Preserving Dive Life and Power Usage


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My computer is currently running windows 10 and I use it for freelance coding work and playing games. If it's relevant, I currently have 3, 1440p monitors hooked up to my GPU. My CPU has Intel HD Graphics that's not currently being used for anything. 

 

I'm looking to build a NAS into it and Unraid was recommended to me for this. 

 

 

If I were to get two NAS grade 10TB HDD and add them into my case, it sounds like I could then use Unraid to run NAS from those drives and keep the other drives I have separated for NAS usage. Is this correct?

 

If it is, then is there a way to "power down" the non-NAS drives to save power? I'm concerned about them being left in an always-on state since they aren't designed for it. 

 

Also is it possible to run the NAS portion through a VPN, but not my "main" OS? (I have two ethernet ports if that helps)

 

Edited by shazzmoe
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I'm basically doing what you're wanting to do. I highly recommend installing VM's onto a SSD or your performance will suffer due to I/O overhead. You will also need to have a hard drive (spinner or SSD) assigned as a Data drive in uNRAID for the array to start and the VM's to be available. You could use the 10TB NAS drives as a backup device for the VM's qcow2 files which exist on the SSD's. The SSD's for VM's will be outside of the unRAID array but mounted using the "Unassigned Devices" add-in for use to host the VM's.

Edited by jbartlett
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Passing through the ethernet ports to a VM is a mixed bag. You'll need to experiment with your motherboard to see if hardware passthrough with LAN & graphics cards will work. Search the forums & google for your motherboard modem & KVM to see if anyone has already forged down this path.

 

Take the ASUS ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha X399 motherboard I'm using for this same type of build. One of the LAN ports can be passed through to a VM if I enable the PCIe override but the LAN passthrough doesn't always survive a VM reboot if I'm also passing through a graphics card.

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In case it is not clear then Unraid is primarily a NAS OS with additional capabilities.    When running Unraid it is in overall control of the machine and if you want another OS to be running at the same time you do that by running the second OS in a VM.   To get the ability for the Windows OS to function as it does now you would need hardware that supports hardware pass through of the GPU (and possibly some other components such as a USB controller).  If you have high-end hardware then it is quite possible it has this capability but it is something to check out.

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thanks for the info. I'm just now learning how this differs from the traditional raid setups I'm used to.

 

What would be the optimal Drive setup if I wanted 10 TB of usable NAS storage, and 500GB of storage used for windows apps and games?

 

Would it be something like this?

2x 10TB HDD (one for parity, and one for storage)

1x 500GB SSD(would one be enough?)

 

Then as I need to increase storage I could just add any sized HDD to the array as long as it's not over 10TB?

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Optimal largely depends on your personal preferences. For example, 2x10TB is fine but parity in a 2-disk array is a mirror (because of math) so some may prefer to go 2x5GB data + 1x10TB parity, or 3x5TB etc.

What we can say is your 2x10TB is not wrong.

 

1x500GB SSD is generally sufficient as long as you don't do a lot of downloads - temp storage can eat up a lot of cache spaces very quickly (i.e. it doesn't get cycled quickly enough) and it gets very annoying when the disk is full.

 

You can add any disk to the array at any time as long as the new disk is NOT larger than the parity. And you can spin down the NAS disks that are not in use to save power (note though that repeated spinning up/down is just as detrimental so you will need to find a middle ground).

 

+1 to what itimpi said. You need the right hardware to support what you are trying to do. But don't go get the latest generation high-end stuff either (e.g. Ryzen took a year to get teething issues bedded down).

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One thing to keep in mind with VM hard drives is that it's a file on a hard drive. You can back up an entire VM simply by copying the virtual disk file to another location. Performing a restore is as simple as copying the backup and overwriting the current file.

 

Things to take into consideration:

  1. You can have a 1TB virtual drive being hosted on a 500GB drive without issue as long as that VM doesn't grow the drive to more than the available capacity of the hosting drive - 500GB in this example. A 1TB virtual drive will fit fully on a 2TB drive as long as other files on that physical drive does not exceed 1TB of storage.
  2. Create a Virtual Drive for the OS and a Virtual Drive for your applications. As a personal preference, I also create a separate virtual drive for applications that create a lot of files such as Plex and a virtual drive for TEMP files.
  3. It is possible to pass an entire physical drive to a VM and the VM would utilize the drive entirely but this may be overkill for your needs.
Edited by jbartlett
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3 hours ago, jbartlett said:

One thing to keep in mind with VM hard drives is that it's a file on a hard drive. You can back up an entire VM simply by copying the virtual disk file to another location. Performing a restore is as simple as copying the backup and overwriting the current file.

 

Things to take into consideration:

  1. You can have a 1TB virtual drive being hosted on a 500GB drive without issue as long as that VM doesn't grow the drive to more than the available capacity of the hosting drive - 500GB in this example. A 1TB virtual drive will fit fully on a 2TB drive as long as other files on that physical drive does not exceed 1TB of storage.
  2. Create a Virtual Drive for the OS and a Virtual Drive for your applications. As a personal preference, I also create a separate virtual drive for applications that create a lot of files such as Plex and a virtual drive for TEMP files.
  3. It is possible to pass an entire physical drive to a VM and the VM would utilize the drive entirely but this may be overkill for your needs.

That is only true if you are using virtual hard drives for a VM.   Even then when only running a single VM I would recommend against ‘over-provisioning’ by having the logical size of the drive to be larger than the physical size as you can start getting strange errors in the VM when a vdisk exceeds the physical space available.    Over-provisioning makes most sense in an environment where you have multiple VMS which are currently using vdisks on the same drive, but which later can be moved to their own drives at a later stage if needed.

 

In the OP’s case it may well make sense to pass a complete physical drive (that is not one of the array drives) through to the VM.   It could even be the current drive hosting the OS for the VM.

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