Background for usage. I currently have two WD MyCloud Ultra EX2's, one Qnap-TS233, two WD MyClouds and two 8tb drives recording and holding 32tb of OTA movies, tv shows and music. All backed up to 5 USB 8tb drives. A lot of overhead. 

 

Primarily used with an HDHomeRun tuner, Emby and Kodi. Learning and enjoying working with dockers.

 

I want to consolidate the above paragraph of 'stuff,' hence my interest in UnRaid.

 

I pretty much have decided to purchase UnRaid in the 26 days I have left on the trial.

 

So I have been looking at hardware options. I think the Fractal Design Define 7XL gets good recommendations. (Been quite a few years since I built my current workstation so I am behind on the current technology). I do not currently believe I transcode any videos for streaming. But on the latter it seems the view is go with an Intel MOBO and processor and IGPU. 

 

In a nutshell, can I get a recommendation on what hardware that would continue to handle what I am doing now and allow for expansion and new capabilities? Running Dockers, stuff like that.

I see there have been 62 views on my post, but no feedback or suggestions. Was my question on hardware recommendations too subjective? Right now in my 'Pilot' I have UnRaid running on an old PC with 4gb of RAM and two hard drives (using one of the SATA connections from the previous Cdrom drive. But I really want to consolidate what I shared above and make it a bit of future proof. I was hoping someone had an idea what that would look like in purchasing hardware.

50 minutes ago, RaidPC said:

I see there have been 62 views on my post, but no feedback or suggestions. Was my question on hardware recommendations too subjective? Right now in my 'Pilot' I have UnRaid running on an old PC with 4gb of RAM and two hard drives (using one of the SATA connections from the previous Cdrom drive. But I really want to consolidate what I shared above and make it a bit of future proof. I was hoping someone had an idea what that would look like in purchasing hardware.

Unraid runs on just about any hardware so a lot of it comes down to personal choice and your particular needs.

 

I have two HDHomeRun units (total of 6 tuners) in my network.  I run Plex supporting my household and 4 remote households.  Streaming to many mobile devices transcodes even if it is local streaming.  Even if you think you don't need transcoding, you should build your system to support it.  Yes, Intel is better for this and an iGPU is more than sufficient unless you do a lot of 4K transcoding.

 

See my signature below for hardware specs on my three Unraid systems.  The CPUs are gen. 9 (the Xeons) and gen. 11 Intel but they still keep up with anything I throw at them.  Later model CPUs/iGPUs should do even better.

 

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Perfect, this is the kind of feedback I am looking for at the moment. 

I run a simple NAS with a very few Docker containers with mysql being the principle one.  (For storing my KODI Database which is accessed by upto seven PC of which three are dedicated HTPC running KODI.)   You can see the hardware that I use in my signature. 

 

Great thank you. Ironically, I use a mysql database as well though I have been trying to get the Kodi headless docker running under UnRaid. (Got it running, but it is apparently an old version and the Community does not have the newer version. Never populated.)

On 5/15/2025 at 6:11 PM, RaidPC said:

Primarily used with an HDHomeRun tuner

HDHomeRun recording of live HD shows can use quite a bit of RAM so that should be a consideration.  Since the HDHomeRun integration with Plex allows for transcoding while recordiing, I have transcoding setup to take place in 16GB RAM. I do not know if Emby has a similar capability with HDHR.