Looking for everyone's opinion on the best setup for running a completely silent Torrent client and media support (Plex, Jellyfin, Overseerr, Sonarr, Radarr, Jellyseerr, Prowlarr, Cross seed).

 

Just bought the LincStation N1 on Amazon (339 euro) and I am planning to keep it (assuming it is completely silent) after reading https://unraid.net/blog/lincstation-no-array . LincStation N1 System Specs:

 

4-bay M.2 NVMe 3.0 SSD Slots
2-bay 2.5-inch SATA3 SSD Slots
a 2.5G Ethernet Port x1
a 10 G USB C Port x1
a 3.5 Audio Port x1
HDMI 2.0 x1
USB 3.0 x2

 

The main reason for the purchase would be that I will have fiber internet (1 GB up and down) soon and would like a new machine that can fully use those speeds and decommission my old torrenting device (which was an old google tv hardware device capped at 300 mpbs up and down)

 

I want to run an all-SSD/NMVe server. I will buy 2x Samsung 870 EVO 4TB (currently priced at 300 euros) during black friday. For now I will use a Netac SSD 1TB to play with it for a month and learn.

 

I plan to upgrade the LincStation N1 directly to unraid 7.0.0-beta.4 when I receive the device. I do not need any parity. I plan to have no array and create just a ZFS pool with the 2 Samsung 870 EVO 4TB in stripe mode to get 1 big 8TB pool. It's all just movies and shows I can re-grab if the drive fails. Since all the torrents stay in the torrent client seeding forever the missing ones would show an error so it'd be easy to know what I need to get again.

 

Some questions come in mind:

 

- Do I need a cache drive/pool if my system is all SSDs? If no/yes, why? If it is needed I will try to score 4x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB or Samsung 980 Pro or Samsung 990 Pro during black friday also. Which of these NVMe models would be the best for my use case? What is the purpose for cache if I have 2x Samsung 870 EVO 4TB as storage? Ideally should the system/docker files be stored on a cache or storage? Should the torrent files be stored on storage or cache?

 

- Should I change the default ashift=9 to ashift=13 for Samsung 870 EVO 4TB and if so, where and how do I do that? If not, why?

 

- The LincStation N1 comes with an internal 4GB boot usb, I assume this where 7.0.0-beta.4 will be installed and booted from. I can backup this boot device through unraid connect. Will the unraid license be stored in my online unraid account or on the boot device? If the latter, how can I restore my license if the boot device gets faulty? Will the final 7.0.0 version also have trim issues for ssd when used in array mode? As I understand arrays are for HDD and pools are for SSD, is this correct?

 

- Is this the best array/pool setup in my scenario? What is the ideal configuration in this case? Are there any concerns, considerations, or caveats I should consider since I’m using all solid state with Unraid?

Edited October 28, 20241 yr by altcoinfanatic

It all comes down to how you want to interact with it and what you want it to do.

in v7 beta you are able to ditch the array and go all pool devices. I will  highly recommend going zfs raidz1 min on any unraid build.
I would still recommend a cache pool for appdata and default as a btrfs mirror for a swap file for other systems...

so 4x nvme in a raidz2 as a single large Data pool since their is 4 i would run a raidz2 so if you have redundancy where you can lose 2 nvme and stilll have all of your data. 
Assuming they are all the same capacity...

My Recommend:
array none
2x sata as btrfs mirror cached pool  - install vms, dockers and set for unraid systems.
4x nvme as raidz2 zfs pool - put for nas shares and large media.

Plex all the way... Jelly fin hasn't quite gotten full feature set Enothh for me to move to it...
I would recommend linux IO plex docker

Review post: