Zotac mini pc? - new build advice

[jimmysticky]

Here it is 2 years later and thinking of giving unRAID a go again.  What would you guys recommend as far as hardware?  I have these two systems available:

 

Zotac zbox Mini Ci320 https://www.zotac.com/product/mini_pcs/ci320-nano.

4GB ram.

Mediasonic Probox enclosure via USB3. 

60GB ssd housed in the zbox as a cache drive.

 

or a traditional retired pc (choice of cpu).  I like going green unless you think a faster cpu will improve system/write speed.

 

Gigabyte mobo ga-890-fxa

4 (or GB ram.

Drives connected to internal SATA ports.

Phenom Black 1090t 6 core cpu  (or) Sempron 45 watt 2.8Mhz single core.

 

Also, does unRAID support different file systems?  I saw XFS and RFS, is the ReFS the Windows filesystem?  I am interested in data-rot protection if this is supported in unRAID.

 

Thanks

[trurl]

The Mediasonic option won't work, only SATA connections can be used in the array. Forget about the Sempron for unRAID v6. More memory more better in general.

 

RFS is ReiserFS not a Windows filesystem. XFS is recommended for new systems. Also btrfs supported. You will have to let unRAID format each drive it will use regardless.

 

There are some file checksumming tools available as addons to help detect data-rot.

[jimmysticky]

Oh wow, bummer.  Thanks for the info.  Ok, so go with the Phenom cpu then?  I was reading about the Btrfs filesystem, this has protection against data-rot I see?  Why do you recommend XFS?

 

Thanks again.

[trurl]

I use btrfs for cache pool, but I would say btrfs on the parity array isn't well understood by our community yet. If you understand btrfs well maybe you could help us.

[jimmysticky]

No, I can't offer much help.  Sorry.  I was just reading in Wiki that btrfs has self-healing capabilities similar to ZFS.  data-rot protection is important to me but it seems it's not widely cared about.  Perhaps it just doesn't happen that often.

[tdallen]

BTRFS has a perception problem here.  Some folks have reported problems including data corruption while using it for their cache drive.  Data-rot is an important topic but I don't think this community perceives BTRFS as stable enough for the benefits to offset the risks. 

 

BTW - I have no experience with BTRFS, just providing a temperature check based on when and how I've seen it discussed.  I suspect as we have some success with it and it is perceived as more mature then people will warm to it.

[xamindar]

Btrfs has some really nice features, but most are not utilized by unraid. Really, at this time the only reason to use btrfs on unraid is for the scrub capability. Scrub will read all data and verify checksums which will tell you whether you have any bit rot or not. But keep in mind btrfs is fairly untested in certain edge cases as it is a new filesystem. It has been known to fail quite spectacularly in certain situations. (All my disks are btrfs)

[jimmysticky]

wow, interesting.  I'm going to start a new topic about data-rot since it seems that is where this convo is going.