I like to build a Unraid (or freenas) server, but I don't know the correct hardware to purchase. But I know what I want to do with the server.

 

The server must be able to run the Xen virtualization environment. Maybe with PCI passthrough. So I can run Windows with complete hardware support?

 

The following software is going to be installed in a docker environment or xen environment:

Plex Media server (Plex Media server must be able to smoothly transcode 1080p video to my other devices.)

Couchpota

Newznab (for personal use)

Nzbdrone or Sickbeard

Nzbget or Sabnzbd

NG Firewall

pfSense

 

I like to be able to hot swap the harddisks.

And maybe it is possible to configure the computer without a display?

 

I think about 4 x 2tb WD red harddisks and one 250GB SSD harddisk. (with room for exception)

2 x 8 GB ram

 

Can someone please help me to get a good configuration for my server?

 

Thank you,

 

Ivo Trompert

At a minimum, I would get 4TB drives.  Preferably 6TB drives.

I don't believe hotswapping is an option with unRAID, hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong.  I've *always* powered my unRAID servers down before adding or removing drives.

 

I concur with switchman, 4TB drives make more sense than 2TB drives and even 3TB drives these days.

 

8GB RAM is more than you need for base functionality, but maybe all the software you're considering adding could use it.

 

Both my unRAID servers use external enclosures for the drives so I can't be much help in that regard, but in my latest build the primary consideration was disk I/O bandwidth.  If a second drive fails during a parity rebuild, you'll lose the data on both drives, so minimizing the size of that window of vulnerability was my goal.

 

Basically you just need to make sure the motherboard and disk controllers have sufficient SATA bandwidth to read/write from/to all drives at the same time without bottlenecks.  For example, a PCI Express Revision 2.0 x8 slot has (I believe) a bandwidth of 4GB/s, enough for each of the 24 drives to transfer at ~167MB/s, fast enough for most "value" drives.  But a controller that can handle 24 drives might be too expensive compared to multiple lesser controllers, so balancing that trade-off becomes the next challenge.

 

So setting aside the enclosure question, which I sidestep, that just leaves finding a suitable combination of motherboard and controllers that hits the right balance of cost and performance.  I've made heavy use of NewEgg's 'Power Search' facility over the past month or so!

unRAID works fine without a display right from the start but you will need a temporary display to make sure the motherboard bios is updated and unnecessary onboard services are turned off.