Hi all, looking at building my first UnRaid server in the not so distant future. Id like to validate what I am expecting to purchase will be compatible before I purchase the hardware so im not wasting money unnecessarily. First i'll address what I think are the common questions that you need to know to give advice on my build.

 

-What is your budget? - Ideally around the $1000 AUD, however I have room to move.

 

-How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need? - Initially I will run 4x4TB disks (including the parity drive) so 12TB Usable. However this will probably get expanded out with another 2x4TBs down the track, bringing the total to 20TB of usable storage. I am also planning on using a reasonably new 1TB laptop rotational hard disk for the cache drive. This is a drive I have leftover from a recent laptop purchase that has been swapped out for an SSD.

 

-Is expandability important to you?  If so, what's your long term goal? (See above)

 

-Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons? Ideally my UnRaid server would also run, SAB,SB,CP & Headphones (the usual newsgroup combo) I would also like to run Plex to stream media to my lounge room and bedroom. Currently I have an i7 Win8.1 media centre box doing all of this. Ideally the UnRaid server would do all of this whilst being a little more economical (electricity wise) with the obvious redundancy benefits (which I do not have currently)

 

-Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives? - I currently already have 2x 4TB SATA disks which are 5900RPM.

 

Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build? - I have a 500W Power Supply that was swapped out of my gaming PC for a larger one, 2x Seagate Barracuda 4TB ST4000DM000 disks (see above) and a 2.5" WD 1TB SATA Hybrid Drive for a cache drive.

 

My proposed hardware list is below...

 

NOTE: I haven't purchased anything yet, this is just what I have picked out initially (and will probably buy if the hardware is compatible.)

 

Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B - $129 - Has 6x 3.5" HDD bays

Power Supply: re-use existing 500W

Motherboard:ASRock Z87E-ITX - $169 - Has 6x SATA ports onboard

CPU: Intel i3 4130T - $165 - Low power edition

Memory: Kingston 4GB DDR3 - $55

USB Drive: Sandisk Cruzer Fit 16Gb - Nice and compact so it cant be broken off in the socket.

Software: UnRaid Server Plus - $69 - Plus supports up to 7 devices (1 Parity, 5 Data, 1 Cache)

HDDs (Parity & Storage): 4x Seagate Barracuda 4TB, ST4000DM000 - $390 (already own 2x of these - $195 each)

Cache Drive: Existing 2.5" WD 1TB SATA Hybrid Drive - $0

 

I should add, i'm based in Australia.. so some of the hardware that US folk use isn't necessarily available here.

 

I guess my biggest concern here is ensuring that all the hardware is compatible and will play nice with unraid, primarily the onboard disk controller and network card. (correct me if im wrong)

 

Since i've never done this before, happy to take onboard any feedback.

 

Thanks in advance 

Two quick comments:

 

1 - Suggest you look at the Silverstone Ds380 or some other case with removable drives. One of the main functions of your unRaid array is being able to recover from a drive failure. When it happens, the last thing you want to be doing is opening the case to fish out the old drive and install the new one. I can't tell you how many users have done this, knocked something loose in the process, and then have the rebuild fail. (This is not a disaster but is a PITA and complicates the recovery). HERE IS A LINK from just yesterday to a user experiencing what appears to be exactly that scenario. Being able to power down the server and swap out the disk is one of the most important things in setting up an unRaid array IMO.

 

2 - 4G ram seems a little light. The newest features of unRaid allow you to use virtual machines. They are memory intensive. I'd recommend 8G with expandability to 16G should you need it.

 

Good luck with your build!

What is the model of your 500W power supply?  Is it a single rail power supply?

Happy to go to 8 or even 16GB (2x8GB) of ram... That's easy enough..

 

I will have to check the power supply to ensure it's single rail. I don't know from memory (working away from home at the moment)

 

How about the motherboard? Would this suit an unraid build with the onboard disk controller and NIC?

 

Is my CPU powerful enough to run plex and Sab/cp/sb etc?

 

I was considering the Silverstone DS380 case, looks perfect for NAS builds. I suppose the extra $80 is not much, the only thing that isn't appealing is that you can't use an ATX PSU for that case. What PSU would you reccomend to suit the DS380?

Your choice for motherboard is probably way overboard for what is needed by UnRaid.  An H87 board with 6 fast SATA ports can be had for around 2/3 the price.  Go to http://au.pcpartpicker.com for current prices on the parts you want.

 

You may of course want the added features that the Z87 chipset offers, such as overclocking and multiple GPUs.  And now that I've done a bit of looking around I see that H97 and Z97 boards are out now.  These are a bit pricier especially in Australia, but even still an H97 board will provide the 6 SATA channels.

 

PCPartPicker is nice because it shows you pricing history from many online vendors, so you can be fairly confident you're getting the best deal you can.

Excellent, thanks for your feedback Chugiak

 

So I can expect that pretty much any H87/Z87 or H97/Z97 chipset board will play nice with Unraid?

 

The main reason I went with that board is because it had good reviews and 6 SATA ports onboard, so I didn't need to purchase an additional sata card.

 

I dont mind spending a little extra upfront on quality gear, as I would hope to get 5 years of life out of this box.

When you talk about playing nice with UnRAID, there are two considerations. Basic UnRAID compatibility, and virtualization. If you are just looking at UnRAID compatibility then you are okay with most motherboards. Some with Realtec NICs can pose a few issues here and there, but many of those issues have been resolved. The worst case scenario is dropping in a standalone NIC (though it seems rare this is required anymore).

 

The bigger question is around virtualization.

 

While UnRAID 6.0 is still in beta, the whole unRAID ecosystem is really moving towards running VMs on UnRAID so that you can minimize the plugins you have running on your host (i.e. UnRAID). This gives you the benefit of improved stability (as you are not adding additional plugins that may conflict or cause issues) as well as by using VMs you can run a full-blown OS in the VM and then load your SB,SAB,CP, HP & Plex. This means you are running versions supported by the creator of the apps vs a single plug-in creator for UnRAID who may be around a year from now or may not.

 

Since you are going down the Intel route (good choice by the way) there are 3 virtualization technologies that you may want:

 

VT-x: This is basic hardware based virtualization support. Most motherboards will support this, and using http://ark.intel.com will confirm that your CPU supports it as well.

Hyper-Threading (HT): While not critical, this can be a nice to have feature as it allows your CPU to queue up the next processing request while the current one is running, which can speed up operations when running multiple VMs.

VT-d: This is the tricky one. The only real benefit is it allows you to pass through specific hardware to a VM. For instance, if you wanted to run gaming in a Windows VM, or XBMC with a dedicated GPU you would need VT-d support. While many vendors claim to support this, few actually do. You need a CPU, Motherboard and BIOS to support this for it to work. ASRock is definitely one of the better brands to stick with if this is something you may want in the future. Others like ASUS will claim to support it, but often break it in the BIOS.

 

Since this is your first UnRAID system the options are going to be potentially overwhelming, and you may not really know how you will want to use UnRAID 6 months from now (or even 6 weeks from now if you get into it deep), but to maximize the options available to you it's worth trying to think ahead on what you may want to do. This will help ensure you pick the right components now vs having to replace a CPU in a few months because you have found you've limited yourself.

 

The i3-4130T supports Hyperthreading and VT-x, but not VT-d. Your ASRock MB will likely support all 3 options. You just need to decide what makes sense for you.

Very comprehensive, thanks for the info bkastner.

 

I have a win 7 remote VM configured on my HTPC at the moment. (The host is a Win 8.1 box running media centre and plex with Hyper V hosting my win 7 VM) This is treated a bit like a terminal server. So I can jump in remotely when i'm away for work, and it doesn't interrupt the girlfriend watching TV (if she happens to be at the same time.) This particular VM also hosts my current SAB,SB,CP & Headphones config as you have suggested above.

 

So having the ability to run the VM from the unraid server would be awesome, means the media centre doesn't have to be on all the time. Gets back to minimalising the amount of devices running 24x7 (and those that are should be as energy efficient as possible)

 

I might try and have a look for a low power haswell i5 that supports VT-x, VT-d and HT

 

Thanks for the insight.

I just setup unRAID on an H97 ASRock H97M and the onboard Intel NIC doesn't seem to be recognized.

 

So you may want to take that into consideration.

 

...also.. if anyone can help me...

 

Is there anything I can do other then add in a NIC and/or wait for unRAID to support the NIC in the H97 chipset?