May 12, 20179 yr Hello, first time post! It's time for me to move away from WHS 2011. It's served faithfully but its day has come. I have two servers with 70TB but that's duplicated by using "Stablebit Drivepool" so it's really about 35-40TB of data. I noticed looking through the CPU threads many folks are using these Xeon and AM3+ CPUs. I don't quite understand that - but perhaps those folks are using virtual machines and gaming machines etc. My main server is an old hand-me-down FM2 AMD APU that's still working fine (it's the software I want to change out.) My only requirements are for pooled storage available from various devices around the house. No VMs, no gaming GPUs, etc. I strongly prefer AMD but I'm open to using Intel if I must for a NAS type build. Over on the some of the other products folks are using Intel Atom mini-ITX. Would that suffice for my needs and unRaid? Also this is probably a dumb question (non-hardware) but I'm imagining that the migration process will be to set up this server as a 3rd server with a couple hard drives, then pull files off my WHS2011 servers until there's enough space to remove a drive, and then pull the drive and replace in the unRaid server. Is that accurate or is there a way unRAID can more directly read this Stablebit Drivepool arrangement (I'm 99% sure no but I figured I'd ask in the remote case that it would save me time.)
May 12, 20179 yr Hello and welcome! unRAID has become a very effective home server platform, with people running many types of applications in addition to the basic NAS functionality it has historically been known for. It's the role as an application server that has caused people to start loading their unRAID servers with bigger CPUs and more memory. But if all you are interested in is basic NAS functionality, you don't need to splurge on hardware at all. That said, I don't know that I'd recommend an Atom. My suggestion would be a CPU with a bare minimum of 1,000 Passmarks and you'll really be happier targeting 2,000+ Passmarks. I'd go with 8GB of RAM on a NAS build, though you could make due with 4GB. AMD is fine. If you go Intel, I'd suggest a Haswell or newer Pentium (though a Celeron will work). Be careful, though. Dockers and VMs are a great way to extend the functionality of your unRAID server and if you start getting into that, you'll want some CPU cycles and RAM to spare. You are correct on your migration strategy. You'll have options to copy the data over, or you can read NTFS disks directly - but the unRAID storage array requires disks formatted with XFS, BTRFS, or ReiserFS so you'll be reformatting those Stablebit Drive Pool drives as you add them to the storage array. By the way, here are a couple of critical plugins: Good luck, and ask if you have questions.
May 12, 20179 yr unRAID will run on basically anything if all you're doing is running a few file shares. I have a Celeron J1900 machine running unRAID at work, and it runs just fine. Most folks run Plex as a media server on unRAID, so need the heavy CPU and RAM.
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