I have in my possession 4x6TB WD Red HDDs. Should I build a server?

[moistousness]

Hi guys, 

 

I have recently come into possession of 4x 6TB WD Red HDDs and was thinking about building a separate NAS with it. While researching, I came across Unraid and I'm really liking the flexibility and features of it. I have beast mitx build at the moment and am thinking of combining this PC and the drives into a server. 

 

Current PC Build

CPU: Intel Core i7 8700k

Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming

RAM: Corsair 16GB DDR4-3200 Memory 

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L12S

PSU: Corsair SF450

GPU: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB Mini ITX Video Card

Storage: 

• 2x Samsung - 970 Evo 500GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
• 1x Crucial - MX500 2TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
• 1x Seagate - BarraCuda 5TB 2.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive

 

What do I currently use my PC for?

• Music Production: Ableton EDM production with lots of VSTs (Synths and plugins)
• Gaming 
• Casual CAD design

 

What would I potential use an Unraid server for?

• NAS 
• Application/Plug-In Server
• VM

 

Is expandability important to me?

I think the drives I have now are more than sufficient. If I would need to expand more than this, I would probably upgrade everything. 

 

What do I plan to run for hard drives?

Games, Programs, DAW and VST Libraries, CAD files, Music, Pictures, Videos (TV Shows, Movies, Camera Recordings) 

 

Upgrade Parts

PSU: With the additional drives, I'll need to upgrade my SFX power supply. 

Case: I'm thinking the Fractal Design Node 304. It keeps it small (which I'm a fiend for) but has a lot of drive capacity. 

RAM: I'm not sure if I need to upgrade to 32GB. I'm thinking of leaving it at 16GB for now.

 

My Questions

• What drive configuration should I use?
  • Since I only have 4x SATA ports on the motherboard, I'm unsure of what combination of drives I should contain in the server. The M.2 drives don't take any ports so I can keep those (cache drive in raid 1?). Should I use all the ports for the WD Reds and forget about the 2TB SDD or use 3x of the WD Reds and use the 2TB SDD with the M.2. in an SSD cache pool or something?
• Would I be getting good performance with the hardware I have, even though it's not server grade? 
• Music Production performance?
  • What would potentially benefit me would be having a VM that has all my VSTS and DAW installed so that I can access it anywhere without having to re-install on new devices. Can this concept be done? I'd have a USB audio interface connected to the server to output audio to my speakers. 
  • Could the VM output audio to a USB audio interface that is connected to a laptop running the VM?
  • Would there be huge latency? VM gaming doesn't seem to have latency. 

 

Thank you, everyone, in advance. The questions may have been answered before but I can't couldn't find the answer using the search bar, especially the music production ones. 

Edited October 24, 2018 by moistousness

[tcwatson]

Did you ever get this set up? I dabble with Ableton (only a few VSTs but I have midi controllers I like to play with) and the latency is really important to me since I do more noodling than composing these days.

 

I currently have an old Dell t5610 running dual Xeon 2680v2 (if I'm remembering the model right) with 64gb of RAM. I installed a PCIe USB card to pass through to the Windows VM running Ableton, and had okay performance. Not the low latency I was hoping for, but it was passable.

 

The Xeons I have are showing their age. Despite the total of 20 cores / 40 threads in my system, Plex ends up buffering a lot when I play 4k content over my local network, and the VM takes forever to open up even small Ableton projects. Suspecting the poor single-thread performance and lack of Intel quick sync, I have ordered new hardware to hopefully address this (i9-9900k + 32gb RAM) but it hasn't arrived yet for me to know for sure.

 

 

 

To answer a few of your questions, you can get around the lack of SATA ports with add in cards. I'm using a Dell h310 (flashed to IT mode) which has 2 SAS ports - you can get a cable which goes from one SAS port to 4 SATA drives. 

 

Running the VM locally with passed through USB and video devices will definitely be your best bet. If you're trying to access the VM remotely through a laptop, you're looking at running Remote Desktop, Splashtop, or something similar to access the VM over the network. Splashtop will definitely be your better option out of the two; RDP has terrible audio quality from the remote system. I haven't tested Splashtop's audio, but it can't be worse than RDP.

 

While it's probably possible to use a USB audio interface on the laptop to access the VM, the VM wouldn't be able to recognize it as far as I know, I think it would only see RDP/Splashtop as an audio output device. Could be wrong on that point though, never tried it.