Hello,

 

I finally found some time and shelled out some money for a new server for UNRAID to replace my trusty 4.6 UNRAID system that has been in place for years.  Before I get into creating it, I had some questions I was hoping the members here could provide their opinions on...

[*]The cache feature is new (to me) and looks nice, and will fit nicely with what I *thought* I would do but appears not to be the way to do it.  I thought with this new system that rather than running the OS off of a flash drive, that I would use an SSD instead.  With it booting off of an SSD it would be very fast, and I could then use the rest of the SSD as a cache drive to supplement all of the HDDs providing the array storage.  What is wrong with my thinking?  It does not seem like anybody is doing Ubuntu/UNRAID off of an SSD.  Is a flash drive really better?

[*]Crashplan was a huge part of my plan to go with a standard Ubuntu distro so I could add it.  Now it seems UNRAID has all of these VMs and virtual app machines, including one for Crashplan.  What little I have seen about it though I see a lot of talk about Windows; is this the Linux Crashplan software being used or is it running the Windows version in a VM?

[*]I have a lot of videos that I want to be able to stream to clients and (perhaps) even view right off the server if I give it a decent enough graphics card.  I have MPEG videos for family videos, and ISO images for DVDs and BluRay discs that I own, and it would be great if there was one product that would allow me to do all of that and perhaps more.  Do you recommend MythBuntu?  Plex in a VM?  Other ideas?  I have a Samsung TV I can do playback on, and I could dedicate a Windows PC (or whatever) to feed HDMI video to my video distribution system if the server cannot do it itself.

 

Thanks!

 

• The cache feature is new (to me) and looks nice, and will fit nicely with what I *thought* I would do but appears not to be the way to do it.  I thought with this new system that rather than running the OS off of a flash drive, that I would use an SSD instead.  With it booting off of an SSD it would be very fast, and I could then use the rest of the SSD as a cache drive to supplement all of the HDDs providing the array storage.  What is wrong with my thinking?  It does not seem like anybody is doing Ubuntu/UNRAID off of an SSD.  Is a flash drive really better?

Just like 4.6, v6 only boots from the flash drive.  Generally speaking, all apps / VMs are all stored on the cache drive.  IMHO, speed in booting unRaid (seconds) is the absolute lowest priority for a server.  How often do you actually reboot a server where the time difference would be noticeable? 

 

• Crashplan was a huge part of my plan to go with a standard Ubuntu distro so I could add it.  Now it seems UNRAID has all of these VMs and virtual app machines, including one for Crashplan.  What little I have seen about it though I see a lot of talk about Windows; is this the Linux Crashplan software being used or is it running the Windows version in a VM?

Generally its the docker app (linux), but a VM would be able to do the same thing

 

• I have a lot of videos that I want to be able to stream to clients and (perhaps) even view right off the server if I give it a decent enough graphics card.  I have MPEG videos for family videos, and ISO images for DVDs and BluRay discs that I own, and it would be great if there was one product that would allow me to do all of that and perhaps more.  Do you recommend MythBuntu?  Plex in a VM?  Other ideas?  I have a Samsung TV I can do playback on, and I could dedicate a Windows PC (or whatever) to feed HDMI video to my video distribution system if the server cannot do it itself.
  

I prefer dedicated HTPC's (openElec) for each television, and have an openElec VM running for the TV nearest to the server.

 

Plex (running as a docker app) I use for the rare occasions I watch something on my tablets

• Just like 4.6, v6 only boots from the flash drive.  Generally speaking, all apps / VMs are all stored on the cache drive.  IMHO, speed in booting unRaid (seconds) is the absolute lowest priority for a server.  How often do you actually reboot a server where the time difference would be noticeable? 
  

No, I wrote faster boot but I meant faster performance overall.  If the OS stays in memory, and the VMs are in the cache, then I suppose having an SSD for a cache drive provides the same functionality.
 
Thanks for the other bits!