Hi all,

 

New to this forum but have been looking around for a few months for an "all in one build".

It is probably best if I let you know what I want and then to hear some other suggestions!

 

In my front-room I have my gigabit switch and my TV. My 2 TV's are smart TV's which are wired LAN and run Plex app. My PC currently serves as my media server, but I want to build a media server - and more!

 

So in the front room I want this server to have loads of storage and also be beefy enough to handle my TV's running Plex and also Hyperspin and some PC gaming. Oh and just so you know that I am not asking for too much i want it to be as quiet as possible!!

 

So realistically I am looking at a case that can handle 5 drives and is "wife friendly" on the cosmetic front.

I think I have narrowed this down to:

 

CASE - Fractual Node 304 (or 804) or the Lian Li - PC-Q25-B

CPU - Intel i5 4690K - looked at the 4670k and I know the 4690K falls into a strange bracket but the price difference (UK Amazon) is only £2.

Motherboard - I need help here I think. I was looking at ASRock Z87-E-ITX. I don't think there is much need for a z97 board, although willing to hear suggestions.

PSU - To be decided. Obviously need's to be fairly short. Read a post on here which used the SILVERSTONE ST45SF-G 450W, but I am wondering if that has enough future power for me - would want to put a fairly beefy GPU in this in the future.

RAM - Have used these: G-Skill 8GB Ripjaws X DDR3 2133 Dual Kit - Red in my PC and love them - wondering if i need lower profile RAM though?

Hard Drives - Was looking at 5 x 4TB WD Red's. Also 1 SSD for the O/S.

 

I did plan on installing ESXi5.5 and creating a few VM's but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed wrong. I can do everything I need with Windows 7 or more likely 8.1.

 

I have had a brief read about unRAID and it sounds good (like ZFS? but I don't think I can install Windows on unRAID) although I think I should either buy a RAID PCI card or I will probably just use RAID-5 on the inbuilt motherboard. Please don't talk to me about backups and that RAID is not a backup! I know it's not, anything SUPER important gets uploaded to my kimsufi dedicated.

 

So in summary I want the server to:

 

Main storage for videos, pictures and movies.

HDMI connected to my TV so I can play PC games and emulators.

Be as low profile as possible.

Be as quiet as possible.

 

Comments/suggestions please!!

 

EDIT - Just also looked at this case - Lian Li PC-V358B Micro-ATX Cube - Black. That is actually pretty much the same height as the q25b, but opens up the possibility to use a micro-atx motherboard.

Your usage needs seem to vary throughout the post. Going to be hard to point you in the right direction...

 

Some key things for you to know, and perhaps read up on... You cannot play games from the server without using some sort of virtualization. You cannot install Windows on top of unRAID. You do not use a RAID card or RAID5 from the MB. RAID cards are simply used to expand the number of sata ports available. All ports should be set to JBOD mode.

 

 

Thanks for your reply. Yeah I don't think I have explained things very well! I am calling it a server but I actually think I have settled for windows 8.1, because I want the multi-roled aspect of media (plex) and games.

 

I didn't think I could install windows on top off unRAID, but thanks for confirming.

 

You can use RAID using the motherboard as long as it supports it. The reason for an external RAID card is if you have a motherboard failure you will not destroy your storage. I don't want to use JBOD as one disk failure will mean I loose all my data.

 

You can use RAID using the motherboard as long as it supports it. The reason for an external RAID card is if you have a motherboard failure you will not destroy your storage. I don't want to use JBOD as one disk failure will mean I loose all my data.

 

This part you have totally wrong!!!  unRAID is not a RAID in a traditional sense.  Each drive is totally independent of the other drives.  Read here:

 

    http://lime-technology.com/unraid-server/

 

If a single drive fails, you can restore the contents of that drive.  If the motherboard fails, you can read all of your data off of all of the good drives in the array (excluding the parity drive, which is just used to store the parity information).  You may even be able to recover some of the data from the failed drive.  If you replace the motherboard and reboot from your flash drive, the array will be up and running immediately!

 

If TWO drives fail, with unRAID, you can read the information from all of the remaining good drives.  This is unlike a single parity RAID array where if you lose two drives, you lose everything. 

 

You can use RAID using the motherboard as long as it supports it. The reason for an external RAID card is if you have a motherboard failure you will not destroy your storage. I don't want to use JBOD as one disk failure will mean I loose all my data.

 

The point of UnRAID is that this assumption is incorrect. You do not run any sort of RAID (hence the "UN" part of UnRAID), but still have a parity disk that can simulate or rebuild a failed disk without you losing any data. This gives you redundancy without having to have similarly sized disks like you would for RAID (i.e. you have a 2TB, 3TB and 4TB data disk as long as your parity is as large as your largest data disk - 4TB in this case). The upside is if you had those 3 disks you could only create a 6TB RAID set (you are limited by the smallest disk). With UnRAID you would have 9TB of usable storage protected by a parity disk.

Just commenting on the hardware; I think you've got a pretty decent selection that is similar to my own. I use unRAID with a virtualized Windows 8.1 machine outputting via HDMI to run a PHT front-end with a Radeon 6450.

 

I use the PC-Q25B w/ST45SF power supply with no power issues. I also use the ASRock Z87-E-ITX motherboard, it's been rock solid and handles virtualization with no problems. It also allowed me to fill the case with 8 Sata ports by replacing the wi-fi card with a mini PCI-express Sata card and still leave the sole PCI-express slot for a graphics passthrough. I've got an i5-4590 and 16GB of ram, which has been more than adequate for my needs. I use Plex remotely and locally with several streams simultaneously, although my media isn't usually in super high-definition.

Thanks for your help guys.

 

Jake333 - looks like I have specked a similar build!! How are you running your vm's? Is there a guide that shows how to get a hyper visor running with ex or hyper-v?

 

Have you tried playing games through a vm? Does it work?

 

Thanks for your help guys.

 

Jake333 - looks like I have specked a similar build!! How are you running your vm's? Is there a guide that shows how to get a hyper visor running with ex or hyper-v?

 

Have you tried playing games through a vm? Does it work?

 

As a FYI, we are (hopefully) expecting beta11 this week which has a streamlined process for creating/managing VMs and jonp has some info on building a Windows VM within in. This would be using UnRAID as the baseOS, not ESX or Hyper-V.

As bkastner mentioned, I'm running my VM's using unRAID as the host OS (instead of as a guest on ESXi, etc.). The betas currently support KVM or Xen as the hypervisor (as well as Docker, although that's a little different). Mine are currently running under Xen, although I suspect I'll transition to KVM at some point in the future. If you look through the Virtualization forums here, you'll find some guides on setup information. That said, the beta releases have rendered much of it out of date. Like bkastner mentioned again, I believe the updates in v6b11 will really streamline the process of installing VM's. So, it might be worth keeping an eye on that.

 

I only use my VM as a Plex front-end as I'm not a gamer, but there are plenty of folks here that do use them for gaming. Shouldn't be anything stopping you from using it as such. Using unRAID as the base OS is really pretty neat, and it sure looks like it's only going to get easier with the next beta. You should definitely consider using it that way, as opposed to running it as a guest.

I'll look into unRAID more.

Just out of interest what CPU cooler are you using? Is your machine relatively quiet or have you switched the fans to noctura's?

The Silverstone 450w SFX unit has plenty of power for a mini-ITX system.  In fact, for most builds, the 300w version is enough -- but the 450w gives you some extra "headroom" which is probably a good idea with what you have in mind.

 

Either of the mini-ITX cases you're looking at would work nicely, as will the PC-V358B if you'd prefer a micro-ATX motherboard.    The latter is probably a better choice if you plan to use a dedicated graphics card, but for a basic UnRAID server I'd use a mini-ITX setup.  You may also want to have a look at the new PC-Q35B, which is a bit larger than the Q25B but supports more drives.

 

... one other thought => Since you're planning to use an AsRock x87-based motherboard, you may want to have a look at this thread:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35739.0

 

There have been some issues with systems not rebooting properly with AsRock boards using this chipset.  If you find this to be the case, note there's a very simple solution in post #58 of that thread [i.e. this one:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35739.msg335033#msg335033 ]

 

I'll look into unRAID more.

Just out of interest what CPU cooler are you using? Is your machine relatively quiet or have you switched the fans to noctura's?

 

I'm using the stock fans in my setup as I wasn't overly concerned with noise from this build. The case cools quite well and is very quiet out of the box in my opinion. I'm just using the Intel cooler that came with the CPU. It's more than enough on a build that doesn't use any overclocking and spends most of its time at a very low CPU usage.

 

garycase is the resident expert on these Lian-Li builds, so what he says can usually be taken as gospel. If you haven't seen his thread on this case, definitely check it out: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=29670.0. It was my inspiration, and there are numerous other builds floating around these forums as well.

 

... one other thought => Since you're planning to use an AsRock x87-based motherboard, you may want to have a look at this thread:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35739.0

 

There have been some issues with systems not rebooting properly with AsRock boards using this chipset.  If you find this to be the case, note there's a very simple solution in post #58 of that thread [i.e. this one:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=35739.msg335033#msg335033 ]

 

 

Just to expand on this, I haven't seen this particular issue with my build using the m-ITX board. That's not to say it won't crop up with a slightly different setup. Either way, the fix is simple and I'm assuming it'll be incorporated into the next beta release anyway. Really not something worth worrying about if you're still in the building stage in my opinion.

Thanks all. Very helpful, and gives me more reading!!

I am also using the stock fans with my Q25 although I predict I will be replacing the top fan sooner than later as it doesnt sound like it's in good health to me.

 

Before I noticed this unhealthy fan it was sufficiently quiet.