Hi all

 

i am looking to move away from my current setup as it is no longer meeting my needs. i have an asrock c2750 with a octocore atom CPU. im going to move away from this to a much more powerful setup, the one question i have is i currently use all 12 sata ports on the board plus a 4 x sata pci adapter and am looking to go with a gaming board and put a couple of SAS cards in for my 16 drives with adapters plus whatever is onboard, (prob six satas)

 

i would prob go with the 16 spinny drives on the two SAS cards (none raid) and use say 4 x 480gb ssd drives satas as cache and 2 x ssd unassigned drives for VMs and docker images etc. I would look to expand this at a later date using additional raid cards.

 

should it be pretty painless to move my array over? ive rebuilt my unraid box before and its been a breeze but as im moving away from hardware i know works to the unknown. i was wondering if i would have any issues with the array, is there any raid cards i need to particularly stay away from or come recommend for unraid with minimal fuss, i did buy an LSI one that refused to work with OMV in my days prior to unraid so that put me off a little.

 

thanks as always in advance for your advice/replies

 

 

There are some restrictions with SAS so search the forum for this.

And be aware that the BIOS of your new Board can handle all SATA/SAS Cards you want to use.

sorry i meant cards that are sas/sata as my drives are sata similar to this

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/KALEA-INFORMATIQUE-Controller-SATA-8-ports-RAID-10-MEGARAID-9217-8i-Microsoft/dp/B01ETCAMF2/ref=sr_1_19?ie=UTF8&qid=1483446485&sr=8-19&keywords=8+x+sata

 

 

The move should be very painless => just connect your drives and boot to the flash drive and everything should work exactly as it is now ... just FASTER 

 

The only issue is, as you've correctly surmised, to be sure you're using HBA's that are supported by UnRAID -- which is MOST of the common cards.    LSI-based boards (like the one you linked to) generally work very well ... there are several different cards based on the LSI chips that folks are using with UnRAID.    Marvell chips sometimes have issues, so unless you have a chance to test a Marvell-based card with your specific motherboard I"d tend to stay away from those.

 

The octocore Avoton you've got is a very nice board -- you may want to keep it as a backup server unless you've already got a good backup strategy.  Very low power -- but still a fair amount of CPU "horsepower".

 

i agree about the board but now i am using a lot more resources on unraid, it doesnt seem to have the grunt i need now. im finding that when plex is in full swing with several users along with all my vms etc, im seeing slowdowns with stuff in general. also being an ITX size board, there is not much room for upgrades as far as pci expansion goes.

 

i spent a while looking into the options when i upgraded and heard a lot of good things about it, i was toying with the idea of freenas before i got it and was told some of the sata controllers didnt play nice with BSD but ive been happy with it on the whole. i didnt go down the server and array case route due to the cooling and noise as my server is in my office.

 

ive had a nas in one shape or another for about 10/11 years, starting with windows then moving onto ubuntu server then more customised builds such as omv and ive tried amahi, but i love unraids simplicity and docker support is great. ive not had a drive die yet to test out the recovery (touch wood!)

The Avoton has plenty of "oomph" for NAS duties -- but clearly not for CPU-intensive transcoding, etc.    Plex generally needs about 2000 PassMarks of CPU "horsepower" per stream -- so clearly an Avoton with 3800 PassMarks isn't a good fit if you're running multiple streams ... especially if you're also running VM's, Dockers, etc.

 

I wonder if it's possible to have PLEX run as a guest VM on ESXi server but, use the storage on an unRAID server?

I wonder if it's possible to have PLEX run as a guest VM on ESXi server but, use the storage on an unRAID server?

 

Sure -- I know several folks who either have a dedicated ESXi server or a Windows w/Hyper-V system for all their VM's, but an UnRAID server for their NAS.    The only disadvantage is that disk I/O is limited by the network speed ... but in most cases this isn't a big issue.

 

 

Having re-platformed my array 3 times, I can tell you that it tends to be much more painful than you expect.

 

The unRAID part is easy. You probably wouldn't even have to upgrade your memory stick if you moved everything over and all the connections were rock solid. Truly plug and play.

 

But I'd never do it. Too much risk for sensitive data to be moved from one box to another. One loose cable and a drive is dropped from the array in the middle of your first parity check. Then you have to rebuild that drive, but in the middle of the rebuild another drive drops. Believe me - it is a nightmare to bring up an array like that, with data you really care about!

 

I suggest to do replatforming at a time you are planning to do some substantial drive upsizings. Set up the new server with 25%+ of the capacity of the old server. Run it through its motions, while all of your data is safe and secure on the other server. Once you are confident in the new server, copy data from the drives you want to eventually move to the new server from your old server. Only after that server is up and humming should you actually break the old array and move the data drives over. Might have to do this a couple of times to get all of the drives moved over. Leave smaller drives behind in the old server, and use it for backups.

 

I highly recommend drive cages in the new server. Makes life much easier to move drives around without opening the server and risking knocking something loose.

 

Best of luck!