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I currently have two HP Microservers in the garage performing the following roles.

 

1. Windows Server 2016 (headerless)

Unifi CCTV Controller - 2 cameras permanently recording, 5 recording on motion detection

TP-Link Camera Controller - 4 cameras permanently recording

4TB WD Purple Drive for storage of video files from Unif/TP-Link

 

2. Windows 10 (Connected to Dual Screens)

Internet Searches

SkyGo / YouTube / Spotify

The odd game

Test Machine with VMware Workstation hosting the VM's

 

Server 2016 is on 24/7 although the Windows 10 machine only gets booted up when I'm working in/around the garage etc.

 

Having upgraded my main PC I now have spare an x79 motherboard, 6 core i7 3930k, 32GB of RAM and a AMD R9 Nano. I am toying with the idea of installing unraid on to this hardware to replace my two Microservers. Having been playing with unraid on a IBM X3650 M3 server I think it could be possible., this is currently what I'm planning.

 

Win Server 2016 VM dedicated to 4TB WD Purple Drive which would also store the video files

Win 10 VM dedicated to a 120GB SSD passing through the AMD GPU

960TB SSD and 500GB SSD for the storage array

 

I'm not sure about the parity drive, I have a 6TB Seagate Ironwolf HD which I could use, but don't know if mixing a HD with SSD is a good idea? I also have another 500GB SSD could be included in the array if needed. 

 

I did consider installing the Server 2016 VM on to its own 120GB SSD but couldn't work out if I was then able to dedicate a second drive, the 4TB WD purple drive to that VM for storage of the video files as I want to try and keep the heavy writes to the spinning 4TB drive if it is possible.

 

I already have the above hardware, so no additional cost would be incurred which is good. I would be grateful for feedback and advice on what I'm considering, if it is doable or would I be in for a world of pain? 

 

Thanks in anticipation.

 

Jack

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Thanks for your reply. It is as I feared then, the SSD array would be slowed down by including a spinning hard drive for parity.

 

I've made the following adjustments and would appreciate your thoughts/opinions

 

2 x SSD for cache drive

4 x HD's for array (3x2TB and 1 x 4TB)

1 x 6TB HD for parity

 

After reading/watching articles about passing through OS installations, I think I will now 

 

Pass SSD through for Win 10 so I can either bare metal (unRAID drives disabled in Device Manager) or VM in to it

Pass SSD through for Server 2016, use as a VM and store video footage to the array

 

Dynamix Cache Dirs to keep the video footage off the cache drive

Dynamix SSD Trim to schedule Trim operations

 

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4 hours ago, JackRegan said:

Dynamix Cache Dirs to keep the video footage off the cache drive

You perhaps misunderstand the purpose of that plugin. All it does is keep directory listings in memory to make it possible to browse without spinning up disks.

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I've been reading and watching so many tutorials etc I might have gone a bit blind to it all. I thought If I created a CCTV share and then excluded this folder in the Dynamic Cache settings ? 

Is there a way for data not to land on the cache drive first ?

thanks for your help again 

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Just now, JackRegan said:

Is there a way for data not to land on the cache drive first ?

Each user share has a setting that specifies whether and how it uses cache. The default setting is to not use cache.

 

There is Help for most things in the webUI. You can click on a specific label on the page to show/hide the help for that one item, or you can turn on/off Help globally with Help on the main menu bar.

 

The different use cache settings have some implications that may not be obvious. See this FAQ for more details:

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/?page=2#comment-537383

 

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