Upgrading my unraid server! Here's my finalized parts in case it helps someone else

[tmchow]

After researching the past month or so about what the next step was to upgrade my system, I've ordered (what I think) are all the parts I needed. I wanted to share my plans in case this helps anyone.

 

My existing setup has been great for the most parts since I built it 2.5 years ago. However, I do run into issues with not enough horsepower to transcode when I have some friends streaming remotely, or someone in the house is using a device that forces a transcode.

Here's my current setup:

 

• 6 drives in the 27TB array + 1 parity drive
• 1 cache (512GB SSD)
• All drives directly connected to my ASRock E3C224D4I-14S motherboard which an LSI 2308 onboard, which supports "8 x SAS2 from 2 x mini SAS 8087". This is a mini-ITX board due to it being used in my old unraid server, but since I upgraded cases I don't have a space restriction anymore. This board sucks for addon cards since it only has a single PCI 3.0 x8 slot.
• Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 3.4Ghz32GB ECC DDR3 RAM
• Rosewill RSV-L4412 4U case. Not enterprise ready, but for a home rack mount case, this thing is terrific. Love the 12 drive hotswap and ability to fit an Enhanced ATX board in there if you wanted.
   

My goals were to improve my ability to support Plex transcodes, while still doing all my nerding out with various VMs and docker containers for fun things like home automation through home assistant.

 

At first I was going to go all out and just upgrade to a coffee lake CPU (Intel Core i7 or Intel Xeon E-2176G) since they supported Intel's QuickSync which Plex uses for hardware accelerated decoding. However, that rat hole then opened up so many other things. I'd need to change to DDR4 RAM, not to mention the new CPU, more expensive motherboard etc. And this was on top of wanting to move to an LSI SATA card.

 

Long story short, I ended up settling on a much cheaper upgrade but still achieving my goals:

 

• Supermicro X10SLM-F, which is still an LGA1150 socket so I can reuse my existing Intel Xeon E3-1231 v3 3.4Ghz CPU as well as my existing ECC DDR3 RAM. Given this is now a full ATX board, it gives me more PCIe slots to fit a SATA card and video card (more on that later). Bought used off ebay for $75.
• LSA 9201-8i SATA card. Bought off ebay from the well known theartofserver seller which has tested and flashed them to IT mode. Cost ws $50.
• AData SU8000 512GB SSD. Added a second cache drive for protection, which will run in the default RAID 1 config. I used this exact drive for my existing cache drive when i did this original build and had no regrets. I'll be connecting the SSDs to the motherboard and the parity+array HDs to the LSI card since the LSI card does not support trim. Cost was $55 new from Amazon.
• Nvidia Quadro P2000 video card. Since my goal was to improve plex transcoding, this was the best way for quality and simplicity (admittedly potentially overkill though). With the new Nvidia Unraid plugin project, I can use the GPU directly into my Plex container! Also this avoided needing to buy a 6th or 7th gen CPU to get better QuickSync hw decoding quality since older CPUs, even though they support quicksync, I've read the quality isn't as good. Bought used off ebay for $310.

 

Ignoring costs for some new SATA cables and an internal USB header adapter to plug my unraid usb key into, the cost is ~$500 and I should be jumping light years in terms of performance for plex, and I'm getting cache drive redundancy too.

 

If you have any questions, please holler. If you have feedback, especially about parts I'm missing, please chime in too

[testdasi]

Have you included the cost for a Plex Pass? Hardware transcoding needs a Plex Pass IIRC.

 

Also note that if you use Unraid Nvidia, you MUST only update using that build i.e. not using the official version.

I thought the warning was obvious on the support topic but apparently some people never read the instructions and shout loudly when things stopped working.

[tmchow]

Have you included the cost for a Plex Pass? Hardware transcoding needs a Plex Pass IIRC.
 
Also note that if you use Unraid Nvidia, you MUST only update using that build i.e. not using the official version.
I thought the warning was obvious on the support topic but apparently some people never read the instructions and shout loudly when things stopped working.

Already have a plex pass subscription. Got in on a lifetime pass for $75 a few years ago!

also thanks for the reminder about nvidia unraid upgrade reminder. I’ve read so many issues with people making a mistake so appreciate the reminder