Is unRAID right for my use case?

[toxeia]

I came across Linus's video on his 2 gamers on 1 PC and liked the idea of unRAID. I currently run my own gaming PC 24/7 and have a server that's set up for recording video from security cameras around the house. I've been on a stint of finding ways to cut bills and thought "Oh man, running 2 PCs full time is probably a killer." If I could use unRAID to combine my gaming PC and server into one box that would be fantastic.

 

So my gaming PC is a x99 XPower MSI board with a 5820K, 64GB memory (for virtualization), a 980TI, a 500GB SSD, and 4 2TB HDDS (RAID 10, 4TB usable). Most of my games are actually on the RAID array, load times are fine.

My server is a Lenovo TS440 with a E3-1250 with a 240GB SSD and 3 4TB HDDS in RAID 5 (8TB usable).

I also found a second 240GB SSD while cannibalizing an old case to fit all the drives into my Shinobi XL.

 

I'm working on setting it up right now, so I have my 500GB SSD as cache and all the HDDs in the parity array (4TB parity, 2x4TB+4x2TB = 16TB usable). They are all 7200 RPM drives, nothing special. I haven't started on doing passthrough for devices yet, and I have installed an EVGA Nvidia 210 as the dedicated card for unRAID.

 

It just hit me that if I'm trying to load games off of the RAID array and I'm recording video to that same array I could be running into some serious issues with I/O bottle necking on my drives. Do you think this is something I need to be concerned with? Am I missing a way to set up multiple arrays?

 

Another thing I thought about - is there no way to have the cache drives run independently? It'd be nice to use that extra 240GB SSD, but from what I understand if I put the 500GB and the 240GB in the cache, I can only use 240GB of the available room.

[testdasi]

You can set up the shares to use different drives (and turn off Turbo Write if you know what it is and have turned it on). In that way your array can write surveillance and read games pretty much independently.

 

As for cache, you actually don't need a 2nd SSD for RAID1 as long as you don't keep anything important on the cache (and have mover doing its job regularly). It's a good to have, not a requirement.

 

The spare SSD, you can surely use as Unassigned or something to keep your VM disk image, for example.

[toxeia]

So there is a way to use that unassigned drive? I wasn't able to find it I'll look through documentation again.

[aptalca]

There is a plugin called unassigned devices that will let you manage drives outside of the array