I have an old gigabyte ga-ex38-ds4 and an Intel core 2 duo 8200 with 4gb non ecc ddr2 ram.

 

I currently use it for a pfsense but need to upgrade my pfsense for newer CPU support.

 

I also have a more modern desktop with Haswell 4670k. For a while I was considering buying a new motherboard and CPU and using my haswell in the nas. But if I can use my older PC I can get away with not buying a new PC at this moment. Saving money.

 

I plan to buy a vero 4k for media PC so don't want to use plex.

 

I plan to buy 4x 6tb WD 5400 nas drive, Silverstone SST-ECS02 and a 8 bay rackmount case and a single rail PSU.

 

I also have 4x 4tb non NAS drives with data on, that I want to add in once I have copied the data off.

 

Should I avoid using old hardware at this point?

Any other recommendations or tips?

 

Thanks.

 

Sent from my SHIELD Tablet using Tapatalk

 

 

 

Edited April 8, 20188 yr by Simontv

1 hour ago, Simontv said:

 

I have an old gigabyte ga-ex38-ds4 and an Intel core 2 duo 8200 with 4gb non ecc ddr2 ram.

 

I currently use it for a pfsense but need to upgrade my pfsense for newer CPU support.

 

I also have a more modern desktop with Haswell 4670k. For a while I was considering buying a new motherboard and CPU and using my haswell in the nas. But if I can use my older PC I can get away with not buying a new PC at this moment. Saving money.

 

I plan to buy a vero 4k for media PC so don't want to use plex.

 

I plan to buy 4x 6tb WD 5400 nas drive, Silverstone SST-ECS02 and a 8 bay rackmount case and a single rail PSU.

 

I also have 4x 4tb non NAS drives with data on, that I want to add in once I have copied the data off.

 

Should I avoid using old hardware at this point?

Any other recommendations or tips?

 

Thanks.

 

Your gigabyte should work fine for testing the waters of unRAID.

 

It should be powerful enough for the file server function. And likely fine for a couple of Dockers as well including Plex. (Your ability to transcode would likely be very limited, but if you have a capable media player, you'd be able to serve media with no problem).

 

VM capability would be hampered by power and RAM. You could play perhaps, but not recommended for daily use.

 

Once you build your understanding of unRAID and what you want to use it for, you might decide to convert your desktop to be your unRAID server, which would provide a lot of more power and options. I never thought I would, but my desktop Windows box is now a VM running off my unRAID server. With passthrough video and USB, no one would ever know. And with the server in the basement and using a couple longer cable runs, I have no noise at all in my office / study and enjoy very responsive 4K video and keyboard/mouse. 

 

If you want to push unRAID to be a heavy VM / transcoding machine, you might look for a newer platform like TR, X299, Rizen, or newest Kaby/Coffee Lake options. All of a sudden 4 core CPUs are old news, and these options give you 6-18 high speed cores for serious computing power. Some provide hardware transcode for X265 streams (read about Quick Sync) if that is important to you.

Thanks for the reply. Using that old motherboard would I be able to say for example, have two or three people playing videos over the network and transcoding on their own media player? 

 

One thing I learned recently was that the Vero 4k only has 100mbit and I spoke to Vero support directly about this and they confirmed that 4k bitstreaming fits nicely in to 100mbit without an issue, much to my surprise. I was thinking surely then if there was one or two other people watching videos without bitstreaming, just playing from a laptop in their bedroom for example directly. That a gigabit connection or two might be suffice in serving the media. The next bottleneck I guess would be the read speed on the hard drives and if we were all reading from the same drive, that might slow it down? But then I was thinking wouldn't that be a problem even if I had a faster cpu and ram, as it is simply the network speed and read speed on the drives that are in play when there is no transcoding directly on the NAS device taking place?

 

I can't see me running my desktop as a vm as I play bf1 and bf4 and I spent a lot of time on my PC and can't have the resources being shared with anything else.  I work in IT so very familiar with vmware so won't be needing to "play around" with vms. I was considering running pfsense as a VM, but decided against it as want that on its own device, so building a mini itx 1u for pfsense. Other than that, only other thing i could imagine I would put in a VM in the future would be some sort of CCTV controller but that not planning on getting CCTV for a number of years as only just buying a house now. 

 

The guy at work runs freenas and puts the home automation software (which i think is available on unraid through docker). But I don't have any plans on running that either, well not initially. I just want to get some disk redundancy as few years ago lost like 300 bluray films and all my 4tb drives are down to about 400gb free. 

 

I also rent a dedicated server from OVH that is quite well spec and I have esxi 6 and pfsense and freebsd on there. I could consider putting cctv controller (not the video files) or new VMs on there if I want to test things out. That has 3tb in raid 1, 6 core 32gb ram. £30 per month. 

Edited April 9, 20188 yr by Simontv

1 hour ago, Simontv said:

I just want to get some disk redundancy as few years ago lost like 300 bluray films and all my 4tb drives are down to about 400gb free. 

Disk redundancy is NOT backup. If you value your data, it needs to be stored in at least 2 discrete places.

I know it is not backup the problem is I have over 20tb of data and there is no cheap way to back that up. End of day I could get the data back, I would just prefer not to have to as it is very time consuming and often can't always get all of it back. Which is what I found when trying to redownload the 300 films that I lost. But If i did lose the data it would not be the end of the world.  I just want to add disk redundancy so that If i lose a disk I don't lose the data. Maybe eventually in the future I could be in a financial situation where I can afford some 10tb disks or the price of large disks comes down and I can afford to have some disks not plugged in that I use for backup. But at this point I can not afford like £600 just to have a off site or offline backup. 

 

 

Edited April 9, 20188 yr by Simontv

1 hour ago, Simontv said:

If i did lose the data it would not be the end of the world.

I don't try to backup everything either but I do have offsite backups of the most important stuff. We've certainly had people come on here asking us to save their baby pictures.

I have some photos but only about 1gb and they are backed up to different smaller hard drives. It is mostly films and TV series and documentaries and books.  Books are already backed up. I do have a bunch of 3 and 2 TB drives that I can use for backup, rather than having it as over flow data. 

 

I guess I am best simply trying it and if it turns out to be insufficient for my requirements that I will be forced to upgrade it. 

4 hours ago, Simontv said:

Thanks for the reply. Using that old motherboard would I be able to say for example, have two or three people playing videos over the network and transcoding on their own media player?

 

Crystal ball says no. You might be able to serve if no transcoding was required. You could "pre-transcode" specific shows in anticipation for them working. This type of transcoding can be done non-realtime so even a server that can't keep up with realtime, can use spare cycles over the course of hours to days to transcode some shows, and when time comes to play the show, it is ready and does not tax the server to serve the transocded file. You can delete the transcoded shows later.

 

UPDATE: rereading this ... if other users are transcoding this could work. But your internet would need to be fast enough to send untranscoded video to that many sources. Maybe possible for lower resolutions or heavily compressed video, or if internet is exceedingly fast.

 

Quote

One thing I learned recently was that the Vero 4k only has 100mbit and I spoke to Vero support directly about this and they confirmed that 4k bitstreaming fits nicely in to 100mbit without an issue, much to my surprise. I was thinking surely then if there was one or two other people watching videos without bitstreaming, just playing from a laptop in their bedroom for example directly. That a gigabit connection or two might be suffice in serving the media. The next bottleneck I guess would be the read speed on the hard drives and if we were all reading from the same drive, that might slow it down? But then I was thinking wouldn't that be a problem even if I had a faster cpu and ram, as it is simply the network speed and read speed on the drives that are in play when there is no transcoding directly on the NAS device taking place?

 

Normally you can't send untranscoded video over the Internet due to bandwidth. But with gigabit, it would be possible. Have never tried it.

 

Quote

I can't see me running my desktop as a vm as I play bf1 and bf4 and I spent a lot of time on my PC and can't have the resources being shared with anything else.  I work in IT so very familiar with vmware so won't be needing to "play around" with vms. I was considering running pfsense as a VM, but decided against it as want that on its own device, so building a mini itx 1u for pfsense. Other than that, only other thing i could imagine I would put in a VM in the future would be some sort of CCTV controller but that not planning on getting CCTV for a number of years as only just buying a house now. 

 

You would be surprised, with a powerful server you can run a VM just a hairs breath slower than running it bare metal Windows. Look online for examples of people running 2 gaming VMs on the same server with high frame rates. And throwing all those resources into a single VM would not disappoint. You have tools to dedicate certain cores to certain VMs, so sharing need not be a concern. I expect running one gaming VM on a powerful server, you'd get much better performance than you are getting today on your dedicated Windows box (passing through video and keyboard/mouse using vt-d).

 

Quote

The guy at work runs freenas and puts the home automation software (which i think is available on unraid through docker). But I don't have any plans on running that either, well not initially. I just want to get some disk redundancy as few years ago lost like 300 bluray films and all my 4tb drives are down to about 400gb free. 

 

I also rent a dedicated server from OVH that is quite well spec and I have esxi 6 and pfsense and freebsd on there. I could consider putting cctv controller (not the video files) or new VMs on there if I want to test things out. That has 3tb in raid 1, 6 core 32gb ram. £30 per month. 

 

Not sure what home automation software you are having in mind. Can you clarify?

 

unRAID is good for redundancy. But it is not a backup.

 

Good luck!

Edited April 9, 20188 yr by SSD