Hello everyone,

 

so I'm new to unraid and am looking for some advice experience regarding how to proceed.

I'm thinking of using my current PC to start with and buy some dedicated hardware sometime next year if needed at all.

 

My current setup is the following:

i7-5820k

Asus X99-S

16GB Ram (4x4, can extend this to 32 if necessary by poppulating the remaing 4 slots)

PCIe 750 400GB nvme

2x 500GB 850 EVO (raid 0)

1x GTX980Ti

 

got a spare GTX560 if needed

 

I also got a Synology 1512+ (3GB RAM and 5x 3TB WD Red, Raid 6)

 

So my idea is to repurpose my system on unraid to run my current instance of Win10 and add NAS capabilities to it as well as a few dockers (Unifi Controller and Video, maybe Plex) and a Linux VM (I most probably will add more over time). I assume my system will be powerfull enough to handle this.

 

On the other hand when I would build a new dedicated system for unraid what kind of performance should I aim for (I was looking at a E5-2620 v4 but not sure if this is overkill - was even pondering of getting a HP DL380 G9 ˜1500$ (not sure if that's good value) instead of building something myself)?

 

Do I need to add a second GPU and could I simply switch between the Linux and Win10 VMs (outputing on the same GPU but not simultaneously)

 

Regarding the NAS part I'd like to have around 3TB of Storage which I'd want to back up to the Synology along with snapshots of my VMs over night (ideally just syncing changes, as I only got one 1GBit port on the PC).

 

I thought something along the lines of adding 2x WD reds for the 3TB and using my nvme drive for the Win10 VM, one of the 850EVOs as cache and the other for the Linux VM if this makes sense.

 

Is this at all possible would I run into issues?

 

Thanks for reading and any input

 

Regards Bean

Some thoughts:

 

Your current system is more than adequate to run unRAID.

 

A couple of 3TB drives is a good way to get started on the storage array.

 

Your plans for the SSDs makes sense to me but you might want to spend some time in the VM Engine forum to see how others have configured things.

Will have do some more reading and give it a shot (once I removed one of my rads to make room).

 

I think I'll still look into building a dedicated unraid box in the future after some hands on experience.

I got until June anyway before I move and need to set up everything fresh at the new place.

I assume a build based on a E5-2620 v4 would do well too then - will only need to figure out what motherboard to get when the time comes.

 

taking my current system in account would a setting like this make sense?

vCore 0-3 for unraid and dockers, as well as a Linux VM and 4-11 for the Win10VM with GPU passthrough on the 980Ti