ssnyderu2 Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 After looking at unRaid, FreeNAS and NAS4Free, I finally decided to go with unRaid for my media server. I like the idea of easily being able to add new hard drives at any time. Below is a list of parts that I already have and what I want to do with them, hoping that what I have will do the job. Right now I am thinking unRaid with Plex. Any suggestions or tips are welcome. I am wanting to build a Media Server. It wont be doing any transcoding or video conversion. I also want to be able to watch the videos from any PC in the house as well as a Ruku and a couple of WD Live TV set top boxes. Case: Fractal Design Arc Mini-ATX PSU: Corsair CX Modular 600 watts Motherboard: Asus P8H67-M LE socket 1155 with 6x SATA ports CPU: i3 2120 3.3 GHz with stock cooling GPU: Built into the i3/MB RAM: 8GB DDR3 HDD: 6x 2TB drives 1 is an Enterprise class drive, the other 5 are standard 7200 RPM drives. Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 Since you already have this I would just go with it and as you use it if you find you need more CPU for example, it is very easy to upgrade hardware and unRAID will just keep going without missing a beat. I have replaced all my hardware since I first built my server, and unRAID just booted up like nothing had happened. Quote Link to comment
ssnyderu2 Posted June 18, 2015 Author Share Posted June 18, 2015 Any issue with using standard consumer level hard drives? What turned me off the most about FreeNAS was its demand that everything be server level. I do have 1 Enterprise class drive, should it be the parity drive? Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted June 18, 2015 Share Posted June 18, 2015 unRAID lets you mix drives any way you want, even different sizes. The only requirement is that parity must be at least as large as the largest data disk. Later you may decide you want more capacity, and instead of adding drives, you can just replace with larger drives. My system only has a limited number of ports and bays for drives, but I can still increase capacity by replacing then one at a time with larger drives as they are made available. In fact, I started with all 2TB drives and now they are all 4TB or 3TB. What speed is the Enterprise drive? If it is not as fast as the others, it might make sense to use one of the 7200 for parity since parity is involved in any writes to the data disks. Having said that, speed is not unRAIDs forte anyway since it doesn't stripe. Quote Link to comment
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