I came across a dual hexa core Xeon X5650 server with 32 GB of ram, and no HDD, for a whopping price of $100 USD. I have been wanting to get in the server side of computing, so I bought it. The only issue is, the server has 8 2.5" drives, and I have more 3.5" than I know what to do with.

 

If I was to run my 3.5" drives in a separate rack mounted server as a NAS (or some storage server) how could unRAID connect to those drives.

 

I have never installed unRAID, but am familiar with Linux. Is a simple mount to remote directory all that is needed.

 

I intend to use unRAID to virtualize a plex server, a windows VM and an Ubuntu VM. With the boot drives on the local machine (unRAID) and the storage drives for the VM's would be on the separate storage server/NAS.

 

Thanks,

Stuart.

use an SAS expander with a cable out the back of the card to access another array/disk box. that's what i do for my 3.5 drives.

You could also try to get a case that can house more drives.

There are backplanes that can take 6x2.5" drives in a 5.25" slot. (e.g. ICY Dock MB996SP-6SB)

You can even buy some 5in3s and run the cables out the back to connect power and data. My backup server is set up this way. Looks like a spider with the 5in3s as the feet. Let's me hook up a lot of drives to one server. Works if server is secluded, as mine is. Wouldn't want this in your living room!

I came across a dual hexa core Xeon X5650 server with 32 GB of ram, and no HDD, for a whopping price of $100 USD. I have been wanting to get in the server side of computing, so I bought it. The only issue is, the server has 8 2.5" drives, and I have more 3.5" than I know what to do with.

 

If I was to run my 3.5" drives in a separate rack mounted server as a NAS (or some storage server) how could unRAID connect to those drives.

 

I have never installed unRAID, but am familiar with Linux. Is a simple mount to remote directory all that is needed.

 

I intend to use unRAID to virtualize a plex server, a windows VM and an Ubuntu VM. With the boot drives on the local machine (unRAID) and the storage drives for the VM's would be on the separate storage server/NAS.

 

Thanks,

Stuart.

 

My use case was i didn't need another unraid server at the time i poked around with this. I actually accomplished this myself by slapping together an ubuntu server with SMB and CIFS(the rest of my machines are windows so i wanted to be able to transfer stuff there that way). On the unraid side of things i used the unassigned devices plugin, and mounted a network share in it. this actually creates a share on the unraid server itself(albiet i could never access the share from unraid's shares on a windows PC due to permission issues). the unassigned devices plugin will allow to you add individual drives, like usb external drives, as well as SMB or NFS network shares. i'd recommend giving it a look, and firing up a trial of unraid, installing the amazing unassigned devices plugin, to see if it fits your use case.

 

From there, because its actually showing as a share like in a normal linux share, i could import that share folder into any docker, and my VMs would access it directly via the linux box. i've tacked in both windows and linux shares this way at times to simply cloudify my storage.

 

This proved useful because i run Plex as a docker, and needed a temporary storage fix. Plex was able to access the share through unraid.

 

I stopped using it because the unassigned devices plugin & unraid didn't like it when the linux server went down for whatever reason or was disconnected, and tried to reconnect. i had to reboot the unraid server before it'd work properly again from the console, as the web gui became unresponsive.

 

I'll also add i stopped about 6 months ago going this route once i resolved the storage issue. i have a new unraid build i'm working on, whereby a seperate machine more capable of adding more drives will simply be used as long term storage. i plan on pairing the two unraid servers with the unassigned devices plugin simply for ease of use. i can work with linux & CLI, but i prefer the ease of use, and the additional functions/stability i can easily achieve with unraid. sometimes i want things to just work, and this worked the best for me.

 

You can even buy some 5in3s and run the cables out the back to connect power and data. My backup server is set up this way. Looks like a spider with the 5in3s as the feet. Let's me hook up a lot of drives to one server. Works if server is secluded, as mine is. Wouldn't want this in your living room!

This is how I connected 12 3.5 drives on my HP N54L before I decommissioned it.  Except I had 2 4 in 3 cages rather than 5 in 3s.