WiFi card for build


Marauder

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So I’m new to unraid, I haven’t installed it yet. Still weighing options on my setup rebuild. My new place requires(for now at least) that the system runs over WiFi as I can’t get Ethernet to where it’s being stored. Is anyone running theirs off of WiFi and can provide some suggestions on cards. My home WiFi is ac1600 so I should have decent speed. I just need a WiFi card for unraid and the vm I plan to build on it. It’ll need to handle torrents and media streamin. So connection count is going to be a factor. Can anyone recommend one that’ll work with unraid?

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UnRAID does not include any WiFi drivers so you would need hardware that works without such drivers.   You may find it easier to use freestanding hardware that can be hardwired into unRAID via Ethernet but then acts as an Access Point (via WiFi) to your main system.   This approach would mean that unRAID would just use a standard Ethernet link as the WiFi is being handled externally to the unRAID server.

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Thanks, that's not a bad idea. Unfortunately. If I do an external system like that I can't leverage the faster bandwidth speeds of wireless AC as ultimately it'll be a wired Gig connection from the external system to the box. But it might be what I have to do, if I choose to go with Unraid and they don't have wireless device support. 

 

I could do something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Wireless-AC-Universal-Connector-WUMC710/dp/B0090DX8O8 or a much cheaper https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-4-Port-Gigabit-Speeds-Wireless/dp/B00A66WJWK

And do a bonded nic, or use dual nics from different services.

 

Edited: to add links, for anyone in the same situation for future reference.

Edited by Marauder
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31 minutes ago, Marauder said:

Unfortunately. If I do an external system like that I can't leverage the faster bandwidth speeds of wireless AC as ultimately it'll be a wired Gig connection from the external system to the box.

If the system is stored somewhere that you can't run a wired cable to it then you are highly unlikely to reach the advertised AC1600 speed (which is 3 simultaneous 433.3 streams if I recall correctly).

 

A closed door alone can half your speed. 😓

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The router would be in the living room, and the server would be in the laundry room, almost directly below it. So yea I would lose a good bit of that bandwidth due to the floor. But I figure If I buy an AC bridge i'd be better off than a G bridge. If the house wasn't a rental, i'd just drill a hole and run the wire.

AC1600 is 16x4 which according to netgears site is 300(2.4Ghz)+1300(5Ghz) Mbps speeds

Edited by Marauder
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Just a tidbit to add.. those are theoretical limits of speed, not what you see in real life. 

 

A wireless bridge is your best option, connect the server room to the living room via wifi, and take all 4 of those ports from the wireless bridge and plug into unraid. Unraid handles LAG/LACP pretty well from my testing. *Do you have more then 1 ethernet port available to unraid?*

A nice high end device you could look into are ubiquity devices.. but they are a bit pricey.

 

That being said, after experiencing unify/UNMS and all the stuff that ubiquity uses, I wont ever look back. 

Edited by tbonedude420
lack of coffee... typos..
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20 minutes ago, tbonedude420 said:

Just a tidbit to add.. those are theoretical limits of speed, not what you see in real life. 

 

A wireless bridge is your best option, connect the server room to the living room via wifi, and take all 4 of those ports from the wireless bridge and plug into unraid. Unraid handles LAG/LACP pretty well from my testing. *Do you have more then 1 ethernet port available to unraid?*

A nice high end device you could look into are ubiquity devices.. but they are a bit pricey.

 

That being said, after experiencing unify/UNMS and all the stuff that ubiquity uses, I wont ever look back. 

I used to have ubiquity wifi throughout my old place. There stuff is great, just might be out of the price range for me right now. My current setup R710, Dell powervault is shared with a friend of mine, and he's since decided to boot me off, and just give me the bits of hardware that are mine. So having to buy hardware to get back up and running. 

 

The server i'm probably going to be using is my old Supermicro X7DAE MB with Supermicro 825 case, with 32gb of ram. The MB has dual Gig nics which i'll utilize. If needed I'll add an additional nic or 2 through PCI.

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1 minute ago, Marauder said:

The server i'm probably going to be using is my old Supermicro X7DAE MB with Supermicro 825 case, with 32gb of ram. The MB has dual Gig nics which i'll utilize. If needed I'll add an additional nic or 2 through PCI.

Oldie, but goodie...Though a bit of a hog when it comes to consumption of power.

 

Any chance you have other 'junk' laying around? Maybe a few linksys routers? bef/sr models?

They can be flashed with DDWRT or Tomato firmware, and you then can make your own wireless bridge.

Granted, it would be G band, not N/AC, but getting up and running (in my opinion) would be first priority. 

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3 hours ago, Marauder said:

The router would be in the living room, and the server would be in the laundry room, almost directly below it. So yea I would lose a good bit of that bandwidth due to the floor. But I figure If I buy an AC bridge i'd be better off than a G bridge. If the house wasn't a rental, i'd just drill a hole and run the wire.

AC1600 is 16x4 which according to netgears site is 300(2.4Ghz)+1300(5Ghz) Mbps speeds

Side note.. Understandably its a rental, so no holes.. but what about opening up an outlet, and dropping a line straight down to the laundry room? 50feet of shielded CMR should be fairly cheap(20¢ a foot last I checked), (go with cat6/cat6a if you can afford it) and it should drop straight down to an adjacent outlet?

 

Not everyone has crimping tools.. but you could get the female style and use a punch down tool (aka, flathead screw driver) and then make a 'proper looking' connection, without drilling holes and voiding rental agreements. Worst comes to worst, just remove it before leaving the building?

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I was thinking of doing something like that too. I've done wiring in the past. But the power outlets don't line up. It's not directly below it's delow and around 5-10 ft over with another wall. There's no outlet on that wall so it wouldn't be a simple drop down. I might be able to run a cable over to one that I can drop down.

 

Yea the MB is old, it's running Dual Xeon 5355. The power is a concern, but I don't think I've got anything else close performance wise. Only other machine's I've got are old AMDs or old Dell 1850. 

 

If I was to go with internals would would you guys recommend spec wise? It'll be running 8-10 3tb drives used as a torrent server, and media streaming(emby). I do have a 16bay Rackable systems(r06530) but thats also old and going to be a powerhog.  

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24 minutes ago, Marauder said:

I was thinking of doing something like that too. I've done wiring in the past. But the power outlets don't line up. It's not directly below it's delow and around 5-10 ft over with another wall. There's no outlet on that wall so it wouldn't be a simple drop down. I might be able to run a cable over to one that I can drop down.

 

Yea the MB is old, it's running Dual Xeon 5355. The power is a concern, but I don't think I've got anything else close performance wise. Only other machine's I've got are old AMDs or old Dell 1850. 

 

If I was to go with internals would would you guys recommend spec wise? It'll be running 8-10 3tb drives used as a torrent server, and media streaming(emby). I do have a 16bay Rackable systems(r06530) but thats also old and going to be a powerhog.  

 

WHY EMBY?! ❤️ Plex

hah.

 

Hardware wise, unless your transcoding (which it seems like you might be) your main concern is quality power delivery, and reliable sas/sata controllers. ddr3 based servers are finally starting to come down in price, see ebay, amazon, server-store, server-monkey, craigslist.. ect. IMO, the Xeon 2670 is the best for the price. 8c16thread /w 20mb of cache. 130$ new, or 50-75 used on ebay/amazon. Its socket 2011, with ddr3 or 4 support depending on the mobo. (I would go ddr3.. cheaper.. reliable. ddr4 isnt that much faster in frequency, or bandwidth, and for the price.. its not worth it (in my opinion)

 

A decent dual xeon chassis with no drives, can run as low as 200$ in some cases (usually without ram). I just built a socket 2011 with 'new' parts, for about a grand. dual 2670's, 64gb ecc/registered/buffered. 16c32t @ 3.3ghz. For the price? Its almost on par with a threadripper from AMD. IPC is 'slightly' lower, but overall, price to performance, what I built works for me. 

 

To put that further into prospective, my entire full build was 1150$ with tax, and odds and ends that were needed. Threadripper v1 alone is 800$, and a board is about 300. That still doesnt include ram, psu, gpu, drives, case, ect...which are included in my purchase.

 

(edit for pcpartpicker list) https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Z2bdMZ

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0056OUTBK/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1 <- the case im using

 

2670 is 2.6ghz /w 3.3ghz turboboost. Just to clarify, and I plan on running these full tilt 24/7. Worst case scenario, i've got some AIO's laying around, and I may just watercool my server.. because I can. :D

 

Also, the 3x 5 1/4 bays has been converted to a 4x 3.5 hotswap bay. They sell it that way, I choose to do it on my own with spare parts. I havent used emby in a while, does it have a similar feature to plex where you can 'optimize' media? If so, that would take alot of the transcoding work out of the equation, and your server wouldn't have to work as hard to stream the media. 

Edited by tbonedude420
added links, clarifications.
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1 hour ago, tbonedude420 said:

 

Also, the 3x 5 1/4 bays has been converted to a 4x 3.5 hotswap bay. They sell it that way, I choose to do it on my own with spare parts. I havent used emby in a while, does it have a similar feature to plex where you can 'optimize' media? If so, that would take alot of the transcoding work out of the equation, and your server wouldn't have to work as hard to stream the media. 

I used to use plex a couple years ago and had issues with it. Emby as far as I know from talking with friends offers all the features of plex. It can optimize(though I don't use it) download files to devices, handle streaming TV input etc. I like it mainly because it doesn't require a my server/users to be registered with plex, it's all self contained. When i used plex years ago it had lots of issues with playback and wouldn't see all my files, I had around 25,000 tv episodes and it would only show 18,000 or so. So i gave up and switched. This was maybe 3-4 years ago. I've heard it's gotten a lot better since then. 

 

I'll check out the 2670 procs. I was looking at the 2011 sockets before as they seemed to be a good middle with price, power, and performance. A big concern was ram. I'm not sure how much i'll need. I used to use FreeNas and they'd recommend a min of 6GB plus 1GB for each TB of storage. Last system was 72gb of ram with Dual E5620. 

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Getting a bit more off topic now, but do you really need a raid controller if you're using UnRaid? As unraid handles the drives, I just need to make them visible to it, so a Sata expansion PCI card should be enough, Or do you utilize a raid card as they tend to have better performance and just make each drive it's own JBOD to pass them through?

 

I've been out of the hardware game for a while now, lol.

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6 minutes ago, Marauder said:

Getting a bit more off topic now, but do you really need a raid controller if you're using UnRaid? As unraid handles the drives, I just need to make them visible to it, so a Sata expansion PCI card should be enough, Or do you utilize a raid card as they tend to have better performance and just make each drive it's own JBOD to pass them through?

 

I've been out of the hardware game for a while now, lol.

Defiantly not. Most of us use "raid" cards, simply because we can flash initiator target mode (IT mode) and use them as a 8port HBA. They also offer good speed, and batteries for those who do use the integrated raid part (IR mode).

 

If you wanted to use a 20$ amazon vantec '4x sata port card' thats perfectly acceptable too, (In most cases). There is talk of the cheaper cards being.. well. cheap - Sometimes out right dying, other times drives 'go missing' causing panic, when ultimately its just a cheap controller. 

 

Also, most motherboards have between 4 and 12 sata slots... and some of us use 24 port and more expanders. IIRC, unraid handles about 24-26 drives. If you need more then that, you raid togather a few of them, and inside of unraid instead of seeing 4x4tb drives, it will show 1 drive at 16TB. Just another way of doing things, thats all. 

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Ok so it's basically what I figured. I've just got so many ideas on how to do the setup, lol. Could also just repurpose my old gaming machine. Thats got an i7-4770k with 24gb of ram. Then I could use the old Nvidia 570ti(i think) for transcoding help. Right now i've got 8 3tb drives, then like 4 2tb drives I can get back once I pull my data off the old system. So storage won't be a problem for now, it'll just be fitting them all in a case, but thats where you can get creative.

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Has dremel, will travel!

 

4770k is a strong cpu, high IPC good for transcoding. I dont think the 570 is supported.. could be wrong.. will check. (ill edit in later if I find an answer, but I remember it being limited to 6xx series and higher)

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

Click down at the bottom "Titan/Geforce" you will see its 600 series and higher. Sorry mate!

 

Even if it is, 265 probably wont work, and your limited to 1 transcode (via nvidia, they have mentioned they dont want people doing exactly what were trying to do)

Edited by tbonedude420
added links, clarifications.
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lol yea exactly a dremel, drill, ductape and zipties, they'll all fit.  Yea it's an older gpu, i figured it might not work. 

The 4470k would be the cheapest option, but the most boring. I then just wipe my Windows OS and do Unraid, with linux. 

If i don't use the supermicro setup I can always sell that to recoup some of the costs. Most the pasts are old and super cheap not, but the case I"m sure is still worth something.

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On 9/12/2018 at 3:49 AM, Marauder said:

Ok so it's basically what I figured. I've just got so many ideas on how to do the setup, lol. Could also just repurpose my old gaming machine. Thats got an i7-4770k with 24gb of ram. Then I could use the old Nvidia 570ti(i think) for transcoding help. Right now i've got 8 3tb drives, then like 4 2tb drives I can get back once I pull my data off the old system. So storage won't be a problem for now, it'll just be fitting them all in a case, but thats where you can get creative. 

Just to resolve some questions you might have.

GPU based transcoding is limited to VMs in unRAID, because there are no GPU drivers on the Host to pass the GPU to the plex/emby docker. (I prefer emby too as there's no need to phone home and that stuff) Personally, as a single/dual stream user, I just use a Pentium G4620 and enable the iGPU to assist with the transcoding in Emby.

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