Good day everyone!

 

First of all I'm very pleased being a part of unRAID community for over 4 years now. Been very happy with my unRAID Pro server ever since I installed it.

Ok, while having virtually no issues with the box, I still decided to update my V5 server to the latest build and revamp my hardware too.

 

My current setup consists of disks of different capacities totaling 34TB+5TB parity. It's all running on PC with the specs in my signature. I also have a motherboard left from my previous rig (ASUS Sabertooth Z77) which I would like to use in my current server chassis. I'm thinking of buying i5-2500 and 16GB of RAM to complete the build and use my older 1420SA HBAs to connect the drives, besides using all 10 SATA connectors on the board.

 

I would appreciate if you guys could answer the following questions in regards to my endeavors:

 

1) Will the hardware specs be sufficient of transcoding 2-3 Plex streams while using Transmission or any other torrent app simultaneously?

2) Can I run Win7 in KVM virtual machine to use it for occasional media sorting, renaming, remuxing, moving to an array? Will my specs provide an adequate performance for this mentioned VM, while not impacting Plex or general access via SMB? I'm thinking of dedicating an HDD outside of array to use it for Win7+torrenting

3) What would be the correct upgrade path? I'm assuming I can follow this steps: Unplug all data drives from my old server -> replace the hardware -> install unRAID6 on my existing flash drive, while preserving the license key -> add 1st HDD to use for my VM needs and add SSD cache drive -> install VM, test if everything works -> connect all drives, including parity and let the unRAID to build the config

4) Since V6 uses brtfs, should I think of somehow moving all my data somewhere else, reformat all drives and then copy the entire library back?

5) Should I replace my 1430SA's? Are they supported in V6? Is it a bad idea to utilize all on-board SATA connectors or it's better to get an HBA card with bunch of ports?

 

Thanks in advance.

4) Since V6 uses brtfs, should I think of somehow moving all my data somewhere else, reformat all drives and then copy the entire library back?

It is available on v6, but I would use XFS in preference for data disks as it likely to be more stable.  For the cache drive use BTRFS if you have to  because you are going to have a cache pool (which requires BTRFS), and XFS otherwise.

5) Should I replace my 1430SA's? Are they supported in V6? Is it a bad idea to utilize all on-board SATA connectors or it's better to get an HBA card with bunch of ports?

 

The Adaptec 1430SA works great with V6 and has very good bandwidth for 4 disks.

 

There’s no problem using all 10 Sata onboard ports but because they go through the DMI path use both top PCIe slots for the Adaptecs, this way and if there are no other limits your parity check/sync max speed will still be around 145/150MB/s.

 

Thanks for your replies!

 

Can anyone shed some light on using i5 2500 for my anticipated tasks? Do you guys do torrenting directly on unRAID? Should I spend more money and get better and newer CPU? Besides running 1 VM, I will be using LogitechMS and Plex dockers.

 

Also, since I don't have 2 licenses for a PRO version, I believe the only method to move all data to a new server is to use the dock station? I'm thinking of buying 2 5TB HDDs (currently my parity drive is 5TB) to start with 1 Parity and 1 Data drive and move all my media disk by disk.

 

Do you know of any better solution?

... transcoding 2-3 Plex streams while using Transmission

... Win7 in KVM virtual machine

... LogitechMS

 

In my experience torrenting is pretty light on CPU utilization though I don't torrent on unRAID.  CPU load during transcoding is highly dependent on the source material and capabilities of the players.  The Core i5 2500 is a pretty capable processor, but you could max it out with 2-3 streams of high bit rate material and players that require a lot of transcoding (or conversely, it could perform flawlessly on low bit rate H.264 encoded material and fairly capable players).  The area of concern I'd pinpoint is if you want to be able to use the Win7 VM while doing heavy transcoding - I'd want more horsepower for that.  Assuming you are buying a used CPU on eBay, a Core i7 2600 (or other higher end LGA1155 CPU) looks like it would cost $50-80 more and might be worth looking at.

The reason why I wanted to run Win7 VM (or XP or is that I was hoping to use MKVTools, tsmuxer to remove/reorder unnecessary audio/video/subtitles from downloaded files as well as converting DVDs/Blurays using MakeMKV. Currently, I use my PC for downloading and muxing/conversion/renaming.