Hello! First UNRAID Build!

[Nanoslick]

For years, I managed my own Plex media server using a stack of relatively unprotected disks, with BackBlaze as my backup solution. It was simple and effective, but as my data grew to nearly 100TB, I became increasingly concerned about its lack of protection. I needed a cost-effective solution that wouldn’t break the bank.

 

After extensive research and years of experience with RAID, I realized that RAID wasn’t the right path for me, mainly due to the high cost of hard drives required for proper protection. Then I discovered Unraid. I had heard many positive things about it, along with some criticisms, but it seemed like the perfect fit for my needs.

 

I will list all the items I used in my Unraid build; some may seem overkill to others, but I had my reasons.

 

Motherboard – MSI MAG B550 TOMAHAWK AM4 AMD (6 onboard sata ports)

CPU – AMD Ryzen 5 5600G

CPU Thermal – Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 CPU Air Cooler, 6 heat pipes and dual 120mm fans. This thing is a BEAST!

Case – Fractal Design Define R5 Black (this case has the ability to hold 11 disks)

Memory – 2x16GB Corsair Vengenance LAPX DDR4 3200

Power Supply – EVGA 500W ATX (this was my first mistake, it could not handle the power of running 11 sata disks and burned up in three days!) The second power supply I went with was the ARESGAME 1300W ATX and I have had no issues)

Cache Disks – WAVLINK SSD 4TB PCIe M.2.2280 and KingSpec XG 7000 4TB M.2.2280 PCIe) Why two different brands? I don’t like to put all my eggs in the same basket.

HBA Controller – SVNXINGII 9207-8i 6Gbs SAS with 8 SATA disk support, includes cables. DO NOT use a standard PCIe SATA Controller, it is a nightmare to get one to work correctly with Unraid so that the disks are presented at bootup. The HBA controller was simple plug n play with Unraid.

Power Splitters – Since I was installing 11 SATA disks, I needed more power connectors than the power supply had, I used Startech PTO2SATA 6in Power Y Splitters.

Case Fans – Fractal Design Dynamic X2 PWM 140mm. The bare case only contains two fans, not enough for 11 SATA disks, I purchased 4 more fans to install.

Parity Disk – 18TB refurbished Seagate Exos X20 disk. This was my second mistake, I purchased a refurbished drive for a parity drive which was my data protection, a noob move on my part. Less than a week after the build my system was in the state of rebuilding a storage disk when the parity disk failed and caused me to lose all the data on that storage disk! Going cheap does not pay sometimes, I ended up purchasing a New 18TB disk to replace the parity disk.

Storage Disks – I purchased 11 SATA 14-16TB disks, mostly refurbished from Newegg. Unfortunately, I’m starting to regret this decision as two of the drives have already failed within a month of use. Upon checking the SMART info, I discovered that these drives had been online for over 4 years! I will never purchase refurbished drives again, especially from Newegg, which seems to source from companies that excessively use these drives. Many of these companies appear to be resetting the SMART data and selling the drives without proper refurbishment. On a positive note, Newegg, GoHardDrive, and Max Digital were all accommodating in processing refunds for the faulty drives.

Disk Tray – ICY DOCK Hot Swap 3 bay 3.5″ SATA Enclosure. I used this to change the two 5.25 bay enclosure at the top of the Fractal case to support three 3.5″ SATA disks. Works great and I have had no issues, I keep my parity disk as well as a couple storage disks.

 

I have a total storage of 180TB now with 12 storage disks and one parity disk (I plan to add another). For many years, I successfully ran Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, Lidarr, Readarr, and Sabnzbd on VMware virtual machines on a full-size rack server. Wanting to push the envelope, I decided to install all the *arrs as Docker apps on Unraid. The installations were straightforward—just a few clicks and some configuration settings, and everything was up and running. I was so proud and happy!

 

However, the next day, my Radarr app failed due to a corrupted database. With hundreds of movies wanted listed, I would have lost them all if I hadn’t done a backup (which I did) and still had my old VMs. I noticed many people online complaining about *arr database corruption with Unraid. So, I quickly moved everything back to my original VMs and plan to keep it that way. I did leave Readarr on Unraid for some testing. Currently, I run CrashPlan, Overseer, and Readarr as Docker applications on Unraid.

Lesson Learned – As I mentioned earlier, I had purchased refurbished disks for storage and parity from NewEgg, tempted by the low cost of $89 for 14TB. Unfortunately, this decision came back to haunt me. First, a refurbished 14TB storage drive failed. I replaced it, and as expected, it began rebuilding from the parity drive and was being emulated. The next morning, the refurbished parity disk also failed, resulting in the loss of everything on the 14TB storage that was rebuilding . Thankfully, I had a backup on BackBlaze, but downloading 14TB of data from the cloud was neither fun nor fast. I love BackBlaze and its been good to me but backing up from Unraid to their B2 storage at $780 a month for 130TB is just not going to work for me! CrashPlan Enterprise unlimited cost me $120 a year, a savings of $9,240 over BackBlaze!! I understand there are many complaints about CrashPlan in the past by others, but this is simply my backup plan to my backup. The parity being my #1 protection, and I plan to add a second parity disk just for extra precaution.

 

What do I like about Unraid? I like that everything appears as one large drive with all my plex data in one location, versus in Windows I had all separate independent drives which was making it had to keep up with which files were on which drives, with libraries each having multiple paths. I like that data is at least parity protected where before I had no protection other than BackBlaze.

 

Updates – I have ordered a second 18TB parity drive. While the chance of two drive failures occurring simultaneously is extremely rare, I prefer the added protection since I’m still using several refurbished drives. Additionally, I upgraded my ASUS RT-AX88U router to an ASUS RT-BE88U router. This new router features 2.5G LAN ports, which will significantly boost my LAN speed when transferring files, as my MSI motherboard natively supports 2.5G. It also includes a 10G SFP+ port and WiFi 7, providing an option for future upgrades.

 

Please let me know what you think, if I could have done things better. Thanks!

 

Edited October 7 by Nanoslick

[Nanoslick]

This is the current status, three new disks still doing disk clear.

 

 

[Nanoslick]

Haha ok well I didn't think it was a compulsive design

[Nanoslick]

No bad for outbound

 

[PSYCHOPATHiO]

if you have not bought the parts yet I would advise against buying an MSI board, in my case I had many issues in my over 20+ build years history, yet I got one for my latest unpaid build. One of the PCIe 16x slot guards came off & exposed the pins, my motherboard is MSI PRO B550-VC.

 

[pujitm]

super cool to read, thanks for posting! welcome to the unraid life