Planning my christmast present from my wife :D

[kitono]

Hi All,

So I'm doing some initial dabbling on a plan to build a new unraid NAS server. Here's the breakdown I have so far and could use opinions/thoughts

 

What is your budget?  Even if you don't have a strict budget set out, at least give us an idea if you are pinching pennies or splurging on your build.

I'm looking for best bang for the buck. Planning on spending around whatever I need to achieve my goal but prefer not to spend much more.

 

How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need?

12tb to start but I would like the convenience of adding an extra hard drive as needed when I fill up. I currently have about 7tb data + 1 parity drive.

Is expandability important to you?  If so, what's your long term goal?

The idea is that I will bring over my existing drives, slowly add addition 4tb+ drives as needed, then replace my older drives with 4tb+ when I fill up.

 

Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons (see here)?  If so, which ones?  Be specific.

I would like to have a VRM like esxi(hyperv?) so that I can run unraid as well as the plex movie server software with transcoding capability for 1-3 people for 1080p or atleast transcoding capability for 1 at 4k resolution. An additional but not necessary bonus would be to also run a VM of windows server for giggles and other stuff (automated processing stuff, maybe an automated de-dupe files process for the file server, an automated unzipper(rar) process would be great too. I do not know if unraid's built in apps can do any of these. I would also like to be able to access the NAS remotely. (I think unraid has an app for that) Also going to use sickbeard too- wonder if there's a way to automate that?

Lastly, a monitoring app that will send me emails or texts if there's a hard disk failure.

Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives?  If you don't have a specific need for 7200 rpm drives, then choose green drives.

This will primarily be an HTPC Movie Server so I would like whatever works best for that (5400 or 7200) and the most cost effective price  for 4tb atleast. Currently I am thinking

http://www.amazon.com/HGST-Deskstar-3-5-Inch-Internal-0S03664/dp/B00HHAJRU0/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1412009456&sr=1-1&keywords=H3IKNAS40003272SN

 

Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build?  This includes drives.

As stated above, I have 3 2tb drives and 1 3tb drive currently.

If you already have parts in mind, please oh pretty please post links to them so that we don't have to look them up.

http://www.pinterest.com/jalalsoltani/unraid-nas-%2B-htpc-plex-movie-server-wishlist/

 

I know the power supply is multi rail but I already own it from a previous computer. It's got 4 12v 32A Rails but put out max 732w so I figure 2Ax12Vx24Drives = 576w for startup requirements + the overhead on the remaining stuff.

 

I'd like to know if 1. My thoughts are all accurate so far

2. What is the best remaining hardware for my goals stated above? How would you do this?

3. Any other thoughts?

[sgibbers17]

I have a asrock c226 ws with a Xeon 1245 running a ESXi server.  But if you are going to be running ESXi the secondary Marvell controllers (it has 2 of them) are not compatible with ESXi so I hade to get a SAS card to pass through to unRAID.  I have now clue about transcoding at 4k?  Are you taking a 4k video and transcoding it to a lower resolution or transcoding it to a different bit rate?  I only have Blu-Ray 1:1 rips and all my devices will stream from unRAID directly and I have never needed to use plex to serve my videos.  But anyway I see no reason that my setup couldn't at least transcode 2 or 3 1080p movies at once depending on the settings.  Also I don't know if the transcoding software you are going to use can take advantage of GPU encoding but I have a 3-4 year old mid range ati card that will encode at over 100 fps.  I don't remember exact numbers as it was a long time ago but I remember it was over 100 fps.  If you could get a GPU to do the encoding 4k should be no problem with today's GPUs.