So my mobo has been tweaking out and the sas cards no longer are working and my current server is almost 10 years old now so I figured it was time for an upgrade, is there a current 'meta' build like there used to be as far as good recommended hardware? It seems like the blueprints and stuff in the wiki is the same stuff that was recommended back in 2011. I have about 20TB of a mix of 1 and 2TB WD red and green drives on a zotac server motherboard with an I dont remember what celeron server cpu. is the norco 4220 still one of the better cases to get if i want to go rack mount now? original server was 4 norco drive cages in a full tower. I'd like to upgrade to unraid 6 (still running 5) and do something with plex or other media/stream ad ons and maybe run it as a torrent download box... I'm pretty sure I know what drives i'm going to get, was just wondering whats the commonly recommended for mobo/cpu/ram and SAS/SATA expander cards for 2018 that will be compatible and work with unraid.

 

any other advice for the upgrade (its really gonna be build basically a whole new server and migrate over not a true upgrade)

 

 

Go with LSI SATA cards.  Most other brands have proved troublesome in certain situations.  Other than that, your hardware choices are pretty wide open but I would be looking mostly at the last couple of generations of CPU families.  

 

For Plex, you need about 2000 passmark per stream if you are going to transcode 1080p streams on the fly.  Most folks are using Intel i5 and i7 processors to do the type of tasks you are looking at.  The new AMD chipsets look promising but there are still some teething problems.  If you enjoy a hands-on approach, you could consider them.  

 

Going from version 5 to version 6, the good news is that you won't have any problems if you want to move the drives to the new server.  The flip-side is that you will lose virtually everything.  You can read the upgrade WIKI here:

 

      http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Upgrading_to_UnRAID_v6

 

At this point, I would suggest a complete reinstall with the latest version 6.5.1.  You can copy over the appropriate files from the config folder/directory to preserve the basic setup but you will have install new plugins and use Dockers whenever possible.  

You can run unRAID 6 in a very basic setup, but since it's capable of so much more it's worth throwing more hardware at it.  Frank covered a lot of good information but here's a few more thoughts:

 

For a CPU, a Pentium is a good basic starting point with Core i3/i5's as upgrades to allow you to run more Dockers and Core i7/Xeon E3 as the higher end option.  There are people who run even bigger boxes but it doesn't sound like you want to go there...  Warning, media applications such as encoding and transcoding like lots of CPU.

 

For RAM, 4GB is Ok for a very basic NAS only setup, 8GB is the much more common starting point and 16GB is where you start to get some flexibility.  ECC RAM is nice and always appropriate for an always-on fault tolerant server, but not strictly needed.

 

Mobo?  A good name brand that has the features you want, preferably without Marvel SATA ports and with an Intel NIC.  Asus, ASRock, Supermicro, MSI to name a few.

 

BTW, one of the best things you can do for yourself is upgrade all those 1 and 2TB drives to bigger, modern drives.  Nothing smaller than 4TB or 6TB drives is my recommendation, and 8TB is usually the best price/performance point.  As a side benefit, you might not need SAS/SATA expanders if you go with 8TB drives... 

2 hours ago, tdallen said:

You can run unRAID 6 in a very basic setup, but since it's capable of so much more it's worth throwing more hardware at it.  Frank covered a lot of good information but here's a few more thoughts:

 

For a CPU, a Pentium is a good basic starting point with Core i3/i5's as upgrades to allow you to run more Dockers and Core i7/Xeon E3 as the higher end option.  There are people who run even bigger boxes but it doesn't sound like you want to go there...  Warning, media applications such as encoding and transcoding like lots of CPU.

 

For RAM, 4GB is Ok for a very basic NAS only setup, 8GB is the much more common starting point and 16GB is where you start to get some flexibility.  ECC RAM is nice and always appropriate for an always-on fault tolerant server, but not strictly needed.

 

Mobo?  A good name brand that has the features you want, preferably without Marvel SATA ports and with an Intel NIC.  Asus, ASRock, Supermicro, MSI to name a few.

 

BTW, one of the best things you can do for yourself is upgrade all those 1 and 2TB drives to bigger, modern drives.  Nothing smaller than 4TB or 6TB drives is my recommendation, and 8TB is usually the best price/performance point.  As a side benefit, you might not need SAS/SATA expanders if you go with 8TB drives... 

 

Like i said i'm starting from scratch, i dont intend to use 6-10 year old hard disks in the new build, I will start with new probably 3TB red drives seems to be a price sweet spot based on amazon searches. The only thing really being retained is the unraid license as of right now, the old case and drive cages are so caked with dust its crazy.

 

 

 

I recommend that you go way bigger than 3TB drives. Don't look at anything smaller than 6TB. You also reduce the amount of power your machine draws by reducing the number of drives.

8TB is the place to be starting now, really.  I wouldn't even bother with 6TB.

 

Damn 8TB drive's are so expensive though. 

48 minutes ago, witalit said:

Damn 8TB drive's are so expensive though. 

 

But they store 2.7 times as much data as a 3 TB drive.

 

And they consume 2.7 times fewer SATA cables, ports and mechanical slots.

 

And they significantly reduces the total power consumption - smaller electricity bill, less fan noise, less heat in the case, less sound and vibrations from spinning spindles, ...

 

And being 2.7 times larger, they have a longer economical lifetime - how long it's meaningful to keep them before they become too small so you need to throw them out to get a disk slot free for a bigger disk.

 

Having higher data density, they normally have a higher sustained data transfer rate.

 

A 3 TB drive needs to have a significantly lower price per GB to make it economical to select 3 TB drives instead of 8 TB drives.

And I will also point out, the the bigger drives have a failure rate which is approximately the same as the smaller drives.  See here:

 

     https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

 

So, statistically, you should have few drive related issues by going with fewer large drives.  Remember, you are buying storage capacity in TB's NOT drives.  Price out the cost of *5*  6TB drives  vs the cost of *4*  8TB drives.  Figure out how soon, you will need to purchase the next drive because you have run out of space.  If you get a MB with *6*  SATA connectors and use 8TB drives, you will have a spare SATA connector (assuming that you will also install a cache drive) for the first expansion thus saving the cost of a SATA card for a few years