I'm just now building a cheap / intro Unraid.

Mostly cheap / extra parts

Optiplex 7010MT / 16gb Ram / i7 

 

4 sata connections on board

I'm replacing DVD with 3 x 3.5" cage.

 

I have 1 PNY SSD (most likely get another for raid mirror cache);

 

The question mainly is about mixing 4kn drives with Desktop NAS drives and what that going to do to my speed.

 

I'm mostly interested in video streaming, but I've already got a Syno 918+ server. This new Raid will be for backing up drives as well. I bought the 8tb Enterprise drives for it, thinking I would mix in 2 8tb drives to a Raid5 and increase my storage (currently 4x4tb HGST DESKSTAR NAS) but it seems that they can't mix.

 

Am I going to run into the same problem with Unraid?

 

Or, can I just use 1 8tb for parity

1-8tb & 2 - 3tb drives for 14tb useable?

 

I also bought a PCIe 1X card with 4 additional Sata ports. It's seeming from reading around the forum that it's a bad idea... But how bad? Speed hit?

 

Lastly, if I want to take advantage of Plexpass transcoding on this tower, a GeForce GTX 1050i is likely the best option, right?

 

https://www.storagereview.com/hgst_ultrastar_helium_he8_8tb_enterprise_hard_drive_review

 

 

5 hours ago, BigSpoonzz said:

Or, can I just use 1 8tb for parity

1-8tb & 2 - 3tb drives for 14tb useable?

You can.

Yes, that´s no problem.

 

See my sig.

 

Mediatower is housing 1x 4TB-Parity, data drives for the array are 4x 2TB, 2x 3TB and 1x 500GB. Cache is a 480GB-SSD Sandisk Plus. As long as my drives are healthy I won´t replace them. Oldest disk (WD20EARX) has almost 21000 power on hours.

 

So, Idon´t have any problems.