I am building a new unRAID system to act as a media server in my home.  The primary application is to run as a file server and a SageTV server – I will be using the unRAID/Docker version of SageTV.  I will also be installing the Dockers for Plex and AirVideoHD but this will be used much less frequently.  I will also want to install Ubuntu in a VM and WHS2011 in a VM which I will continue to use for backups of the Windows PC on my LAN.  I may be doing some transcoding from time to time as I may use Handbrake to re-encode recorded TV files.  And I may want another VM or two to play around with other OSes from time to time.

 

For hard drives I am likely going to buy a new 4TB to use as a parity drive and recycle 3 x 3TB (or similar size) hard drives.  I would then likely use one or two 128GB SSDs as cache drives.  I would be sure to have my SageTV appdata on this partition to make sure that it runs as quickly as possible.

 

I can recycle the components mentioned above.  Will they be suitable?  One potential negative is that the mobo only has 2x6Gbps SATA and 4x3Gbps SATA.  But if I want more drives it should be easy to add a PCIe SATA controller.

 

Is 16GB enough memory for this system?  I currently have 2x4GB sticks in the system and I was going to add 8GB more, although I guess I could go to 24GB by adding 2x8GB.  Is mixing RAM sizes an issue?  I don’t think it is as long as the specs like timing are the same, or am I wrong here?

 

Anyone have any experience in using this mobo or a similar Asus mobo for unRAID?  Anything to be aware of in the UEFI/BIOS settings for virtualization?  Anyone know if the mobo’s firewire port would work in unRAID for channel tuning in the SageTV Docker?

 

I read somewhere that there are benefits to using two cache drives – why is that?

 

Here are some of the CPU specs.  Do I need the VM stuff that this CPU does not support?

Intel® Turbo Boost Technology ‡ 2.0

Intel® vPro Technology ‡ No

Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology ‡ No

Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) ‡ Yes

Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) ‡ No

Intel® VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT) ‡ Yes

Intel® 64 ‡ Yes

 

 

Hi -

 

A few answers, but I don't have experience with that Motherboard.

 

- Your plan for the hard drives makes sense.

- Your plan for the SSD(s) makes sense.  There are two reasons for implementing a pool of cache devices - increasing the size of the pool and redundancy.  The default when you add a 2nd cache device is Raid 1ish pool (two copies of your data).

- 16GB sounds fine for unRAID, some Dockers, and a VM or two.  It sounds like you'd like to be able to run several VMs, though, and it could be light for that.  There's a lot of overhead to account for.

- Only having VT-x means that you can't do hardware pass-through.  Your VMs will have to run headless, accessed via RDP or VNC.  So good for server type functions but you won't be passing in a GPU, for instance.