NAS, HTPC, and Gaming Build


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This will be my first unraid build and I wanted to get everyone's thoughts on component selection. I intend it to be used primarily a NAS for the household (backing up other household computers and phones, important documents, pictures, movies, etc, also running something like ownCloud), while also serving as the HTPC in the living room and gaming PC for the wife. We have been using a PS4 attached to a 1080p TV running PLEX to stream content from our old mac mini. It's time for an upgrade and I'd like the system to be able to virtualize Windows 10 to run Kodi as our HTPC and Steam for gaming. I'd like to also being able to serve 2-3 PLEX transcodes (1080p) while the windows VM is running to other clients around the house. I'd prefer to dedicate 4 cores to the Windows VM, which will always be running. So I am thinking a 6 core processor at a minimum, which also need to be relatively high clock to support gaming. I would also like to use ECC RAM so that's pushing me to the Xeon line (Ryzen is also appealing and it sounds like compatibility is getting better, but I'm still worried about the growing pains). I am looking to future-proof this system as best as possible, so I'm comfortable spending money up front to ensure that capability. I would like to be able to add a second video card for my son in a number of years so he can play light games (thinking Mincecraft) on a thin-client.

 

So, at a minimum, I'm looking for the following capability:

9-10 hard drives for future expandability.

Two video cards for separate gaming virtual machines (probably light gaming, so 2-3 cores per VM is acceptable - will start with one Windows 10 VM for now)

Enough PCIe lanes to eventually add in a 10Gb Ethernet card

Motherboard with IPMI (this build will be in the living room and I will be disabling the power/reset switches - the toddler loves buttons!)

Fast cache drive to run VMs and docker containers, running at least the following:

PLEX, sabnzbd, sonarr, radarr, mineOS, Pi-hole, OwnCloud, and at least one Windows VM for Kodi and Steam gaming, with two Windows VMs in the future.

 

Here's what I have picked out so far:

 

CPU: E5-1650 V4 (6 core, 12 thread, 3.6 GHz)

Motherboard: X10SRA-F (10 SATA ports with IPMI and plenty of expansion capability)

RAM: 4x 8GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered RAM

CASE: Silverstone GD08  (one of the few cases that fits our living room entertainment center while holding 9-10 drives)

Power Supply: Seasonic Flagship Prime Titanium 1000W (needed for eventually powering two video cards and 10+ drives)

Graphics Card: EVGA GTX 1060 (already purchased)

Add-On Card: Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe card for two NVMe M.2 drives (this card should hopefully allow me to use two NVMe drives in unraid as a cache pool. The X10SRA-F motherboard support bifurcation of the 8x PCIe slot into 4x/4x, so hopefully this will work?) 

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U9S

Fans: 3x Noctua NF-P12 PWM (higher static pressure for under the hard drives)

          2x Noctua NF-S12A PWM (side intake)

          2x Noctua NF-A8 PWM (back exhaust)

 

Parity Drive: 8TB WD Red

Data Drive: 1x  8TB WD Red (more to be added as needed)

Cache Drive: Samsung 960 Pro 512GB  (M.2 NVMe drive - used as cache, docker, and VM drive - driven from the PCIe add-on card listed above. One drive to start, will add another soon to create cache pool).

 

I think my biggest concern is about the support and compatibility of the NVMe drive in unRAID. I haven't found a clear example of anyone using a card like the Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 with two NVMe drives successfully. I plan on splitting the cache drive to also host the windows VM and dockers, so I'm wondering if I'll get any speed advantage running the NVMe drive over a standard (and much less expensive) SATA SSD. The other benefit I see is freeing up 1-2 SATA ports by using the PCIe lanes.

 

I've also heard that Intel will be updating the E5 and E7 line sometime soon, so I'm not sure if this is even the best time to buy into the outgoing 2011-3 platform. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated!

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unRAID supports NVMe no problems, and I don't see any reason why that 'spliiter' card wouldn't work.  NVMe is much quicker as a cache, I've run NVMe in the past in unRAID and Plex ran much better, as did VMs.  Currently running a SATA Samsung 850 EVO and it's reasonably quick, but it is noticeably slower.  I'm only using the 850 EVO because I needed the NVMe drive somewhere else.

 

Docker and VMs run off the cache drive by default on unRAID, so that's no problem.

 

As for your 2011-3 question, I wouldn't.  I have an Asus X99-A board with an E5 Xeon in it, and it's sitting on a shelf.  The power consumption of the X99 system is much, much more than my current i5.  The i5 machine idles less than 15W, about 50W with all the drives running and the CPU busy.  The X99 uses 80W doing nothing.

 

Ryzen is much, much better than it was even a month ago.  I sort of gave up on my R7, and went back to an i7-7700K. The Ryzen had terrible stability problems, and would randomly go to black screen, then lock up solid.  Today I was off work and fed up, so fired up the R7 board, updated the BIOS, reset all my BIOS settings and everything is totally stable.  It's been running 3DMark on loop for 6 hours now, no problems.  It's very hard to go past 8 proper cores, with SMT on top.  You also get all the fancy USB3.1 built in to the chipset on Ryzen, where on X99 it's all added on with chips that are using up precious PCI-E lanes.

Edited by HellDiverUK
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  • 1 year later...
On 7/10/2017 at 5:50 AM, LanceK said:

I think my biggest concern is about the support and compatibility of the NVMe drive in unRAID. I haven't found a clear example of anyone using a card like the Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 with two NVMe drives successfully.

 

any update available if this works for you ?

Edited by unrateable
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I have the asus hyper-x nvme adaptor in the phys x16 (electrical x8) , slot1 of my board. supports bifurcation. both ssds are nvme x4 latest gen.

tried with auto and x4x4 bios setting , in legacy OPROM mode, but unraid only recognizes one nvme (970) and not the 2nd (wd black)

 

I wonder if I need to switch to EFI OPROM mode (whats that for anyway?)  or use SLOT6 instead .  unfortunately in SLOT6 is my double slot GPU which probably wont fit in SLOT1 and I wont be able to run the GPU x16 (although thats not that important since dif between x8 and x16 GPUs cant barely be noticed)

 

ideas?

 

ps: i hate that the tinkering messes up my vm xmls after each reboot but one´s got to pay the price... 😅

Edited by unrateable
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2 minutes ago, unrateable said:

I wonder if I need to switch to EFI OPROM mode (whats that for anyway?)  or use SLOT6 instead .  unfortunately in SLOT6 is my double slot GPU which probably wont fit in SLOT1 and I wont be able to run x16 (although thats not that important since dif between x8 and x16 cant barely be noticed)

Usually only one slot supports bifurcation, and at least on the X11SSM the slot number it's identified in the bios next to bifurcation enable/disable option, in this case slot 7 IIRC.

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10 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Usually only one slot supports bifurcation, and at least on the X11SSM the slot number it's identified in the bios next to bifurcation enable/disable option, in this case slot 7 IIRC.

 

I was thinking my board can do 2 slots bifurcated , however still doesnt explain why SLOT1 doesnt work, unless I also need to activate it for SLOT6 the same time.....

1480585422_Screenshot_2019-02-14MNL-1643pdf(1).thumb.png.3ab50034d177b3954e4ca6b64cd1fc1e.png256609045_Screenshot_2019-02-14MNL-1643pdf.thumb.png.d149c916dda3749f22cf41fecf658d63.png256609045_Screenshot_2019-02-14MNL-1643pdf.thumb.png.d149c916dda3749f22cf41fecf658d63.png

 

could activating SR-IOV make a difference ?...hm

 

Edited by unrateable
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7 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Also, I don't know about this adapter:

I only know about the Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 which is the one you were asking about.

sorry, my bad, I am using this one....

 

I used auto and x4x4 but only one nvme shows up.

 

the adaptor has room for 4 m.2 s . I have the 970 in the second and the wd black in the first. maybe two of the 4 wont work since the pcie slot is x8 max...

 

ill try to swap (the wd) this upcoming weekend....

 

Edited by unrateable
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..couldnt resist and updated the bios + swapped the nvme sockets on the asus hyper-x adaptor card few minutes ago.

now I am using the two sockets next to each other and in numerical order.

wohoooo the motherboard seems to like it; unraid reports the two nvme in two seperate iommu groups. clean and sweet. 😁

I conclude the reason of my issue was that the asus card signal routing wasnt connecting the two nvme ssds to the mobo PCIe slot (electr. x8 /mechanical x16) on the first 8 consecutive lanes.

Edited by unrateable
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