awediohead: Hardware questions from a struggling newbie

[awediohead]

I'm in the same boat basically, though I don't have any previous NAS devices, I am cobbling together a basic NAS from left over parts from previous PC builds. I recognise that this will at best produce a result that is far from ideal, but it makes more sense to me to experiment and make mistakes with stuff that hasn't cost me anything, or very little, than make major purchasing decisions and expensive mistakes. This is very much a dilemma given that older gear tends to be cheaper, but run 24/7 is very inefficient compared to more modern gear. I started off with OMV on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a couple of USB3 drives, so when I say cheap, I really do mean cheap! :)

  One of the key bits of info that swung me towards at least giving it a go with an older mini-ITX build was on one of the Space Invader YT channel videos where he showed how the unRAID NAS could be scheduled for sleep and/or be essentially unavailable for large chunks of the day/night when it won't be used by anyone, save maybe a teenager who damn well shouldn't be using it!

[trurl]

For NAS functionality not much is needed. The main concern would be the reliability of old disks. In order to reliably rebuild a missing disk, parity PLUS ALL other disks must be reliably read.

 

If you get into dockers and VMs then performance becomes more important. 

 

How much RAM will you have? 

[awediohead]

Sorry if I assume the question re RAM is addressed to me - I don't want to seem to be hijacking someone else's thread!

That said my initial build will be based on an ASUS H81T R2.0 which a friend gave to me,  It's one of those weird 'thin' ITX mobos with no PCIe slots and an external PSU and SO-DIMM RAM, of which it has 8GB currently,  with an i5-4670T quad CPU. I could upgrade the RAM to 16GB, but as I said I just want to play around with this to familiarise myself with unRAID for a while, without spending any serious money. I got 2 x 4TB USB 3 external drives which I can remove from their cases - both are near as dammit new. So I'll have a 500GB SSD cache, a 4TB parity and a 4 TB media drive.

 

SFlix asked if Ryzen APU's are any good, and while I suspect they'd be fine for what I propose (or probably better) I'd also be interested to hear from more experienced members - to broaden the question what is the role of GFX processing in unRAID - presumably its more important with VM's but what else can make it worth having a discrete GPU with reasonable grunt?

[trurl]

27 minutes ago, awediohead said:

I don't want to seem to be hijacking someone else's thread!

Split your thread.

 

29 minutes ago, awediohead said:

GFX processing in unRAID - presumably its more important with VM's but what else can make it worth having a discrete GPU with reasonable grunt?

Some people use GPU for hardware transcoding with their Plex docker, for example. I do that but just use the builtin iGPU on my Intel CPU.