NVMe / SSD / HDD Madness, A little help please


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Hello, 

 

I have the following:

  • ROG Zenith Alpha Motherboard
  • 2990WX Thread ripper
  • 2 x 1TB NVMEs
  • 3 x 250GB SSD
  • 4 x 2TB HDD

 

I will be setting up UNRAID whereby I can have multiple Machines with a dedicated video card for video editing and playing games And in some cases streaming.

 

I would like to know what would be the best configuration regarding the storage as I am not familiar on how to set up the appropriate array.

 

It is worth noting that I will be running quite a few VM's 10+ sum for video editing, others for playing games, and the remaining ones for automated tasks. Hence the 64 core CPU.

 

Can someone please advise me on what would be the best way to set up everything. I can always add a few more SSD's if necessary. But I'm pretty much stuck with the NVMEs

 

Thank you

 

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The 4x2TB HDD should be in the array (1 parity + 3 data) to give you 6TB of general-purpose shared network storage.

 

With regards to the SSD's, there are many ways to set them up depending on what exactly you are after (e.g. capacity vs speed vs failure protection vs VM requirement etc.).

 

You mentioned needing 10+ VM's but few users really need that many VM's (e.g. there are few reasons why a video editing VM can't be used for playing games). So I would suggest you write down each VM and its use case + hardware needs (e.g. storage, GPU etc.) + any shared hardware.

That will give us a better idea as to what kind of storage config is more optimised (+ chances are things will need to be simplified).

Edited by testdasi
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7 minutes ago, testdasi said:

The 4x2TB HDD should be in the array (1 parity + 3 data) to give you 6TB of general-purpose shared network storage.

 

With regards to the SSD's, there are many ways to set them up depending on what exactly you are after (e.g. capacity vs speed vs failure protection vs VM requirement etc.).

 

You mentioned needing 10+ VM's but few users really need that many VM's (e.g. there are few reasons why a video editing VM can't be used for playing games). So I would suggest you write down each VM and its use case + hardware needs (e.g. storage, GPU etc.) + any shared hardware.

That will give us a better idea as to what kind of storage config is more optimised (+ chances are things will need to be simplified).

Thank you very much for the information.

 

Well let's realistically say 6 VMS

 

  1. Main VM / Video Editing (Own Video Card)
  2. Gaming (Special settings) (Own Video Card) 
  3. Streaming Machine (Own Video Card)
  4. Image automation
  5. watch folders

I understand your advice regarding the 2TB drives.

 

But how would I set up NVME + SSD with speed and protection in mind....

 

Thank you very much.

 

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2 hours ago, authorleon said:

But how would I set up NVME + SSD with speed and protection in mind....

  1. What kind of video editing are you doing? 4k? 1080p? H.264 / H.265? ProRes?
  2. How are your games stored? Steam library? Battle.net library? No library?
  3. What kind of streaming are you doing? Streaming your gaming on Twitch or streaming media to the rest of the household?
  4. What kind of "image automation"? Have not heard of this use case before.
  5. What needs to be "watch" in the "watch folders"?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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17 hours ago, testdasi said:
  1. What kind of video editing are you doing? 4k? 1080p? H.264 / H.265? ProRes?  1080p mainly. All the media will be stored on a QNAP.
  2. How are your games stored? Steam library? Battle.net library? No library? Steam / Local Install.
  3. What kind of streaming are you doing? Streaming your gaming on Twitch or streaming media to the rest of the household? Twitch / YouTube
  4. What kind of "image automation"? Have not heard of this use case before. Mainly image processing / Cleaning / Cropping etc etc. 
  5. What needs to be "watch" in the "watch folders"? Video trans-coding. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, authorleon said:
  1. What kind of video editing are you doing? 4k? 1080p? H.264 / H.265? ProRes?  1080p mainly. All the media will be stored on a QNAP.
  2. How are your games stored? Steam library? Battle.net library? No library? Steam / Local Install.
  3. What kind of streaming are you doing? Streaming your gaming on Twitch or streaming media to the rest of the household? Twitch / YouTube
  4. What kind of "image automation"? Have not heard of this use case before. Mainly image processing / Cleaning / Cropping etc etc. 
  5. What needs to be "watch" in the "watch folders"? Video trans-coding. 

 

I would do something like this:

  • 1xNVMe passed through to the main VM as a PCIe device (for best performance).
  • 1xNVMe passed through to the gaming VM as a PCIe device.
  • 1x250GB SSD mounted unassigned for the vdisks of the other VMs.
    • 64GB should be more than sufficient for OS + streaming software of the streaming VM
    • 2x32GB for (4) and (5) (although depending on what you transcode, 5 can be done with the Handbrake docker)
    • Remaining can be another vdisk to be used for the streaming VM as temp space
  • 2x250GB SSD in the cache pool in btrfs RAID 1 for 250GB mirror-protected storage for your most important data.

You will almost certainly need to turn on ACS Override and need to find single-slot GPU's due to how your mobo PCIe slots are structured.

In addition, I don't remember Asus motherboard allowing you to pick any PCIe slot as primary (i.e. what GPU to boot Unraid with) so expect a bit of gripes (and potentially a run in with error code 43) passing through your primary i.e. gaming GPU.

 

You may also need a USB card if you want hot-pluggable USB ports for all 3 main VM's. The X399 chipset only has 2 pass-through-able USB 3.0 controllers.

So the 3rd VM can only be cold plug (USB device passed through at VM boot) or warm plug (there's a plugin that allow you to connect a newly-plugged USB device to any booted VM but you need to control that manually from the GUI).

 

 

 

 

Edited by testdasi
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