K movies that I stream in my LAN via Plex (for media files, I'm not doing any transcoding or such)

 

As my free space is running low - I still have 3.5TB free but with my photos and music it will be filled completely in the next 6-9 months - I want to move away from QNAP and build a custom NAS with Unraid, a solution that will allow me to add more HDDs in the near future.

 

What I also have lying around is:
- Fractal Design Node 804 with plenty of room for at least 8 HDDs
- Seasonic 550W silent 80+ Gold power supply
- 16GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM

 

Option 1 (~370 EUR - I live in Europe):
- Biostar B760MXC PRO 2.0, it has 8 SATA ports, 
- Intel Core i3-13100T (35W, tray) + cooler

Option 2 (~230 EUR)
- ASRock N100M with only 2 SATA ports
- PCIe SATA X4 Card 6 Port Expansion Card for 6 additional SATA ports - from what I understood Unraid plays nice with the ASM1166 chipset

(also, I think there are NVME to SATA adapters, but I could not find any - any suggestions here?)

 

On top of both, I will have to add the ~80 EUR cost of the Unraid license.

 

I'm more inclined towards the first option even if it costs more (the price difference almost covers an 8TB HDD) since I'm not a big fan of adding expansion cards.

Also, I'm pretty sure both i3 or N100 will be able to drive my setup with ease since I won't do any CPU-intensive tasks (as I said, my media files are served only locally via the Plex server, without any transcoding).

 

I'm not looking for my solution to be completely silent or to consume as little as possible.
I'm mostly want to future-proof this solution storage-wise, by adding more disks, as needed.

 

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Should I wait for Intel U300/N300 integrated MBs to show up, would it make sense over the N100?

Or, maybe, a 3rd option?

 

Thanks a lot!

Edited November 19 by netall
made a mistake in text

[Vr2Io]

On 11/19/2023 at 7:23 PM, netall said:

(also, I think there are NVME to SATA adapters, but I could not find any - any suggestions here?)

Amazon also have ASM1166 M2 version, https://amzn.eu/d/gpTQDIz

 

The drawback of Biostar B760MXC PRO 2.0 was three 16x slot was 1x PCIe lane width, it will nice for NVMe and not for SATA expansion. BTW you still have one true 16x slot. ( ASM1166 were PCIe3.0 x2 native )

 

If you need future-proof go with B760 platform.

 

 

On 11/19/2023 at 7:23 PM, netall said:

On top of both, I will have to add the ~80 EUR cost of the Unraid license.

 

Upgrade or new license ? Actually you don't need a new one.

Edited November 20 by Vr2Io

[netall]

Thanks for the answer.

 

I decided to go a little bit different with the build since I have some other stuff around and will use that (for the moment, at least):

- Intel i7-7700K and

- Gigabyte GA Z270M-D3H (plus those 16GB DDR4)

Both of them are solid performers - better than Biostar in terms of quality or Asrock/Asus N100M in terms of performance (if needed).

At the beginning I did not think to use these due to a higher power consumption but I can lower the voltage and play around in the BIOS to reduce the i7 performance/power.

Since the GA board only has 6 SATA3 ports, after an extensive search in the forum, I have ordered a LSI 9207-8i and the cables for it so 8+ HDDs won't be an issue.

 

As for the license... I'm coming from QNAP, so I don't have an Unraid license - I need to buy one (Plus). Let's see the Cyber Weekend offers! 😁

 

 

 

[Vr2Io]

Although desktop CPU have higher TDP, but if you can minimize its CPU usage / loading, it also use not too much power.

 

28 minutes ago, netall said:

I'm coming from QNAP

Misunderstood you use Unraid in Qnap.