Hi. I am currently running a Windows 10 box which is really a cobbled together and "aggregated over the years" bunch of hardware and storage. It is being used as a HTPC, gaming machine and also for file storage but not in a very organised or safe way - if I had a disk failure on some of the drives attached I would be in big trouble. I use and external USB3 2-bay raid 1 drive with 2 8TB drives in it for keeping important data and backups, plus a media & software library, but after reading around this site about UnRAID 6, I thought that maybe I should use UnRAID to build a machine which is a combination of NAS utilizing all the various attached drives with a VM win10 machine utilizing my GPU (gtx1080) for gaming and HTPC, etc.

 

So it is an Asus Z97-a motherboard with a core i7 4770K, 16GB ddr3 RAM. Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU. I also own a PCIe sata port expansion card (or raid card maybe) so I can increase the number of possible drives attached

I have Windows 10 running on a 500GB Samsung SSD, plus 2 x 250GB SSDs in RAID0 as a Steam library drive, Plus I have 1 x 2TB HDD, 1x 4TB HDD and an optical drive (DVD reader/burner). As I said, I also have an external drive box which is actually a USB3 drive with 2 x 8TB HDDs inside in RAID1, so although that is 16TB, I'm using 8TB mirrored. I also have a 2 TB Western Digital "green" HDD just sitting spare as a backup drive.

 

What I was wondering about achieving using UnRAID, was to get all the HDDs - 2 x 8TB, 1 x 4TB, 2 x 2TB, 1 x 500GB SSD as a JBOD disk array, using 2 x 250GB SSDs as the cache pool.

 

I would also like to have a VM which is my Windows 10 install, which I hope can utilize the GTX 1080 GPU as a gaming /HTPC/workstation machine, which accesses the disk array for media and installed software. This is one of the first concerns I have, since the lga 1150 motherboard I have can only ever support 4-core 8-thread CPUs, will it be enough for me to assign 1 cpu core to the NAS part of this system, and 3 CPU cores to the VM? And RAM - 2-4GB to the NAS and 12-14GB to the VM?

 

Also, since I hear that Windows 10 licensing is very dependent on recognizing hardware it is installed to - it isn't going to work for me to just "clone" my Win10 install and run it as the VM right? Although it is still running on the same motherboard, etc -  it is through the layer of a hypervisor. Am I better off using Windows 8.1?

 

The alternative is to look around for a used, more "server" style motherboard/CPU like some kind of xeon system with maybe 6 cores/ 12 threads, but I would rather use the hardware I already have.

 

Another concern I have about migrating the current system across to an UnRAID one, is having somewhere to copy all the data from all the disks to, before I format them into the UnRAID array, then transfer the data back. From what I have read, I am supposed to use one of my 8TB drives as the parity drive (as it is the biggest drive I have) - does this mean that this drive is pure parity and does not count as storage? I guess If I bought a 3rd 8TB drive of some kind - then I could put that on the array as parity drive, then format one of the raid 1 8TB drives on to the array and copy the data from the other before adding it to the array, then I can copy data from each of the other smaller drives before adding them to the array (I have USB3 adapters and sata power supply adapters so I can take a sata HDD and transfer it's contents via USB3).

 

This I expect to be a steep learning curve, but if I can pull it off I hope to gain much better data security, and a much more efficient usage of my hardware resources. And I hope to learn a lot as I do this too! I guess I am somewhat of a power user - I have had a computer of some kind since about 1985. I use Linux a lot and prefer it in many ways to Windows, but there is just so much more Windows software out there when I need to do something serious.

 

If any of the above descriptions and questions made no sense, please feel free to flame me or correct me, but if you can help I will appreciate it very much and I always try to return favors if I can.

 

Thanks for your time...

I think migrating to unRAID would be a big step forward once you get it all setup.

 

But I personally would tend to want the old trusty Windows box fully operational until the unRAID server was up and running. I might plan to set it up with just a couple new disks, and then migrate some of the physical disks from old to new in the future, but I'd get a new case, motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. And get unRAID all setup and running in parallel with your current setup. And when done you can decommission the old box. Or better yet, keep as a backup.

 

But if you want to reuse your current desktop as a server, it is certainly possible. CPU capable. RAM a little light but probably fine for (4G unRAID, 12G Windows VM). You might even be able to create a dual boot setup so that you can get back into your Windows box.

 

A VM loses only a little performance to a physical machine with the same number of cores. But unRAID wants one full core for itself and dockers, so in a 4 core machine, your VM would only get 3 cores. That would equate to loosing 25% of the horsepower. But if you had a 16 core machine, you could give 15 cores to a VM and lose only 6.25% of the power due to the lost core. (unRAID wants a core not just a thread - so even with hyperthreading you'd loose a whole core).

 

Most users are either going with Windows10 or Windows7. Personal preference. I went with 10. Gridrunner (a.k.a., "SpaceInvader One" on YouTube) has a two part video series on setting up a Win10 VM and passing through video and USB. I'd definitely check that out as my first steps into VMing.

 

You mention having a RAID card. Not sure which one, but typically you want to stay away from RAID controllers with unRAID.  Some RAID cards can be crossflashed into IT mode. If yours is possible to do so, should be fine after crossflashing. I tend to recommend the LSI SAS9201-8i. 8 drive card. Not RAID. No flashing necessary. ~$50 on eBay.

 

The way unRAID works is that the parity disk(s) store no data. They are just used for redundancy. If a disk were to fail, unRAID could rebuild (create a mirror image on a fresh disk) of the failed disk using all of the other disks + parity. With dual parity you could survive dual drive failure and rebuild both. The parity drives do not store data but they do count for your licensing count. In fact, ANY hard drives in the server at boot time count against licensing, even if they are not in use.

 

The mathematics behind RAID5 and RAID6 are basically the same as unRAID single and dual parity, but the similarity ends there. RAID5 and RAID6 stripe data across the disks. Each disks in a RAID array is loosing some of its capacity for redundancy whereas with unRAID, each data disk retains its full data capacity, and you sacrifice one (or two) whole disk(s) for redundancy. With RAID5/RAID6, if you loose more than 1 (2 with RAID6) disks, the entire array data is lost. With unRAID, if you lose more than 1 disk (2 with dual parity), all of the other disks are fully readable and usable. Only the data on the failed disk(s) are lost. Also, unRAID is not limited to disks of the same size. You can have a variety of disks of different sizes and grow organically as you need the space. This is not RAID5/6 strong suit. But RAID5/6 will be faster, especially on writes. Most folks here are using it mainly for media files and backups, and the write penalty is not much of a negative compared to the advantages I just listed. Adding an SSD that is not in the array (as an unRAID cache or unassigned device) would give you very fast performance on that disk, which is typically where things like VMs and Dockers are stored. So you get the best of both worlds.

Lots of good information on the wiki and by asking questions here. Good luck! You're about to embark on a fun project and think you'll be looking back a month or two from now very happy you decided to move to unRAID!