unRaider of The Unnused Power - turning my gaming rig into an unraid gaming box

[axilas]

Hello ppl.

I'm new in this forum, and I wanted to share with you guys my plan to setup an unraid gaming rig/nas box just like the one Linus showed on his "Use your Gaming PC's Extra Power as a NAS Ultimate Guide" video, and perhaps have some feedback from you guys.

 

My goal is to:

1. Have my W10 gaming rig working as good as it is today;

2. Use it as a NAS box;

3. Use some spare sata hd's together to get share space;

4. Use the benefits of having a virtualized system for backups, yada uada

5. Have some of the storage performance benefits of unRAID.

 

My hardware:

Case: Corsair Carbide Air 240

CPU: Skylake 6100

Cpu Cooler: Noctua NH-L9i

Motherboard: H170M-E-D3 (only 4 sata ports.... : /)

GPU: Asus GTX 970 Turbo

RAM: 16GB DDR3 1600MHz

PSU: Silverstone Strider Plus 1000W

SSD: Toshiba Q SERIES PRO, 256GB

HD: Well.... there's a 1TB 2.5", another 500GB 2,5", I think there's also a 320GB 3,5"...

 

 

Ok, I know there's not that much HD space for a solid NAS, also not a lot of SATA ports, but I want to make a proof of concept to see how unRAID behaves.

 

I'm thinking on making a Share for Steam library (not-very-often-played games), 2 fast space for the w10 gaming vm being one for the W10 installation and one for apps/games installation, and perhaps another share for music/video/photos (or one for each...).

 

Has anyone did it?

 

Well, anyway, I got to reinstall W10, so I think I'm going to do it anyway. If anyone got any recommendation, I would thank's a lot!

[00b5]

Did you verify that your mb/cpu/etc support passthrough? It all needs to support VT-d and have it enabled.

 

If that is good, then go for it.

 

I'd probably make your SSD a cache drive (whether you setup cache shares or not) and use it to store your VM's etc.

 

unraid will boot from a USB drive, and you have enough hdds there to at least setup some shares/etc. If it works reliably, and you want to keep using it, you'll probably want to invest it a few larger 3.5" hdds (say 3 4TB+ drives) to make your storage worthwhile.

 

You can make as many shares as you want, it will spread the data across the drives. You should have enough to test it out, assuming you don't mind tinkering/reimaging as needed.

[axilas]

Anyone?

At least someone to say "don't do it, it's not worth the trouble..."

 

Come on guys... I just want to know if I can have any performance gain from going from a common Windows 10 64 bits installation to a unRAID virtualized one... Or at least if my performance can stay the same and also have the virtualization benefits...

 

...

[SSD]

Anyone?

At least someone to say "don't do it, it's not worth the trouble..."

 

Come on guys... I just want to know if I can have any performance gain from going from a common Windows 10 64 bits installation to a unRAID virtualized one... Or at least if my performance can stay the same and also have the virtualization benefits...

...

 

Not worth it if your space needs are so meager.

 

Unless you like a challenge and are up for the troubleshooting involved, this has a risk of causing frustration for little reward, solving a problem you don't have. And you mention one of the goals as taking advantage of unRaid drive performance - that is not realistic. UnRaid is relatively slow to write due to redundancy, and has some annoying performance pauses if drives are spun down. And writing to multiple drives simultaneously (in the protected array, not cache) are really slow.

 

Setting up your rig as described would be worthwhile, IMO, if creating a media library was of interest, requiring in excess of 3-4T of space. Many unRaid servers here are in the 20T and above range. If you had that sort of storage need, I'd say definitely go for it. You will get no performance gain in gaming, but would not lose much either and have two functions satisfied by the single machine.