Good evening ;

I wanted to inform myself in advance what would come to me if I would switch from VmWare to unRAID.

 

Currently I use the NAS for private stuff:

 

Referring to PlexMediaServer; OwnCloud (backups for the phones) as well as Windows 10 Enterprise for movies to decode.

On the Windows VM the PlexMediaServer is running; what relative to the performance is relatively IO,

but I often have the problem that weakens the SMB share of the performance and breaks off.

 

Here are the data from the NAS:

 

OS: VmWare 6.5
VM * s: Windows 10 Enterprise; FreeNAS 11 (SMB); OwnCloud

Case: Chenbro RM 41400
including SAS backplade for 16 HDD HotSwap

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2650
Ram: 8 x 4 GB DDR3 ECC
Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-U8

Network Card: Intel Pro 1000PT 2 x 1 Gbps

Controller: 2x Dell H310i SAS 2 Port

HDD:

1 x 8 TB Seagate Archive HDD (Series)
4 x 4 TB WD Red (Films)
1 x 1.5 TB WD Green (OwnCloud)
1 x 500 GB (BackUp)
1 x 250 GB (docs / pictures)

OS HDD: 1 x 500 GB Samsung EVO SSD

 

So now to the direct question:

 

What disk would I have to take for the cache and would end up running everything again as it is now?

 

would it improve the performance if I use the SSD as a cache? or would I have to sacrifice a 4TB for that?

 

and how hard would it be to switch from the current system to unRAID?

just before I do not know if it brings me something I would not like to change the system.
At the moment I'm still waiting for 4 x 4 TB WD Red for further data / movies / series.

I'm aware that it would be a lot of work, only the work would be worth it if in the end everything would run better than now,

 

 

 

Sorry 4 the bad english i came from Germany ;.)

 

Hello and welcome.

 

unRAID boots from a USB stick, get a good one (though it doesn’t have to be very big, 8GB is plenty).  Your SSD will make a fine cache drive.  It will be an “application” drive - run your Dockers and VMs from the cache drive.  You don’t need to cache writes to the array - I’d suggest starting without that and just use the SSD for applications.

 

Your big challenge will be migrating your data.  unRAID formats drives as it adds them to the array.  It can mount foreign disks for the purpose of copying data.  What format are your current disks in?

currently all hdd are put together in simple freenas arrays. the important data are saved in my google drive so that would not be the problem.

currently all films / series are still on my online server as a back-up, that would not be the topic

since I have two 400MB cable lines, the 7 - 9 TB would not be the job to rebuild.

the unRAID runs on a USB stick, I've already understood, so the SSD would be sufficient for the applications.

So I installed now unraid and have to say top system.

 

Now I have another question:

 

I still have 2 x 300 GB SAS 15k HDD can you put together as raid1 and then use it as a cache?

 

would that bring something or would it be meaningless?

 

Currently I use the following dockers:

 

munin; filezilla; plex; plexpy;
handbrake; mkvtollnix; jdownloader; dupeGuru

 

and would like to spare the ssd.

 

What would you do ?
the ssd use or the 2 sas hdd

5 hours ago, MrDoob said:

I still have 2 x 300 GB SAS 15k HDD can you put together as raid1 and then use it as a cache?

That's the default mode for the cache pool