About 7 years ago, I wanted the ability to stream media from a computer to an android phone, pretty heady stuff, I know.

I bought a brand spanking new HP N36L, slapped 4x2TB drives, and Amahi 6 on it and I was off to the races. Knowing nothing about linux, fedora, etc. I had plenty of time to muck about, fix broken stuff etc.

 

About 3 years ago, I built another AmahiBox:

Fedora 21 / Amahi 8
SilverStone DS380B
Asus P8H77-I
Intel Core i3-3220T
8GB DDR3
Crucial M500 250GB SSD
4x5TB WD Green (w/ Idle Timer Reset) in software RAID5
Noctua NH-L9i CPU Cooler
SilverStone SST-ST30SF PSU

 

It's what I'm using today.

 

While it still does what I want, the machine has gotten crankier and crankier, and Amahi development appears to have slowed to a crawl. As it's hard to update Fedora/Amahi as a non-superuser, I'm stuck on F21/A8, and my installation Plexmediaserver has grown increasingly out of date.

 

I read about Unraid, and being a commercial project it seems to have a active support and does more or less exactly what I want without needing to be a guru just to keep it up and running.

 

My next machine will be:

SilverStone DS380B (with the ducting)

AsRock H370M-ITX/AC

Intel Core i3-8100

16GB DDR4

2xSamsung 840 EVO
4x5TB WD Green (w/ Idle Timer Reset) (Unraid)

Noctua NH-L9i CPU Cooler
SilverStone SST-ST30SF PSU

Internal USB 2.0 to Female USB connector

Good Quality 8gb USB key

 

The parts are already purchased but not assembled, any last minute advice folks would give me a relative novice before I slap it all together?

 

I've backed up the all the files i'm keeping to an external drive so I can safely wipe out the RAID5.

 

best regards,

rbmatt1s

 

 

 

 

I could use some advice on what to do with my Non-Array drives.

I have three 3x 240 gb SATA SSDs, one 250 gb 2.5" hard drive.

 

the asrock has 6 SATA ports, so i plan to use 1 for parity, 3 for array, and 2 for ssd's. Would you recommend using one or two for cache?

I was probably going to go 1 cache, one unassigned and use it for plexmediaserver.

 

if I want to add drives down the line i can probably add a PCIe SATA controller, yes?

The question is if you want redundancy of your cache drive. You can run a cache pool (RAID1) to give you that but it will use up 2 SATA ports for only 250gb of space. If it's true "cache" than it will be moved to the array every 24 hours so only a short period for loss. I just use my cache drive for all my Docker stuff and unRaid mover ignores it. For me redundancy isn't that big of a deal as I back-up all the apps data so that can be rebuilt fairly easily and I don't worry about the cache data. All depends on how you want to allocate your SATA ports and drive space. As you said, maybe 1 for cache and 1 for unassigned and then when you need more array space, just swap the unassigned for an array disk. 

 

And welcome to the forums. Beware, Docker is addicting! and you can do so much more than Amahi.

Edited November 9, 20187 yr by Loch

On 11/7/2018 at 11:42 AM, rbmatt1s said:

any last minute advice folks would give me a relative novice before I slap it all together?

 

Since it's all new to you my advice would be to compose a list tasks/goals to where you want to be (Unraid configuration and software running).  This way you don't get frustrations and/or expectations too high.  It might also help you focus on what questions you may need to ask if you run into problems. 

 

Might be something like:

1. Initial setup and configuration.
2. Get your Unraid system on your network.
3. What do you want your User shares to look like? Configure these.
4. Importing / copying data.
5. Can I see my data on my network?
6. What plugins interest me? Install and setup.
7. What Docker Applications interest me? Install and setup.
8. . . .

At least that's what I like to do when I find myself in the relative novice category.

Thank you very much for the input.

@LochSuppose I take the two drives, and form a RAID1 cache pool. How would I get mover to ignore any apps/dockers stored to the cache drive?

 

@Jcloud My current list looks like:

CIFS shares, couchpotato, Sonarr, Radarr, Transmission, OpenVPN, Plexmediaserver.

I'd like it to serve as a TimeMachine Server, but I think that might exceed my skill level.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 hours ago, rbmatt1s said:

My current list looks like:

CIFS shares, couchpotato, Sonarr, Radarr, Transmission, OpenVPN, Plexmediaserver.

Looks like fun.

 

2 hours ago, rbmatt1s said:

I'd like it to serve as a TimeMachine Server, but I think that might exceed my skill level.

$5 bet with self, you'll get there.

I'm watching this tutorial video on Dockers:

Unbelievable. 

 

Things are seem so much simpler than they were eight years ago. Docker seems pretty revolutionary. 

6 hours ago, rbmatt1s said:

@LochSuppose I take the two drives, and form a RAID1 cache pool. How would I get mover to ignore any apps/dockers stored to the cache drive?

@rbmatt1s Under the Shares tab in the web GUI, you can change the setting for specific shares. Just set whatever share you want only on the cache disk to "Use Cache Disk" - "Only" and it will leave anything in that share/folder only on the cache drive. It will thus NOT be backed up to the array, will show as Orange in the GUI and if the drive dies, it will all be gone, but if you use Cache Pool, then you should have your RAID level backup.

 

And all those programs are well done with Docker (soo much easier than a few years ago). Use the wonderful CA Backup/Restore Plugin and it can back-up all the app-data (important parts) to the array so if you loose the cache drive (or in your case loose both drives), then all you have to do is reinstall download the containers and restore the app-data and you are back in business.

7 hours ago, Loch said:

Just set whatever share you want only on the cache disk to "Use Cache Disk" - "Only" and it will leave anything in that share/folder only on the cache drive. It will thus NOT be backed up to the array, will show as Orange in the GUI and if the drive dies, it will all be gone, but if you use Cache Pool, then you should have your RAID level backup.

Cache prefer is a better option, and if you are using multiple drives managed by unraid in the cache pool with a RAID level that supports redundancy it will not show as orange, because unraid knows you have RAID redundancy.

3 hours ago, jonathanm said:

Cache prefer is a better option, and if you are using multiple drives managed by unraid in the cache pool with a RAID level that supports redundancy it will not show as orange, because unraid knows you have RAID redundancy.

ie in case your cache fills and it needs to write something to it? 

 

35 minutes ago, Loch said:

ie in case your cache fills and it needs to write something to it? 

 

Yes.

Thanks for all the advice!

 

I created a build guide here