Hey everyone,

 

So, the time has finally come for me to upgrade my unraid box. Back in 2011, i built my first unraid box using some recommendations at the time for budget builds. This included the following main components:

 

Biostar A760G M2+

AMD Sempron 140

2 GB RAM

Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

15 x 3TB - 8TB mixed hard drives ranging 

2 x 120 GB SSDs for cache pool

 

After switching to dual parity about a year ago, and with recent versions of unraid, the performance of my server has gone down hill. I was typically seeing sub 70MB/s write speeds, and parity check averages were around the same. I also have plex installed on a separate box. When parity check is running, i can't even watch anything from unraid box because the performance degrades so much... and that lasts for about 40 hours. To get some extra life out of the box, i tried upgrading to an AMD Phenom II X4 955 and 8GB ram. Strangely, my speeds got worse. That was about a couple months ago. Now my server is crashing frequently and it's not worth trying to bring it back with the existing hardware. Time for an overhaul

 

With that said, here's what i'm thinking. Previously my unraid box just served as a NAS. This time, i'm thinking i might want to move my plex into a docker container on unraid box. I also want this box to last a good while again. So knowing that, i've tentatively decided on the following main components:

 

Rosewill RSV-L4500

AsRock EP2C602-4L/D16 SSI EEB

Dual Intel Xeon 2690 v2

64GB 8X8GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC REG

EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G3, 80 Plus Gold 1000W

LSI SAS9300-8i (IT mode) (maybe 2 of these since SAS3 expander boards seem ridiculously expensive)

Asus Hyper M.2 x16 NVMe Expansion Card

2 x Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD

2 x Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U CPU Cooler

3 x iStarUSA BPN-DE350SS Trayless 5-in-3 Drive Cages

 

As for HDDs, i have a couple 8TB Ironwolf drives for dual-parity, and the rest are a mixture of 3TB-8TB drives (green, blue, red, black, etc) which i will transfer over to new build as is (data intact hopefully). 

 

The main things i'm looking for with this build are:

1. Faster parity checks (ideally at least ~100-120MB/s) and write speeds

2. The ability to use plex in a docker container

3. Be able watch plex during parity checks without significant degradation (assuming a small number of concurrent streams)

 

Looking for feedback on whether this will be sufficient for my needs?

Is any of it overkill?

Are my goals even realistic? 

Are there things i'm not considering that i should be?

 

Thanks everyone. Really appreciate any and all feedback. 

 

Edited March 17, 20197 yr by davis999

Will be following your post with interest.  My existing server build is almost identical (except I went the Celeron route).   Also have a separate server for my Plex at the moment, and would love the hardware power to merge them into one box.

Well, i decided to pull the trigger on this build. My current unraid box won't even boot anymore. Couldn't wait any longer.  I've done enough research that i'm confident this should work out well for my needs. 

 

Going to be a few weeks before i have all the parts. Will report back here when it's all up and running. 

For anyone that is curious... I've had my new system up and running for about a month or so now and so far i'm loving it. The hardware is pretty much exactly as i stated above. Migrating the data drives over was very smooth. So far it's taken everything i've thrown at it with ease. I used to run Plex on a separate box,  but i migrated that over to a docker container on my unraid box. In addition to that i've also got docker containers for nzbget, radarr, sonarr, openvpn, duckdns, etc etc. The system is barely taxed by all of these things running... plex is the main user depending on how many concurrent streams are in use. I'm planning on possibly moving a windows VM over to this as well so we'll see how that goes.

 

If anyone has any questions, feel free to reply and i'll answer as soon as i can.  

Congratulation for the new build

Kind of overkill build for what your currently running but great room for the future if you decide to run VM's etc. If you run concurrent Plex streams then its not really overkill but its always nice to have some room! :). Congrats

Thanks @witalit. At any given time, i can have up to 6-8 concurrent streams on my plex instance, but even with that, they're not necessarily all transcoding. Some would be direct play. That said, i will be adding more load to it as time goes on. VMs are next on the list. Hopefully this will last me for a long while, as my previous box did.