FNG here. Just introducing myself and sharing a bit of my disaster / project. I am primarily here because I had to un-f$%* my previous mistakes from my last NAS.

 

The single largest mistake was building a ZFS server with 8 of the dreaded Seagate ST3000DM001. If only I knew then what I know now...

I saw that more than I saw a happy status for the array. In the end, I ended up RMA'ing 6/8 drives and all 6 of the replacements have reallocated sectors and errors as well by this point. Two of the original drives are somehow miraculously good still.

 

My second mistake was using Freenas and ZFS. I built the last server at a time that Freenas was not that mature, and ZFS is extremely unforgiving with pool expansion. This led to a server that just didn't fit my needs that well, and one that constantly needed maintenance because of my poor choice of drives.

 

SO, time to move on in a big way! The party starts here with 7 shiny enterprise grade 5TB hard drives

 

And for good measure, lets add some enterprise grade SSD's to the mix (along with two regular burners for pass through).

Those should certainly get the juices flowing!

 

And now we skip all the boring stuff and get straight to the money shot

 

A little more detail about my setup (see full specs in signature):

- Only 6 of the 7 5TB drives are being utilized until Unraid adds dual parity

- Currently running 32GB non-ecc memory soon to be upgraded to 64GB DDR4 ECC

- Cache pool is comprised of 4 Intel DC S3500 300GB in Raid10 (2 of the 6 went to a friend)

- Hosting 4 primary virtual machines with a handful of others for test environments

- Plex Media Server, NZBGet, and Sonarr on a VM that is intended for external RDP

- CouchPotato, Guacamole, muximux, plexpy, and OWNCloud Dockers

- AMD 6450 is passed through for a software development machine

- Nvidia GT 720 is passed through for an HTPC in the basement theater via HDMI over ethernet

- Yes I cheaped out and didn't buy a workstation motherboard

 

Things I still need to figure out:

- The Plex Media Server docker went into a rogue state and caused the Unraid web gui to become unresponsive. I was only able to fix this by SSH'ing in and kill-9'ing the docker process in its entirety. CPU and Memory usage was low at this time... so not sure what to make of that. So for now, I am sticking with my VM for this purpose until that kind of behavior is resolved. My library is very large (15TB+) so that could impact things (I did see this is a logged  defect in the forums)

- Cache pool performance is pretty poor overall (Read some posts that this should improve in 6.2)

- Get a git repository up and running (either via docker or vm) : Any suggestions?

 

So that is where I stand at this point. I spent a LOT of time researching NAS solutions, and settled on Unraid because it seemed like I could replace 3+ machines with one box. I have been following it for a long time and it has really matured nicely which is what brought me on board. Hoping this time I made a better choice with the disk drives 

A couple thoughts ...

 

(1)  If you're using an E5 grade Xeon I'd certainly use a server-grade (Cxxx chipset) motherboard instead of an X99 board.    That will let you use buffered ECC memory instead of unbuffered RAM, as you're using now.

 

(2)  Where did you get your non-standard E5 chip?    The E5-2675v3 isn't listed on Intel's Ark site and runs at a much lower clock speed than other chips in that generation.    It's not clear what the "vintage" is for that chip -- 'nor which of the advanced Intel technologies it supports.    It's apparently a bargain chip that can be purchased pretty cheaply -- just curious what your source was and whether you've found any unsupported technologies that limit its utility.

 

Yes, I have definitely been considering switching to a workstation motherboard. If I did,  I would just use the X99 board to upgrade my desktop. I have had this up and running for a few weeks now and everything seems great so we will see how I feel about it in a couple of months.

 

The processor was an oem eBay purchase from Japan. The turbo clock speed for all cores is lower (2200) but serves my needs quite well for the type of workloads I toss at it.

 

Edit (to further elaborate):

The motherboard does support RDIMM with a Xeon processor.

 

You can see an example of it on eBay here

 

It doesn't seem to have any limitations that affect me personally. CPU Mark is around 24,000. I was interested in hardware pass-through, a high core count, and low power usage and it meets those needs well. If anyone has any additional specific questions about the CPU, I can do my best to get that information for you.