New guy here needing some advice


Blair2499

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Hi All,

after spending months browsing the forums and reading what feels like thousands of threads i thought i would put all my questions and assumptions into one thread with the hope that someone will be able to help!

 

So I'm currently using a T710 with 2 quad-core Xeon's (can't remember the model numbers off the top of my head) 48gb of ram and a mix and match of drives in basically all raid 0 (i know i hate it too) running plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Ombi and Nzbget within a server 2016 VM. I'm looking to move to a rackmount setup (mainly cause i have an r710 sitting spare - The joys of working in it) along with a move to Unraid!

 

However herein lies the beginning of my questions:

 

The R710 has a perc6/i in it at the moment, i know i need to change this to an H200 however has anyone managed to get this to work in the r710's storage slot with it being able to pass drives through to Unraid?

 

Next, is I'm needing more physical space and have found a cracking deal on a NetApp Ds2246 with 24 600gb SAS drives so i know I'm going to need an external HBA, however, what's the best one to use with this config and will i need to flash the external adapter to IT mode/IR mode also?

 

Next for my Unraid questions is for the actual docker side, I've never really dived much into Linux in general so the full docker side of things is still confusing me, my current setup is relatively automated, i tell Ombi or Radarr/Sonarr what i want and it goes and finds it and does all the downloading, moving and renaming for me. has anyone managed to get this working on the Unraid docker side?

 

also more of a plex side question, but i have a good amount of 4k content (trying to grow the collection why I'm upgrading) however the server will not have enough power to transcode 4k streams on the fly, and was curious to know if there is a way to automatically have a 1080p transcoded copy made and stored without me having to do it manually through something like handbrake?

 

I've probably missed out some other stuff but any info is greatly appreciated!

Cheers

Blair  

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14 minutes ago, Blair2499 said:

a cracking deal on a NetApp Ds2246 with 24 600gb SAS drives

I always recommend fewer larger drives instead of more smaller drives. Each additional drive requires another port, additional power, at some point more Unraid license, and most importantly, each additional drive is an additional point of failure. And larger drives typically perform better than smaller drives due to increased density.

 

There's a reason there is a "cracking deal" on that.

 

 

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6 minutes ago, trurl said:

I always recommend fewer larger drives instead of more smaller drives. Each additional drive requires another port, additional power, at some point more Unraid license, and most importantly, each additional drive is an additional point of failure. And larger drives typically perform better than smaller drives due to increased density.

 

There's a reason there is a "cracking deal" on that.

 

 

i see what your saying, i have the other option of purchasing a MD1200 and using some larger 3tb disks at almost the same costs, I'm already going to need a pro licence so the amount of Unraid licences required wasn't something i took into account! 

2 minutes ago, trurl said:

And if these are used disks, that is another reason to think twice. Every bit of every disk must be reliably read in order to reliably reconstruct a missing or failed disk, so it is important to only use trustworthy disks in the array.

70% of my drives are ex server drives I've taken from my work and I've not yet had a spinning disk fail on me (touching all wood) i thought the redundancy of many smaller discs would be better than fewer larger disks? but if this isn't the case then maybe the md1200 would be the better option?

 

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1 hour ago, Blair2499 said:

i thought the redundancy of many smaller discs

The redundancy is provided by all the data disk plus the parity disk(s). If you only have one parity, then you only have redundancy for one missing disk. Dual parity allows 2 missing disks. If you have more disks then you have more of a chance of having more failures than redundancy can recover from.

 

And bad disks aren't the only thing to consider. Bad connections or cables (power and data), bad ports or controllers, are much more frequently the problems we help users with than actual bad disks, especially when they are first getting the kinks worked out.

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5 hours ago, Blair2499 said:

i tell Ombi or Radarr/Sonarr what i want and it goes and finds it and does all the downloading, moving and renaming for me. has anyone managed to get this working on the Unraid docker side?

Quite common doing this on unRaid.

 

5 hours ago, Blair2499 said:

without me having to do it manually through something like handbrake?

Pretty sure the handbrake app for unRaid has a "watch folder" feature for doing this.

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