What type of hardware requirements will I be looking at for a total of 16 drives?

 

Wanting something that will only need to run Unraid.

 

This box will be directly connected to my main server via SFP+ 10gbps connection.

 

That connection will then be added to the hyper-v virtual switch with all of my servers to allow them the fastest connection to the DAS/NAS

 

If it was not for the USB requirement I would of just used an expander and ran unraid as a VM.

unRAID generally isn't CPU intensive unless you begin running applications via plugins/Docker/VMs.  You'll want a modern (Haswell or newer) CPU because of the instruction set support for dual parity (I assume with 16 drives you'll want dual parity).  Will you be running ECC RAM?

 

The 10gbps connection is something I don't have experience with and might keep you out of a low end CPU (not sure if a Pentium G4400 would be enough, for instance).  unRAID is more likely to become I/O bound than saturate a 10gbps link, though.  What type of activity are you planning on (number users/streams, reading vs. writing, etc.).

 

 

Wanting something that will only need to run Unraid.

 

This box will be directly connected to my main server via SFP+ 10gbps connection.

Unless you are planning an all SSD build, it will be a few years before an unraid box can meaningfully use a 10gbps connection. Have you researched unraid much? It's not really much for speed, typical write speeds are about 1/2 of theoretical single drive performance, read speeds should be close to single drive. Unraid doesn't stripe data across multiple drives.

The 10Gbps connection is cheap (about 60.00) and I just want to make sure my VM's on my primary server do not have the connection between the storage and server be the weak link.

 

I currently run a server 2016 hyper-v server with several Ubuntu VM's running things like Plex, Owncloud, Sonarr, Radarr, Nzbget, and Jackett.

 

Also some windows VM's for server 2016 RDS server, 2016 Domain controller, 2016 with misc services.

 

All of my data is currently on an external USB3 Raid 5 of 4x 4TB HDD in a Mediasonic Proraid. This array is full as is my external 4TB I used to offload non-media files from the array.

 

Plex has anywhere from 2 to 3 users on it at any time, owncloud is syncing multiple computers through out the day and of course the downloader VM's are always doing something.

 

If unraid cannot handle this does anyone have another recommendation? I would go with another larger raid 5 or 6 but I am worried about the drive size and the chance of rebuilds failing. (also the disk space loss)

You can get 10GbE speeds with unRAID using a fast enough device (or pool of devices) as cache, those speeds are not possible using the array with HDDs or SATA SSDs since unRAID doesn't stripe data, and currently no single device can reach 1GB/s read or write (except NVMe SSDs)

unRAID is more than capable of handling a 4x4TB storage array (or lots more) and 2-3 Plex streams.  Assuming transcoding is required (is it?  depends on your media and players) then give unRAID 1,000 - 2,000 Passmarks to work with and then the usual 2,000 per 1080p stream.  I'd probably use a Core i7 or E3 Xeon but I like to have plenty of CPU to spare.  If transcoding is not required then a Pentium or Core i3 is probably sufficient.  8GB of RAM is sufficient but I'd use 16GB.  I'd use ECC RAM but it's not as critical a requirement as it is with something like ZFS.  Plan on an SSD cache drive (or 2 if you want redundancy) to run Docker and Plex from.

 

I'm assuming all those VMs will remain where they are.  If you are moving any of them to unRAID it's a different story.

 

Also, just to be sure - unRAID isn't traditional RAID and doesn't implement RAID level 5, 6, 10, etc.  Hopefully you've read up on unRAID's software RAID implementation and are comfortable with it.

My primary server is handling all of the VM's and Transcoding. (dual ht/hexacore Xeons with 80GB ram)

 

Unraid will only be for data storage and retrieval.

 

So I need to know what is the minimal acceptable hardware requirement to host about 8 HDD's and some SSD's for cache with the ability to expand to 15 or so drives in the future.

 

The motherboard will need a minimal of 2 8X pcie slots for the 10Gbps card and the raid card. Maybe even 3 8X slots for future expand-ability.

I am looking at unraid as a means of affordable storage system without losing to much space (like raid 5 and 6 or 10)

 

All HDD's will be 128+ cache 7200RPM drives.