Hi All,

 

after much deliberation I've finally arrived on Unraid over Freenas/an off the shelf solution and am starting to collect parts/cobble together a server.  My objective is to off board my plex server to my home network rack in the basement,  add storage/backup for my wife and I(long story short her laptop recently took a tumble and i had to pull the hdd to recover as much info as possible).  To start with I've purchased a 1u server with 4 hot swap bays(link below) i plan on populating it with 24gb of ram,  a 250gb ssd for cache, 6tb parity drive, and two 4tb drives for storage.  This all seems straight forward to me . . . though if anyone has input on what i'm doing wrong please speak up.  

 

I am however trying to future proof my build to a point.  In the future i'm looking to setup a VPN between our house and my parents house, for offsite backups.  They'll get a similar Unraid server when/if i get this far.  I suspect i'll eventually need to add more drives, a JBOD box, and am looking to some suggesting on the right controller card to put in my build now.  I've seen the wiki hardware page but it seems like most of the controller cards that are recommended don't have an external sas to jump down to a JBOD array.  I'm assuming Unraid supports this, right? does someone have a recommended card for this sort of set up/ are there any precautions i should be looking for?  

 

We'll leave the vpn and syncing conversation for later, i don't see having time to conquer that until this fall.  

Thanks,

WYO

 

 https://www.ebay.com/itm/SuperMicro-815-6-1U-Server-w-X8DTU-F-2x-6-Core-x5650-2-66Ghz-No-Mem-No-HDD/192868995227?hash=item2ce7e3509b:g:DWIAAOSwtcRcLm32:sc:FedExHomeDelivery!19610!US!-1&frcectupt=true

 

14 minutes ago, WyoFarr said:

I'm assuming Unraid supports this, right? does someone have a recommended card for this sort of set up/ are there any precautions i should be looking for?  

Yes, current recommended HBAs are from LSI, any model using the SAS2008/2308/3008 chip, they can have internal ports only, for example 9207-8i, external ports only, 9207-8e or both 9207-4i4e.

Thanks,

 

As i look to the future and building the JBOD,  do i need to worry about the sas adapter card i use?  thinking about something like the link below, the JBOD is likely to only be 8 disks,  knock on wood i can't imagine ever needing ore than 48tb of storage.

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/CableCreation-SFF-8088-SFF-8087-Adapter-Bracket/dp/B01GPD9QEQ/ref=sr_1_12_sspa?keywords=sas+card&qid=1553795492&s=gateway&sr=8-12-spons&psc=1

If you buy an HBA with 1 or 2 external ports you don't need the adapter, but that adapter will work if the HBA only has internal ports.

 

 

One more question that i thought of last night.  in peoples opinions do i have enough processor and ram to also run a window vm for blue iris?  or is this something people would recommend offloading to a dedicated NVR machine?  

 

Edit: just realized how load of a question this is...

 

I'm not currently running BI,  right now i just have SD cards in all the cameras and am using the reolink desktop client.  It's okay but is missing some of the display functions BI has, which is why i'm contemplating the move.  Currently i have 5 of the link below.  and with our patio and garage expansion i'll likely add a 6th and maybe 7th.  I hardly ever look at the footage but when i do it's(as imagined) for something important.  Right now i get about 14 days of motion activated recording which(knock on wood) has been fine.  The cameras do have integrated FTP functions so I suppose another option is to just have a vm pull the recordings down nightly, store them for X number of days before re-writting over the data.   

 

 

https://www.amazon.com/Reolink-Surveillance-Security-Detection-RLC-410-5MP/dp/B07C5JWK4K/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?crid=AMH6PP7KR3SA&keywords=reolink+5mp&qid=1553861917&s=gateway&sprefix=reolink+%2Celectronics%2C144&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1

 

 

 

Thanks 

Wyo

Edited March 29, 20197 yr by WyoFarr

>> a 250gb ssd for cache,

 

SSD prices, in general, are going down you may want to look at larger size drives - budget permitting. (Certainly not a "wrong" choice though)

 

>> in peoples opinions do i have enough processor and ram to also run a window vm for blue iris?

 

I've setup a few BlueIris servers for work. You certainly have enough ram and I think you'll be ok for cpu cores. I'd probably allocate/play around with 8,12, or 16G of ram and pin two to four cpu cores with their hyperthreads (4 to 8 virtual cores) - depending on how much you want to give to Plex.

 

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