I apologize for the long post. I think i need to explain my position clearly so i can get the right advice to move forward.

 

My current Unraid situation:

 

• Unraid running on old Gigabyte MB with 16GB ram (GIGABYTE GA-Z87X-UD5H 1150 ATX) - 10 Sata ports
• CPU - I4790K
• 6 x Sata drives (parity and one other are 6TB), balance 4 are 2TB 7200 RPM NAS drives
• 2 x Cache SSDs (256 GB Samsung EVO and Mushkin)
• chassis is a Istarusa D-storm chassis which i love. (consumer ATX in a server chassis is Da Bomb)

 

Running the usual suspects - Plex server, Sonarr, Radarr, Sabnzbd, Ombi, Resilio-sync, etc.

Plex Media player embedded on openelec VM with passthrough GPU (AMD 250X) (which serves my Projector and HT room via AV equipment)

 

So far the above is rock solid. I have utilized about half my available storage of 14TB and all the dockers and VMs run off the cache exclusively. 

My issue lately has been a combination of worries....

a) My cache drives heat up and choke my system when Sabnzbd is unpacking movies. I split the temp and final downloads to different stores (temp is on spindles) and final is on SSD. This has somewhat alleviated the heatup, but system still chokes.

b) Plex streams concurrently to 3-4 users usually. While I notice CPU spikes intermittently when  transcoding, it seems to be managing somewhat. I have 7 users of my plex machine. Thank heavens they all don't stream at once. However with the advent of higher bit-rate movies and 4K, i suspect i will be crying soon.

 

I maybe trying to throw money at something that wont fix things, but i feel it's time to upgrade some hardware for better performance. I have 2 choices:

 

1. Swap out ageing MB, CPU,  (and therefore ram and PSU) for a Ryzen build with 8 cores while retaining Unraid config in place

or

2. Use another existing server platform I happen to have lying around with the following specs (was running freenas - but its a pile of Camel poo):

 

Dell R510 with Dual Xeon X5650 2.66ghz 6C CPUs

64GB RAM

12 x 1.2TB NL-SAS drives fully populated (5.1/4 spindles)

2 internal slots for additional 2.5 drives

2x10GB SFP+ NICS

 

The advantage with using pt.2 is that its already available and no need to spend money. However this thing is:

 

a) Loud

b) power hungry (and my energy company loves me)

c) expensive to replace or upgrade SAS drives

d) no GPU pass-through that will be a cake-walk. I will  have to find some odd half height PCI gen 2 card or some such thing or buy a Roku for the HT room and stream it instead of GPU passthrough.

 

What would you folks advice and/or do?

 

 

 

 

Hi -

 

I assume you've been reading the Ryzen threads.  I'm not ready to make the jump, too many early adopter issues especially with regard to passing through a GPU.  The dual X5650's would give you roughly 35% more Passmarks and would help with 1080p Plex streams.  I think we're going to see more hardware assisted transcoding in the future, though, like GPU based or the HEVC encoding support in Kaby Lake+ processors - so buying the right hardware may become as important as buying big hardware if your focus is high quality video,

 

I'd focus on your cache/SSD overheating issue and keep an eye on your CPU - the 4790k is still a good CPU and may keep you going for a while yet.

put a dedicated fan on your ssd first.

 

I use to have a dl 380 g6 with dual x5670's in it. Loved it. Loved that it chewed through everything I threw at it.

 

I now run a 10 core 20 thread server on one processor (sometimes move it up to 20/40 with a second processor- with 4 total sockets available) and I can tell you, having lots of cores is helpful. Especially for transcoding. So is having lots of ram. If your buy in price is cheap/next to nothing, then higher energy cost is fine in my book.

 

 

14 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Hi -

 

I assume you've been reading the Ryzen threads.  I'm not ready to make the jump, too many early adopter issues especially with regard to passing through a GPU.  The dual X5650's would give you roughly 35% more Passmarks and would help with 1080p Plex streams.  I think we're going to see more hardware assisted transcoding in the future, though, like GPU based or the HEVC encoding support in Kaby Lake+ processors - so buying the right hardware may become as important as buying big hardware if your focus is high quality video,

 

I'd focus on your cache/SSD overheating issue and keep an eye on your CPU - the 4790k is still a good CPU and may keep you going for a while yet.

 

I agree the 4790K is probably not the issue - and my SSDs should do the job in theory - i think it may be the ageing Mobo or something that is being thrashed. I did check out the Ryzen threads but from what i read, it seems mostly to be fixed ? 

8 minutes ago, harihoudini said:

 

I agree the 4790K is probably not the issue - and my SSDs should do the job in theory - i think it may be the ageing Mobo or something that is being thrashed. I did check out the Ryzen threads but from what i read, it seems mostly to be fixed ? 

 

Would you fly on a plane that was mostly fixed? Trust your data to a mostly rebuilt HDD?

 

I can't wait for ryzen issues to get fixed, but until then....eh.....