Upgrade help after 10 years

[fozzyb]

Hi everyone,

Hoping some of you may be able to help me out here with a new build.  I haven't touched my machine in over 10 years and, needless to say it's time for an upgrade.  I'm currently using the machine as a server only.  No dockers, VM, etc but I'd like to add these as well as a cache drive which I haven't been able to add due to the limitations of my current system.  I'm clueless to a lot of the amazing upgrades to Unraid over the years, but I want to make sure I have the hardware capable as I learn and add these upgrades.

 

After a bit of research, would this be a viable build and, if so, what would be the best raid controllers to complement the rig?  

https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/user/fozzyb/saved/jmBrVn

 

I'm currently using a very old PCI raid controller that would be more or less obsolete now.

https://www.newegg.com/syba-sy-pci40010-sata-ii/p/N82E16816124028

 

Current drives -

2x 4TB WD Red

7x 2TB WD Green

 

I'm sure I may have left out some important information, but it would be greatly appreciated if anyone can chime in on the above.  Many thanks in advance!

 

[ashman70]

The motherboard you have selected has six onboard SATA ports that you can use, currently you have nine drives, are all your drives full? If you are unable to consolidate your current system, in other words reduce the amount of physical drives, then you will need a HBA. I would suggest looking on eBay for a Dell H310 flashed to IT mode, or you can flash it yourself, it's pretty easy and their are guides on this board on how to do it. You will need two breakout cables and the card can support up to eight drives and has no issues with unRAID. The CPU you have chosen is entry level, if you want to explore dockers and virtualization you will need more cores and so a bigger CPU. If your budget can withstand it, you may want to look at something like an Intel i5-8600. I would also suggest reducing the number of smaller drives you have in favor of larger ones, so consider getting perhaps a 6 or 8TB drive for parity and eliminating the 2TB drives, replacing them with 4TB drives. The 2TB drives will be the bottleneck in your system as they are the slowest drives. Also consider an 500GB SSD as a cache drive, this is necessary if you want to play around with virtualization and handy for dockers too. Consider a UPS for your system, unRAID has native UPS management, something like an APC, something like this is all you need ( https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16842301701) otherwise your parts list looks good.

Edited June 15, 2019 by ashman70

[fozzyb]

59 minutes ago, ashman70 said:

The motherboard you have selected has six onboard SATA ports that you can use, currently you have nine drives, are all your drives full? If you are unable to consolidate your current system, in other words reduce the amount of physical drives, then you will need a HBA. I would suggest looking on eBay for a Dell H310 flashed to IT mode, or you can flash it yourself, it's pretty easy and their are guides on this board on how to do it. You will need two breakout cables and the card can support up to eight drives and has no issues with unRAID. The CPU you have chosen is entry level, if you want to explore dockers and virtualization you will need more cores and so a bigger CPU. If your budget can withstand it, you may want to look at something like an Intel i5-8600. I would also suggest reducing the number of smaller drives you have in favor of larger ones, so consider getting perhaps a 6 or 8TB drive for parity and eliminating the 2TB drives, replacing them with 4TB drives. The 2TB drives will be the bottleneck in your system as they are the slowest drives. Also consider an 500GB SSD as a cache drive, this is necessary if you want to play around with virtualization and handy for dockers too. Consider a UPS for your system, unRAID has native UPS management, something like an APC, something like this is all you need ( https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16842301701) otherwise your parts list looks good.

 

Thanks for the reply.  Definitely worth pushing the CPU up to a i5 if it will extend the longevity of the system.

Would one of these HBA's work in lieu of the H310?  Looks like the seller tests and flashes it to IT mode so it's more or less plug and play:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-LSI-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-LSI-9201-8i-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162958581156?hash=item25f1169da4:g:7sYAAOSwjMtcT8T8

 

Thanks again!

[mrbilky]

6 hours ago, fozzyb said:

 

Thanks for the reply.  Definitely worth pushing the CPU up to a i5 if it will extend the longevity of the system.

Would one of these HBA's work in lieu of the H310?  Looks like the seller tests and flashes it to IT mode so it's more or less plug and play:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Genuine-LSI-6Gbps-SAS-HBA-LSI-9201-8i-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/162958581156?hash=item25f1169da4:g:7sYAAOSwjMtcT8T8

 

Thanks again!

I can confirm that these will work I bought two from them and worked right outta the box no setup required