Hey guys,

 

I am brand new to UnRaid and have been deeply considering implementing a server in my home as a resource for storage, VMs, Plex, and possibly in-home game streaming if it comes to that.

Before I get into it too much I wanted to know if the system specifications I currently have would do a reasonable job of supporting a server with those requirements in mind.

 

Hardware I have laying around:

CPU: 5930K or 6700K

Motherboard: MSI X99 SLI Plus

RAM: 16GB DDR4 Non-ECC

 

I will need to purchase a couple of drives and would also appreciate some feedback on what sizes are best, which kinds of drives would be best and the loadout I should go with (storage to parity ratio, SSD as caches or not).

Finally, I was hoping I could get some information regarding the feasibility of using an UnRaid server to source my need for practice with a Windows Server and client OSes. How easy is it to wipe and reload a VM in UnRaid compared to VMware or Virtualbox?

 

Thanks  :D

 

 

Not sure what you meant by storage to parity ratio. Just a few drives or 20 drives, you still just need 1 parity drive. The one thing you gotta keep in mind is the parity drive needs to be at least the same size or larger than the other drives. So if you have a mixed batch of 1tb, 2tb, and 3tb drives, the parity drive would have to be a 3tb or larger. For the drives to buy and try, well everyone has their own favorite brands, just spend a few hours and go thru the Storage section of the forum and see what folks are using and reporting. You'll want to use a good quick drive for the parity, so a 5400rpm as a parity drive wouldn't be ideal. Can't really comment on the vms, plex, and the rest. I just use unraid mainly as a file server, storage, and for streaming media.

 

That sounds like a great starting point for an unRAID server.  I like WD Red drives - they've been reliable and have an extra year of warranty over the blue/green drives.  I'd start with unRAID 6.1.9 and a single parity drive unless you are inclined to experiment with the 6.2 public beta which supports dual parity. 

 

The number of drives to buy is really dependent on your storage needs, but the 4TB drives tend to be a nice sweet spot in price per TB right now.  SSD is the way to go for cache.