November 3, 2025Nov 3 Hey everyone,New to Unraid and had a heck of a time starting out but didn't take long to figure things out. Here's what I learned in the last few days of a noob with Unraid.Background: I stared my trek about 4 years ago when I converted an old HP i3 42xx somthing processor with 7 hard drives crammed into a pc case designed for 4 drives. At the time I used TrueNAS, the free one, and was fairly happy but never really did anything special except to store all my media, important files and run Plex on it. Well, until 6 or so months ago, everything was fine until the Plex server wouldn't transcode anymore and after concluding that I need a better processor and a GPU to transcode, I started looking into my options. My BIG issue is that you couldn't just add hard drives to the array if you wanted to add more space. I was going to get this nice acrylic, 7 bay, drive enclosure and add a SATA PCI card but this would have meant creating different pools and split the NAS into 2 or 3 different segments unless I wanted to delete the whole thing and start over. Nah. Too limiting. So, a few months back is started reviewing all the different types of NAS software. Criteria: 1: Add as many drives I want, when I want and not have to split the storage. 2: GPU transcoding 3: Plugin for Jellyfin. 4: Setup a HomeLab for my IT education. All working seamlessly. So I ended up choosing Unraid. I then decided to work the hardware around it. In my mind, I needed CPU Cores.... LOTS of them. I don't need that much in performance as it is not my main rig I work on, I just need to spin up Jellyfin, a few VMs with Linux and Windows for testing and just throw all sorts of VMs or Docker images. Fun stuff.Hardware (cheap overkill or just cheap?) I purchased a 4U case and plugged in a X99 Motherboard with Dual CPU slots, 64GB of rams (expecting a total of 128GB), 2x E5-2698v3 CPUs (16 cores each, only 1 plugged in at the moment) and 2x 8TB parity drives, 8x 4TB Seagate Barracuda's/WD NAS Red drives. 2.5Gb network card, 2.5Gb switch and a 850w power supply... I was ready!Problem 1: X99 mobos are finicky with RAM. The first 64GB didn't work, only 2 chips were recognised. I thought it was a board problem so I sent it back (thanks Amazon). I ordered a 2nd board from Amazon, never arrived. In the meantime, my CPUs came in from AliExpress. Ordered the Dual X99 from Aliexpress and I thought it would take a month, came in a week later. YAY!.Price up to now (all in $CAD)Mobo: $109Case: $138CPU: cpu 1 - $24 , cpu 2 - $262.5 Gb 8 port switch with 1x 10gb port - $68Ram - 64Gb (free but at the time it was $170 from Newegg) (pre pandemic pricing)HDs - 7x 4TB ($80 each) 2 x 8TB ($129 each) (pre pandemic pricing)2.5Gb network card - $30Power supply - $180CPU fan - $15 AliexpressNot counting the drives and ram that I already had, about: $590If I add the drives and a license for Unraid that I have not purchased yet: $1541So how did thing go up to now??? Bullet points with solutions coming:Installing the drives in a 4U case with a board stretching under the drive chassis was annoying and difficult to keep the connectors connected. These Chinese X99 boards do not come with a manual, you have to Google everything. Especially which CPU is slot 1 and Slot 2. Grrrrrr.As mentioned, I had to use a set of 4x Jigsaw ram as the board did not like TFORCE ram. When switched, everything came up.X99 board is "Battery Not Included" so I had to get a CR2036 from the Dollar Store.Installing the Unraid was easy enough but then as soon as my configuration was up and running, I kept getting errors and configuration save errors. The USB stick was corrupt and couldn't be written to. Thank you Unraid forum for confirming that I can just get a new key, reload the thing an restart the trial. Setting up the (Un)Raid was easy with quick searches.Using GROK to help was a total nightmare, kept giving me outdated version 6 setup info and I cursed at "her" at the end of the night and called "her" useless. She felt bad.Once I had everything up and running, I started to move my saved data from my external portable drives to the array. Woo... 110mb/s write speeds.... WHAT!!!??? on a 2.5Gb? Well, ends up that it could be the write buffers on the drives that fill up too quickly and can't write fast enough to the disk.... terminal test shows 2.3gb transfer speeds. SMB??? Not really, I used Unbalanced and found that the drive starts out fast (130mb/s and then quickly deteriorates down to 2mb/s after 20 minutes. Not good. After trying many, many tests and even trying to connect the USB directly to the Unraid, nothing worked. The only nagging thing was the disk 1 was running hot (48 - 50 celcius), other drives stay at 36. So I decided to replace the drive. NOT SO FAST!!! I need another drive! After opening the case, I found that 1 of my WDs was not plugged in. So I had 6 disks in the array instead of 7. Believe it or not, that's good news. I can just replace the drive and get it running again. (to be continued)I got really tired of the slow transfer and I thought, if the drive to drive transfer is slow, why don't I add a SSD NVMe and use that as a cache drive. I found a 512Gb nvme, connected it into the board and setup the drive as a CACHE. So once it was cached, I disabled writes to disk 1 from all my drives, set all the shares to use the Cache then copy to the disks. I used the Unbalanced Plugin to move the rest of the data from disk1 over to the cache. BAM!!!! 160MBs... slowing.... slowing..... slow...oh wait!!! It settled at mround 103MB/s ... dipping down to the high 80s but there there was my solution. A fast cache drive. Now even my SMB is steady copying at around 65 - 75MB/s, rarely going under it. I'm not knocking it, it's better than the 2 or 4MB/s transfer after 20 minutes of copying. Last but not least, this happened about 3 hours ago. I decided to fully empty out disk1 and take it out of the array. I couldn't get the last 70GB out and I didn't think that the VM and Docker images were the culprits. I decided to remove the drive anyway. Stopped the Array, removed Disk1 and replaced Disk1 with the WD red 4TB. Started the array back up and I got a Emulated Disk message. Ummmm, ok. Then after 3 or 4 minutes, I see all the drives writing over to Disk1, OMG!!! I think I just simulated a failed drive and replacement. The array is now rebuilding the drive!!!! Oh, that was an unexpected surprise and as I can see, so easy to do if one of my drives fail, I'll already know what do!! BONUS!!So that's my whole ordeal since Thursday. What I can say now is this: If I need to rebuild this again, instead of 3 days of head scratching and sobbing, I can confidently rebuild the whole unit in under 1 hour. Can I get a discount for my Unraid????LOL!!Thanks everyone.Jacques.
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