I currently run WHS with an Areca raid card in a 24bay Norco w/ 2 Raid 6 arrays (~36TB usable).  I built a new server for FreeNAS, but after building an unRaid server for a friend I am having second thoughts.

 

My primary driver for FreeNAS was attaining 20-30% parity, setting up 3x 8 drive vdevs in z2 (raid 6 ish) pooled together so that I would have 18 storage drives and 6 parity drives.  However given the steep learning curve with FreeNAS relative to the simplicity of unRaid I am seriously reconsidering this plan.

 

Use case is mediaserver + owncloud.  I share this with family and can have 6-8 concurrent streams via plex.  I'd like to be able to support 10 streams concurrently @ 4mbps - 8mbps (I have 1gbps internet).

 

Two questions:

1. Is my hardware sufficient for 10 concurrent streams with Plex?

2. Will random reads from individual drives as opposed to spanning across multiple be able to support 10 streams?

 

Hardware:

Intel E3 1275 - 3.40Ghz 8 core

64gb ECC ram

IBM m1015 controller

Supermico X10 board

Supermicro 846 24 bay case

2x256gb Samsung 850 Pro (cache now?)

 

 

Your CPU only has a Passmark score of 10K, which according to Plex you should be maxing out at around 5 transcode streams... I'm guessing you have a lot of your stuff either optimized or is under the 4 Mbp/s threshold so it just direct streams.

 

You will likely need a dual CPU build to support that many users.

 

If the reads are all from different drives you won't have any issues as unRAID doesn't stripe data across drives, the real limiting factors are individual drive performance and controller bottle neck. I haven't run into any issues yet with merely three streams (two transcoded, one local stream). I will note that I didn't check to see if everything was on the same drive, but it was all movies.

 

Transcode remote is limited to 4mbps

Transcode local is limited to 8mbps

I try to utilize a NUC at home to allow for direct stream but ATV / Roku used by kids

 

I'm not sure what the capability of the IBM M1015 is.  Hoping to upgrade gradually to WD red pro 7200 rpm to improve single drive performance.

 

Will using a cache pool 2x256gb and having plex transcode through ram help or is the CPU the bottleneck?

CPU is the traditional bottleneck for Plex and you are certain to hit it if you want to transcode 10 streams.  That said, Plex does trancode to disk.  I think a pair of high quality SSDs will be sufficient but another option is setting the transcode directory to a RAM drive.

On 2/16/2017 at 11:32 PM, bigzaj said:

I currently run WHS with an Areca raid card in a 24bay Norco w/ 2 Raid 6 arrays (~36TB usable).  I built a new server for FreeNAS, but after building an unRaid server for a friend I am having second thoughts.

 

My primary driver for FreeNAS was attaining 20-30% parity, setting up 3x 8 drive vdevs in z2 (raid 6 ish) pooled together so that I would have 18 storage drives and 6 parity drives.  However given the steep learning curve with FreeNAS relative to the simplicity of unRaid I am seriously reconsidering this plan.

 

Use case is mediaserver + owncloud.  I share this with family and can have 6-8 concurrent streams via plex.  I'd like to be able to support 10 streams concurrently @ 4mbps - 8mbps (I have 1gbps internet).

 

Two questions:

1. Is my hardware sufficient for 10 concurrent streams with Plex?

2. Will random reads from individual drives as opposed to spanning across multiple be able to support 10 streams?

 

Hardware:

Intel E3 1275 - 3.40Ghz 8 core

64gb ECC ram

IBM m1015 controller

Supermico X10 board

Supermicro 846 24 bay case

2x256gb Samsung 850 Pro (cache now?)

 

 

I'm currently getting 4 plex streams (720p) with a i3-3225 and 16GBs of RAM with a passmark score of 4339 on a gigabit network...However this peg's my CPU at 100%.

 

I'm currently on FreeNAS and I'm definitely making the switch....I'm going with a AMD processor that's rated at almost 9K.

What unRAID does for NAS that no others do is offer ease of capacity expansion. You can add any size drive you want at any time (regarding that your parity drive is at least as large as any of your data drives).  This negates the need to match a bunch of the same drives together when what you're looking for is oodles of storage, and so saves cost when upgrade time comes.

 

The downside is (generally) you're using one or two disks at a time with unRAID, and this means your data flow is limited by the max transfer rates of a single drive (or multiple drives if your files are spread across them evenly).

 

FreeNAS and others give you more bandwidth by striping multiple data paths together for higher throughput at the cost of requiring same size disks for each member, and so greater cost and lower upgrade flexibility.

 

So in making the decision between the two (specifically, because you mentioned them both) you need to consider whether data transfer rates will be a limiting factor for your use case, and how you will solve that issue if yes.

 

However, beyond that perhaps more importantly is how concerned you are for the safety of your data. When you get into large volumes (above 10 or 12TB) you really need to consider traditional RAID level limitations (RAID5 or RAID6 or even ZFS variations on those themes) which are only really good up to that volume size (http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-6-stops-working-in-2019/, among other similar articles all over the Internet).  Beyond that you are tempting fate to the point where you may win the lottery sooner than you'll escape data loss with RAID5 or RAID6.

 

With unRAID the risks are nowhere near as high because each data disk is its own separate file system that is simply unified for ease of file management, and XOR'd onto one or two parity drives for protection.  The end result is, as long as you keep on top of drive faults and other hardware failures, your data are much less likely to fall off the edge of the earth. If catastrophe should ensue, and you lose more than one drive at the same time with unRAID, you still have all your other drives' worth of data intact, awaiting your enjoyment.

 

In my own experience I have only lost data from my unRAID arrays because I hit the DELETE key when I shouldn't have. In nearly 10 years, I'd say that's a solid recommendation. I cannot say the same for any of my RAID5 or RAID6 arrays I have used over the years, unfortunately. I never trust them without full backups of all data.