I've been using Unraid for about 6 years now and love it. I recently upgraded from v5 to v6 and the possibility of using docker containers has really opened up my thoughts on how to better utilize the system. It's been simply hosting music/movies/tv, but now I'm looking to run plex or emby from it and also using it as storage for system backups of my other computers and possibly host some VMs in the future.

 

The current hardware is too old to do anything useful and with a drive also starting to fail, now seemed like a good time to upgrade the hardware and take this thing to the next level.  So here's the current state:

 

OS: v6.1

CPU: AMD Sempron 140

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2

RAM: 2GB DDR2 800

Case: Cooler Master Centurion 590

Drive Cage(s): 3x Cooler Master 4-in-3

Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-550VX

 

Parity Drive: 2TB WD20EARS

Data Drives: 3x 1.5TB WD15EADS (1 starting to die), 2x 2TB WD20EARS

Cache Drive: None

Total Drive Capacity: 8.5TB

 

My plans, in addition to continuing to host music/movies/tv episodes, are to run a Plex or Emby container to manage all those media files, store system backups of my htpcs, and possibly (if this would be doable) run a win7 vm and drop my tuner card into it to act as the main live tv recording system so that my htpcs just essentially become clients to the unraid server. This last idea is mostly a nice to have and not necessarily a key driver of the build.

 

I'm currently looking at the following upgrades:

 

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1231V3

Motherboard: ASRock Rack C226 WS Micro

RAM: 16GB Crucial DDR31600 ECC Unbuffered

 

I plan on picking up a 4TB WD Red to use as the new parity drive and use the existing parity drive to replace the failing drive.

As far as add-in cards, I plan to get some sort of SAS card at some point to expand my currently paltry storage...and if the Win7 VM is doable I'll need to put my Ceton Infinitv4 tuner card in and probably a video card.  SAS card would likely be PCIE x8, the tuner is x1. and so a video card would likely have to be at most x8 unless onboard graphics can support it.

 

Anyway, it's really hard trying to figure all the different details out, so many things to consider. So I'm posting this to get some outside opinions and see if people agree I'm on the right track here.

... unless onboard graphics can support it.

 

There is no onboard graphics ... and the 1231v3 doesn't have an embedded GPU, so you will have to use an add-in card.    A PCIe x16 card will work fine [it'll run at x8 bandwidth if you have another card in the x8 slot, but that's plenty fast enough on a v3 PCIe bus].

 

Oh right, been looking at too many motherboard specs. Definitely would need a video card then.

An E3-1226 has onboard video, and will let you use the integrated video for that MB.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117319

 

I assume you just want this in case you want to hook up a display/etc. It can't be used to pass through or anything, but it is perfect for building the server. Also keeps your slots free for doing vt-d with a better videocard for a VM.

 

Your selected E3-1231 is a slightly newer generation though.

The E3-1226v3 has much lower performance than a 1231v3  [PassMark 7376 vs. 9594].

 

If you want onboard video, I'd recommend using the E3-1246v3, which has onboard video AND performance actually slightly better than the 1231v3 [PassMark 9900].

 

Hmm, yeah perhaps the 1246 would be better, that way I can test out various setups without having to pick up a discrete graphics card until I'm ready or when it's finally necessary.  The $35 bump in price is reasonable.

 

So question, what are the tradeoffs with going with a server motherboard like the one I'm thinking of picking up and say one of the new Skylake Z170 desktop boards?  I know the server boards support ECC RAM but only have 16 pcie lanes, while the z170 boards don't  support ECC but have more pcie lanes (up to 36? if I'm reading  correctly), which would allow for multiple SAS controller cards and discrete graphics.  Is there anything else I'm missing? Is ECC just that much more important in this type of setup?

I'd wager that the majority of users are running non-ecc memory.  ECC is nice to have, but I wouldn't say it's necessary.

ECC memory begins to be beneficial when using more then 2 RAM chips. I am running two 4GB DDR3 chips, non-ecc.

For a server I'd FAR rather have ECC RAM than the extra PCIe lanes that Skylake provides.

 

ECC is beneficial regardless of the number of modules you've got installed ... but I agree that if you're using unbuffered RAM it's a good idea to not install more than 2 modules.