How should my hard drives be used?

[quietas]

I'm replacing my old WHS server with unRAID at some point soon and I'd like some advice on the best manner to use my hard drives. The primary use behind this is as a host for Plex, SABnzbd, Sickbeard, uTorrent, and general NAS'ish functions like backup storage.

 

As Plex transcoding is a major function I'll use a year old Asus P9P67 Deluxe, Intel i72600k, and 8gb RAM. For the NIC I have the onboard Intel, onboard Broadcom, or I have a couple Intel PCI-express Pro 1000GT's I can use. The hardware may be overkill, but it's a gaming desktop that will be replaced with a more mobile gaming laptop for roaming around the house. I also have an Intel i3 2120 I could use in place of the i7.

 

As for storage I have 4 new Seagate 3tb (model ST3000DM001-9YN166), 2x 1tb Samsung HD103UJ, 1x 1tb WDEAVS (green 8mb cache), 1x 1tb  WDEARS (green 32mb cache, and an older 120 WD1200 10k rpm Raptor (SATA 150), plus a pile of old 250gb or less.

 

What would be the best use of my existing hardware and is there anything I need to make it better?

[Influencer]

You should be able to transcode fine with the i3, so I'd save the i7 for a build that needs the extra power, otherwise the added power needed to run the i7 would probably be wasted. With the add-ons you'll be running 8 GB of ram will work great, I use 8 GB and have never come close to maxing it out, using many of the add-ons you want to use.

 

Any of the NIC's you listed will work fine, all have proven to be reliable(well, haven't heard much about the broadcom but no news probably means it works). Push comes to shove, the Intels have proven to work great in the unraid environment.

 

The best use of the drives, well, you'll have to dedicate a 3TB to parity as its your largest drive, so that would leave 3 3Tb's, 3 1 TB's, and the 120 + 250's. With that much storage you would need the plus or pro license, which would unlock the cache drive as well. SO:

 

3 TB - Parity

 

3 TB - Array

3 TB - Array

3 TB - Array

1 TB - Array

1 TB - Array

1 TB - Array

 

120 Raptor - Cache

 

If you think you'll download/transfer more than 100 GB a day, you can use one of the 250GB drives as cache, but you'll see the most speed gain during transfers if you use the raptor. Most people don't transfer more than that so it should be fine(I use a 80 GB cache, if I get close I just manually invoke the mover script, but I don't get close very often).

 

That would give you 3 TB parity, 12 TB usable storage, and 120 GB for your cache/app drive(apps MIGHT take ~6-7 GB, the largest of this being the plex library)

[quietas]

Thanks for the help. I was hoping I'd be able to make use of my gear. I also forgot to mention I have an extra Dell Perc 6i that I can hook the 1tb drives into if it makes any difference. It was what I ran with the 1tb drives prior to upgrading to 3tb drives.

[Influencer]

You can, it wouldn't help much in the array as parity would slow you down. You might be able to use raid with the 1 tb drives as your parity, that might help speed things up a bit, but other users would have to chime in. I have no experience using a raid config inside unraid, I do know others have done so.

 

You also might be able to flash the controller to it mode to expand the array since its lsi based. I havent found where anyone has done this, one user was going to try but didn't, he ended up selling it and buying another, cheaper card.