Hello all,

 

I am in the process of building my first home NAS, and I have decided to go with Unraid. I plan on building with a Skylake I3-6300 on a SUPERMICRO MBD-X11SSM mobo with ECC Ram. The reason I really want Unraid is because of the ability to have Unraid manage the underlying storage, and to run a windows VM over it so I can configure Utorrent, Sickrage, couch potato and Plex (in an environment i'm familiar with).

 

I have a couple questions that researching youtube/Unraid website has not clearly answered.

 

When I provision a windows VM, my i3 will have 4 cores to assign to the windows vm (2/2), Do i have to leave a core open for the underlying UnRaid OS to operate? Meaning will I have to assign less than 4 cores to my windows VM that it will be running? (I dont plan on running any other VMs on the box). If i can assign all 4 cores to the VM will it degrade the throughput and write speeds to the provisioned storage pools that Unraid is managing? I don't want to over-provision my windows box where all the heavy lifting takes place and then choke out the underlying OS (unraid) from doing its job.

 

Is this a valid concern?

 

Also, I will be running on a gigabit network, will an SSD write cache be needed to saturate the gigabit network?

 

I plan on starting with 5 HDDS with 2 as parity, will I be able to just throw another hard drive in and expand the pool? My understanding in freenas is that i would have to destroy the entire pool and reprovision it with the new HD addition.

 

I have money burning a hole in my pocket and if I can get these questions answered I'm ready to pull the trigger on my build!!

 

Thank you all in advance for your time!

On mobile so brief answer, but yeah, leave a core for Unraid, host takes preference so if you allocate everything to a guest and host needs it the guest can go down.

 

Yeah, you can throw a hard drive in at any time.

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

 

Before you commit to spooling up a Windows VM, you really should look at the Docker implementations of SickRage, Plex, etc.  They're a great way to do what you want with less overhead than running a VM.  Both a VM and Docker will take some time to figure out but Docker might be the better time spent.  Then again, unRAID gives you the flexibility to do both .

 

An SSD cache drive is the default location to install VMs and Dockers.  If you want to saturate (or come close to saturating) a gigabit network then you will want to use that cache drive to cache writes to the array.  Truthfully, though, writes to the parity protected array are pretty fast.  They start out at a full 112MB/s while unRAID is caching in RAM.  They then slow down to somewhere between 35MB/s and 60MB/s for most folks.  The newer, larger and faster the array drives, the faster the writes.  Unless you write lots of data, all the time, while you sit and wait - write caching is unnecessary, IMO.

Hell, how did I miss that! Yeah, dockers all the way.  May I recommend to sir, the linuxserver.io ones....

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

 

Before you commit to spooling up a Windows VM, you really should look at the Docker implementations of SickRage, Plex, etc.  They're a great way to do what you want with less overhead than running a VM.  Both a VM and Docker will take some time to figure out but Docker might be the better time spent.  Then again, unRAID gives you the flexibility to do both .

 

An SSD cache drive is the default location to install VMs and Dockers.  If you want to saturate (or come close to saturating) a gigabit network then you will want to use that cache drive to cache writes to the array.  Truthfully, though, writes to the parity protected array are pretty fast.  They start out at a full 112MB/s while unRAID is caching in RAM.  They then slow down to somewhere between 35MB/s and 60MB/s for most folks.  The newer, larger and faster the array drives, the faster the writes.  Unless you write lots of data, all the time, while you sit and wait - write caching is unnecessary, IMO.

 

After looking at possibly upgrading to a Xeon (so that I can still get ECC support) didn't seem worth the extra money just to run a windows VM if I can run all of my services in dockers to have full access to the hardware. I have had experience using dockers in other applications so I would not be afraid in using these.

 

You mentioned that dockers are by default installed to the cache drive. I'm planning on using 7200RPM Seagate Constellation 2TB drives, is a cache drive absolutely necessary to use the dockers? Or can I just use the raid array. I plan on having 16GB of ram in the machine, and from what I have read, RAM is used to cache the data that is being written and then once that is full the write rates will slow down (not a big deal to me, I can always find an SSD and throw it in later).

 

My main use for this is to schedule torrenting while im asleep over a proxy, and to serve up to 2 1080p streams transcode at a time (90% of the time it will be 1 transcode stream), otherwise its just gonna be a data dump for my awful data hoarding habit. Passmark scores and the information from plex state that the i3 should be more than sufficient for my needs.

 

Are there any recommendations you could give to this build given my use-case?

 

 

Whilst you can install dockers to the array, it's not recommended.  You'd be far better off throwing a cache disk in there.

 

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Whilst you can install dockers to the array, it's not recommended.  You'd be far better off throwing a cache disk in there.

 

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

Ok then I will be getting a SSD to use as a cache drive. I guess the LAST question I would have for this is about torrenting. After reading more on the forum, I'm looking at the WD 2TB Reds (5400RPM) instead of the 7200 Seagates.

 

If I set up sickrage/rtorrent to do its job of finding the torrents and downloading etc, to my understanding it will exclusively use the cache drive to do all of its operations, and then move everything off the cache to the actual raid. Is this correct? The reason I ask this is I read that using low speed drives as the destination for torrent activity and other drive activity can hamper or cause issues with the torrents speed. Will getting an SSD cache alleviate this problem?

Yes, that's the reason to get an SSD for your cache drive.  An SSD is great for the high activity, low latency requirements of Plex and downloaders, etc.  5400rpm drives should be fine for your array, though you'll find that the price per TB is best at the 3TB or 4TB level.

Yes, that's the reason to get an SSD for your cache drive.  An SSD is great for the high activity, low latency requirements of Plex and downloaders, etc.  5400rpm drives should be fine for your array, though you'll find that the price per TB is best at the 3TB or 4TB level.

 

Thank you everyone for your help.

 

I believe that answers all of my questions.