Hardware Setup (HDD future proofing)

[Dal1980]

Hi guys

 

This product has been on my radar for some time. I've not had the available funds/time to get my old dirty setup into this unRaid which was something a few friends recommended. I've been putting off going ahead because of the overheads I have with getting this up and running. I know the cost curve is high then looks like it is VERY maintainable.

 

I think my first thought was, okay I need the biggest and baddest HDD/SSDs I can find so that everything is there, but obviously, that was going to be some serious money so I dialled it back, way back! I settled for 2 parity HDDs at just 4TB each but then realised that the best deals where in this size so this might actually be the standard size HDD I use in my array (array being the right term right?). So I shifted to 6TB. Then the calculated overheads began looking too expensive. The other overhead which is obviously necessary is the unRaid software licence itself (I'm not complaining here btw).

 

So in an effort to actually get started I wanted to maybe take a more tactical approach which has only crossed my mind now.

 

I currently have a stock of;

 

Hardware

(nothing to write home about here but it's what I have spare)
i7-960 (first gen i7)
Asus P6X58D-E mobo (supports VT-d) Manual Link below
12GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3
NVidia 560Ti GTX
Cooler Masters HAF case (6 HDD bays + 6 optical drive bays)
4 Port Nic (5 ports in total)
80Mbps Fibre Broadband (unlimited) Tested@ 73.6Mbps download | 17.5Mbps upload

Asus P6X58D-E mobo Manual Link

 

Parity HDD (going to use 2 parity HDDs)

None
None

 

 

SSD (my unRaid Cache disks)

256 GB - Crucial MX300 (label says this is 270GB)
256 GB - Crucial MX500 (label says this is 250GB)

Future: I could possibly replace these two for larger cache SSDs but it is probably unlikely

 

 

HDD (will be used for storage)

4 TB - Western Digital (Blue)
2 TB - Western Digital (Green)
1 TB - Western Digital (Blue)
500GB - Western Digital (Blue)
500GB - Seagate (Generic white label)

Future: HDD will probably be something like 3TB or 4TB Barracuda or Iron Wolf

 

 

Intended Use for my unRaid system

I currently have a system that has 500GB of storage, 4GB RAM and is running on Intel Quad Q9550 CPU. I currently and has successfully ran VMware ESXi with 2 instances. PFSense (for my home router) and a Lubuntu which runs my Plex server. It has been running non-stop without issue for over a 1.5years

PFSense looks after itself, I haven't needed to touch it after setting it up and it has enough resources. Lubuntu is only there to run Plex which serves my Movie, Picture and Music streaming internally and externally to a few devices (i.e. my mobile or my work pc) There is never any more than 1 person streaming although there may be up to 3 or 4 eventually but only at odd times).

 

For my new unRaid setup I would to setup my PFSense and Plex again with the possibility of running another couple of desktop images (that will probably be spun up and down as and when needed) and an Ubuntu (for Apache) web server for low amounts of web traffic. 

 

 

My questions:

 

1. For my Parity HDDs, could I buy 2x 4TB, use them as Parity Drives but then at a later stage buy the 2x 6TB drives and move the old ones into my array as data drives?

If so, is there anything I need to know i.e. long rebuild times etc?

 

2. If I start on the basic plan to keep costs down then got Pro is there any limitations on features other than the number of drives I can attach?

 

3. Is there anything obvious about my existing parts list (or future intended buys) that send up warning flags with anyone?

 

4. On VMware ESXi I have an option to (forgive me, I can't remember what it was called)... Since ESXi loaded PFSense which supplied DHCP there was an option in ESXi to delay trying to communicate with DHCP until it had loaded the PFSense instance. Can unRaid do the same thing?

 

 

Many thanks

Edited May 12, 2019 by Dal1980

[trurl]

1. Yes. Rebuilds require writing the entire disk so of course that will require several hours depending on size.
2. No.
3.  
4. I know some are running PFSense on their Unraid but haven't paid much attention to those details.

 

[idoabra]

I'm having similar questions myself, and I was wondering if you managed to get some answers...

[Dal1980]

On 6/27/2019 at 10:01 AM, idoabra said:

I'm having similar questions myself, and I was wondering if you managed to get some answers...

Hi idoabra

 

I ended up using 2x 6TB (see below for actual drives I bought from Amazon). This allowed me to have enough of a size for adding new drives as anything past 6GB currently is probably going to be outside what I want to spend on drive expansion and should keep me comfortable for at least 3 years (space is actually going a long way for me right now, better than I'd planned)

Seagate 6 TB IronWolf 3.5 Inch 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive for 1-8 Bay NAS Systems (256 MB Cache, 180 TB/Year Workload Rate, Up to 210 MB/s)

 

I've still gone for the 2x cache SSD disks and installed only the 4 TB - Western Digital (Blue) 2 TB - Western Digital (Green) 1 TB - Western Digital (Blue) HDD's for now. It seems the 4TB (which isn't that old, maybe 3 or 4 years) is the one that is showing the most problems (intermittent), I'll be swapping them all out for new 4 or 6TB HDD in the future so not too worried.

 

I've just gone for the entry level license for now on unraid but I will probably jump up to the highest tier when I have a spare £70, right now I'm skint lol

 

There currently is something that is bugging me about my current setup and that is power consumption. The PC I'm using is old (first gen i7 from 2010 era) so it's a bit of a hungry hog but it's the only system that I have spare that would be suitable. 

 

The plan also changed slightly for my PFSense since I had a low powered system board (ASUS N3050M-E) which seems pretty decent on power consumption instead of running it as a Docker on the Unraid. This has the benefit that PFSense has it's own hardware (which probably isn't a massive benefit but feels neater), I can turn off the Unraid machine and still have internet which is a big benefit. I also hit some complication with the docker instance which I could have figured out if I'd stuck at (probably) but just opted for independent hardware.

 

Hope this helps

 

 

[NewDisplayName]

I know u can run pfsense on unraid (there are even dockers for this). Couldnt successfully try it tho.

 

At the end i would suggest setting unraid up so it can communicate to the internet (or atleast LAN) also if the docker wont start. So you could reach it in a bad scenario.

 

integrating as much as possible into one machine is the most power efficient you can get. For that matter just buy a cheap UPS (best is USB) for around 50€ and you can exactly see (also inside unraid) how much power it uses. Nice benefit is that you dont get corrupted files/drives when power shuts down. (unraid does a clean shutdown when power is below x%)

 

I had a unraid machine running with 44TB with around 30Watt (idle).

 

Now ive upgraded and also integrated a real graphic card for my windows 10 vm and it uses around 150watt. (but i will remove graphic card b ecause benefit is marginal)

Edited August 16, 2019 by nuhll