ChappyEight Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 I have an elementary question of which I cannot seem to find an answer. I've been running an UnRaid for about 2 years successfully and using the Plex docker. This server is literally only for Plex. I'm moving to a new home where I'll be building a server closet and I'd like to move my unraid/plex server hardware into a rack mounted box. Basically this server was a "test" using an old machine to see if I could actually get it set up and going. Two years and 3 HDD upgrades later, it's fully functioning and doing great. I'm running unraid off a USB stick. So, I have two primary questions: Knowing nothing of rack mount enclosures, do they typically accept ATX motherboards? In other words, what are the odds that I can literally just take the hardware out of my current gaming enclosure and install them into this rack enclosure and have everything work okay? If that isn't possible and I need to get a new mobo/processor/RAM combo with the old HDD's, any suggestions? I'd like to avoid pre-built NAS boxes as it seems they lack the necessary specs for Plex transcoding. Regardless of whether I need to replace the mobe, etc. to move into a rack mount enclosure, I've been wanting to add a file server to my network. Would you all suggest that I buy a rack enclosure with enough space for more than the 4 HDD's (3 in RAID, 1 parity) and simply use shares to create a plex server and file server on the same machine? Or, would you suggest I buy something small to swap the Plex into and then either buy or build a second NAS unit for the file server? I appreciate you humoring my ignorance on these matters. - Chappy Quote Link to comment
saarg Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 Rack cases can fit ATX motherboards, so you should be able to move the existing hardware to your new case. You will most likely have to get a 4U case to fit the power supply. You also need to consider the height of the cpu cooler if it's not a stock one. Unraid is a Nas and the file server part doesn't use much cpu, so buy a case that have space for lots of disks. Then you don't have to worry about upgrades further down the line. So use the same server for both plex and file sharing. 1 Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 7, 2018 Author Share Posted March 7, 2018 Much appreciated, @saarg. I'm thinking this case might do the trick: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00N9CXGSO/?coliid=I1WQLVBYOQMDBN&colid=13726JSCYFZ23&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it . Like I mentioned, I have 4 drives (3 Plex, 1 parity) so this would give me 8 bays to either develop a file server, expand Plex, or both. Thanks again, Chappy Quote Link to comment
saarg Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 Looks good. Don't know what alternatives there are as I'm not US based. Price seems decent, but you might find something cheaper and used off ebay. 1 Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 7, 2018 Author Share Posted March 7, 2018 (edited) 5 minutes ago, saarg said: Price seems decent, but you might find something cheaper and used off ebay. Great point, I'll be certain to look there. One more question, and this one is a noob question for sure. Do I/should I somehow separate the Plex files from the file server or, rather, should I consider the entire server as one big file server that happens to have plex files in one of the folders? If the latter, will I screw up the Plex docker if I move the current folders into a larger overall file structure or can I simply update the paths in the docker? Thanks, Chappy Edited March 7, 2018 by ChappyEight Added quote. Quote Link to comment
statecowboy Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 (edited) What do you mean by file server (LAN shares, cloud shares, etc.)? You can create shares for whatever you want, and not need to pass those shares to your file server (or just turn on smb shares to share whichever shares you want over your LAN). My personal setup is I have a share for movies and tv which are passed to plex. I also run nextcloud as a file server of sorts which allows me to add, share, download, upload etc files to/from my machine (I have a dedicated nextcloud share, but also pass my other shares to it so I can use them). You can pass whatever shares you want to the file server. Depending on what file server system you're talking about, I don't see any value in moving all of your media into one big folder. As for a chassis, I have a Norco 4224, purchased from Newegg. It has 24 hot swappable bays, plenty of room for future expansion. Quality control and support are basically non-existent with Norco, but my chassis works perfectly. Edited March 7, 2018 by statecowboy Quote Link to comment
mgworek Posted March 7, 2018 Share Posted March 7, 2018 If your looking into getting a 4U, it might be worth it to get a Roswell Case. It will be a little more money but you will get more bays. For $100 more you can get 20 bays. https://www.amazon.com/NORCO-20-Bays-Server-Chassis-RPC-4220/dp/B00BQY39SO/ref=pd_sbs_147_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00BQY39SO&pd_rd_r=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5&pd_rd_w=5uPYM&pd_rd_wg=vnWoG&psc=1&refRID=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5 You can spend a little more then that to get 25 bays. I don't know how much of a rush you are or where you are in the US but I have the 20 bay case above that I will be selling but it might be 1-2 months. Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 15, 2018 Author Share Posted March 15, 2018 Sorry for the delayed response, life's been a bit nuts at work. On 3/7/2018 at 1:10 PM, statecowboy said: What do you mean by file server (LAN shares, cloud shares, etc.)? You can create shares for whatever you want, and not need to pass those shares to your file server (or just turn on smb shares to share whichever shares you want over your LAN). My personal setup is I have a share for movies and tv which are passed to plex. I also run nextcloud as a file server of sorts which allows me to add, share, download, upload etc files to/from my machine (I have a dedicated nextcloud share, but also pass my other shares to it so I can use them). You can pass whatever shares you want to the file server. Depending on what file server system you're talking about, I don't see any value in moving all of your media into one big folder. As for a chassis, I have a Norco 4224, purchased from Newegg. It has 24 hot swappable bays, plenty of room for future expansion. Quality control and support are basically non-existent with Norco, but my chassis works perfectly. I'm going to swallow my pride here and come clean that when I say "file server" I don't know much more than that. My intent was to mean a consolidated storage point for the home, a portion of which serves as my Plex server. Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives? On 3/7/2018 at 2:54 PM, mgworek said: If your looking into getting a 4U, it might be worth it to get a Roswell Case. It will be a little more money but you will get more bays. For $100 more you can get 20 bays. https://www.amazon.com/NORCO-20-Bays-Server-Chassis-RPC-4220/dp/B00BQY39SO/ref=pd_sbs_147_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B00BQY39SO&pd_rd_r=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5&pd_rd_w=5uPYM&pd_rd_wg=vnWoG&psc=1&refRID=07Y94NPR0KKMVCFXA6H5 You can spend a little more then that to get 25 bays. I don't know how much of a rush you are or where you are in the US but I have the 20 bay case above that I will be selling but it might be 1-2 months. I'm in no huge rush. Should be closing on this house in early April and moving by mid-April. Probably get this network all set up in May if I can get the Cat cabling run by then. Thanks again, folks, really appreciate your time. - Chappy Quote Link to comment
saarg Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 There are different ways to get 24 drives connected. You could buy a port multiplier/sas expander, but this is slower as you use one sata port for multiple disks. There's also hba cards. These are faster as each drive has full bandwidth. The cheaper cards have mostly 8 or 16 ports, so you need two to fill up your drive bays. You could also crossflash a raid card into IT mode (Works the same way as an hba card). You can find lots of cheap good cards on eBay. A third option would be to buy a motherboard with a built in raid controller (needs to be able to flash it to IT mode), but I'm not sure if there are motherboards with 24 ports though. The disk guru @johnnie.black probably have some good recommendations for cards and can explain more correctly about the different options With unraid you have what you call a file server that can run both VM's (if your hardware supports it) and docker containers with a lot of applications available. 1 Quote Link to comment
statecowboy Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 5 hours ago, ChappyEight said: Sorry for the delayed response, life's been a bit nuts at work. I'm going to swallow my pride here and come clean that when I say "file server" I don't know much more than that. My intent was to mean a consolidated storage point for the home, a portion of which serves as my Plex server. Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives? I'm in no huge rush. Should be closing on this house in early April and moving by mid-April. Probably get this network all set up in May if I can get the Cat cabling run by then. Thanks again, folks, really appreciate your time. - Chappy No judgement here.....this was my first "server" build so I had to learn all of that as well over the last few months. With the Norco 4224 chassis you have 6 backplanes. Each backplane has a SAS connector and a molex power connector (it appears with the norco chassis there are different configurations out in the wild, some with multiple molex connections etc - however, mine has one sas port and one molex port on each backplane). From that SAS connector you can do one of a couple of things. One would be to run a reverse breakout cable from the sas connector to multiple SATA ports on your MOBO. Assuming your mobo doesn't have a ton of spare SATA ports, you are looking at doing what @saarg recommended, which is getting into a SAS controller card and a SAS expander. This is the route I went. I have an LSI 9210-8i sas controller flashed to IT mode (basically this gets rid of the raid functionality of the card so your system just sees drives and you decide what to do with them) which is connected (with 2 sas to sas cables) to an HP 24 drive SAS expander card. From the SAS expander card I run 6 SAS to SAS cables from each of the ports on the expander card to the backplanes. For what it's worth I bought the sas controller and expander for about $60 for both (used on ebay). As far as "file server", unraid has built in share functionality. So, you can just set up SMB shares with whatever share folders you decide you want to share over your LAN. There are also various dockers that give you additional functionality, like nextcloud, which allows you to log in to your server and share files similar to dropbox. 1 Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted March 15, 2018 Share Posted March 15, 2018 7 hours ago, ChappyEight said: Here's a second really dumb question: if I were to build a Norco 4224 system, using my existing 4 drives but all new hardware otherwise, how do you get enough SATA ports to connect all 24 drives? Recommend way is using multiple HBAs to get the necessary number of ports, e.g. one 16 port plus one 8 port or three 8 port, LSI HBAs are recommended, or using a single 8 port HBA connected to a SAS expander, if you want to go with one of these options we can recommend some models. You can also use the available onboard SATA ports together with any of those options. 1 Quote Link to comment
NewDisplayName Posted March 16, 2018 Share Posted March 16, 2018 One hint, i always wanted a rack mountable solution and bought a server case for it.... big fail. Its too hot or too loud. Except you only want to put some hdds into it. I let mb, cpu and ram in server case and buy a big tower case, where i just put the hdds. Maybe i can make this way a quit and cold envirorment. Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 17, 2018 Author Share Posted March 17, 2018 (edited) So, @johnnie.black , is something like this a decent deal? https://www.ebay.com/i/173103529991?ul_noapp=true Edited March 17, 2018 by ChappyEight Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted March 17, 2018 Share Posted March 17, 2018 20 minutes ago, ChappyEight said: So, @johnnie.black , is something like this a decent deal? https://www.ebay.com/i/173103529991?ul_noapp=true Don't know if the price is good or not as I don't know for how much they usually go, it does seem cheap, backplane is the one without an expander, so 24 individual SATA ports, can be messy with all the cables, but the espander backplane model is usually considerably more expensive. 1 Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 17, 2018 Author Share Posted March 17, 2018 ahh, appreciate the clarification and taking the time to respond so quickly. Quite the learning curve here... Quote Link to comment
JorgeB Posted March 17, 2018 Share Posted March 17, 2018 1 minute ago, ChappyEight said: ahh, appreciate the clarification and taking the time to respond so quickly. Quite the learning curve here... See here for a description of the most common models, the SAS2 expander model is the most wanted, and you want to avoid the SAS1 expander model as it's limited to 2TB disks: https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/supermicro-4u-24-bay-chassis-gotchas.11625/ 1 Quote Link to comment
ChappyEight Posted March 17, 2018 Author Share Posted March 17, 2018 Really appreciate the link. Thanks again. Time to do some more research... Quote Link to comment
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