Hi

 

I am building my first unraid server with some 'old' parts i have. Id appreciate some relatively general advice as a sort of sanity-check please. (i haven't bought unraid yet as im not sure about mobo compatibility. the parts aren't all together yet but they will be next week.

 

CPU = i7 gen2 LGA1155

RAM = 16gb DDR3

MBOARD = DQ67SW (http://ark.intel.com/products/51997/Intel-Desktop-Board-DQ67SW). not sure of compatibility, compatibility guide doesnt say yay or nay so ill just have to try and report back.

Adaptec 71605E card http://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/raid/sas_raid/sas-71605e  - compatibility guide says all is good. I have checked that the intended 4TB drives are compatible with the card and that unraid seems to support > 2.2tb drives on this card.

I have also got a series of 128 and 256gb SSD's and around 4 2tb green drives (if you think they might help)

650w PSU but i think i will need to upgrade this to at least a 750w. i dont mind as the 650 is very old had has been running non stop.

 

VIDEO

Onboard video.

 

DATA

I was intending to run 8 x 4TB enterprise drives for data with the ability to expand it out to a maximum of 10-12 drives (the card supports 16 drives)

 

PARITY (EDITED)

1 X 4TB drive

CACHE

1 x 256GB SSD.

 

OS

Since i had a spare SSD, id figure id put this on it.

 

intended us

NAS, virtualisation for 1-2 vm's + plex

 

My questions

1) Am i correct in assuming that i will need to run the drives in JBOD/raw in order for unraid to support it ? the card itself doesn't support raid 5.

2) if this is the case, im assuming problems with write slowness will need to be corrected by a cache drive ?

3) If so, i do intend to do regular multi TB writes to the nas. with this in mind along with my intention to use the 256GB will be insufficient and i should increase the size of the cache drive to be about the same size as the average multi tb batch ? my asusmption is that when the cache fills up, the night job to move the data will happen immediatly to free up cache.

4) even though i have a spare SSD, should i not use it and just use a USB for the OS ?

5) what are your general thoughts on this build ? i get the impression it should be a powerhouse considering what i am going to be asking it to do.

 

Questions from the Forum FAQ

 

6) What is your budget?

$2-3k (AUD) without disks. i figure this is how much a similar qnap or synology would cost. as for cash, if i need to spend i will, but prefer to use existing if the benefit of buying new is either low or means that i wont really see it.

 

7) How many drives do you want your server to be able to support and how much capacity do you need?

upto 12 x 4tb enterprise drives over time. as for the capacity i need, i need at least 25TB, anything on top of that is a bonus.

 

Is expandability important to you?  If so, what's your long term goal?

To a point. its difficult to say as it will grow as needs go, but maybe in 10 years time i might get to around 50tb at a wild guess.

 

9) Are you interested in running any unRAID Add Ons (see here)?  If so, which ones?  Be specific.

Plex and kvm to run 1-2 small vm's.

 

10) Do you want to run green/low power drives or faster 7200 rpm drives?  If you don't have a specific need for 7200 rpm drives, then choose green drives.

the green drives i have are quite old and have been through alot. i dont trust them and prefer to use the enterprise drives but happy to use them in a redundant cache or some thing like that if you think its a good idea.

 

11) Do you have any spare parts laying around that you would like to apply towards your build?  This includes drives.

this is posted up the top

 

Thanks for looking at this post and appreicate any feedback you have for this noob. Cheers

 

Matt

 

1. Yes

 

2. A cache will improve write performance, or you could enable Turbo write which spins up all the disks to avoid the usual read/modify/write parity update

 

3. When the cache fills up subsequent writes are directly to the array. Once the cache is full it remains full until the mover is next scheduled to run. I've tried running the mover manually while still copying files to the cache and the performance is not good.

 

4. The OS has to load from a USB device (that's how the licensing works - the licence key being tied to the USB device's GUID) but once loaded it runs entirely from RAM. A better use of the second SSD would be to add it to the cache pool.

 

5. You don't need Enterprise disks. Unless you already have them lying around I wouldn't recommend buying them. They don't add very much and cost a great deal. I'd use fewer, larger capacity consumer grade disks instead.

Hi John

 

Thanks, i appreciate you going through my post and posting a reply.

 

understood everything you have said, and yes i do have some of those enterprise drives lying around, i just won't add to them, instead i was going to do what you recommended and add some more reasonable priced drives, especially considering my low end need.

 

have enough parts in the same place to test it out tonight, so ill see how it goes.

 

Thanks again

 

Matt

Whether you need a powerhouse or not depends on what you want to do, which you don't really specify. If you want to run VMs then you may need to do some more research. I have not researched your parts to see if they are appropriate for some VM uses or not.

 

650W PSU may be plenty, or it may have some design issues that make it unsuitable for unRAID. Single +12V Rail is the usual recommendation.