New Build Planning. Need Advice.......


Sgt.Ogre

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First post here!

 

I have been curious about UNRaid ever since I saw Linus start playing with it (he seems to have inspired many people to try it) and I have finally decided to build my own UNRaid box. I currently have a 4 computer setup at home and want to cut that down to one chassis and 2 computers. I am starting to get my part list together and I wanted to get some input and opinions from you guys. My questions are pretty varied so input on any of them is very much appreciated!

 

First, the basic parts list. I probably won’t be building this until later in the year but I like to do my research early so I can avoid issues.

 

Case:

Part One

and

Part Two

 

This will allow me to house the UNRaid machine and the secondary machine i need in the same chassis, as well as fit a ridiculous amount of HDD’s. I also plan on doing custom water-cooling on the whole thing so the extra room will be nice for that. Since CaseLabs is out of business I can’t get one of theirs and this seems to be the only other one that fits the bill.

 

The CPU will most likely be a 3rd Gen Threadripper, probably the 3960x. I will be throwing in 3 different GPU’s as well. A high end one for a Windows VM that I will use for gaming, a mid-low end AMD card for Plex transcodes, and a super low end one for UNRaid/MOBO use.

 

For storage I plan to use 10TB spinning disks, probably 10 to start with. I will be using a Dell h310 flashed with the IT firmware to expand the number of SATA ports I have access to since most MOBOs only come with 6-10 and I will need 16 or so eventually.

 

I will most likely populate 2 or 3 M.2 slots with 1TB or larger NVME SSD’s for the Windows VM and a cache drive (More questions about that later).

 

Alright, onto the questions!

 

1.       Currently I use Storage Spaces on Windows 10 Pro. It is pretty good and fairly user friendly, but write speeds leave a bit to be desired. My original plan was to spin up a second Windows VM to handle that and Plex but looking into UNRaid more I see ZFS as an option as well. Is it better than Storage Spaces? I mostly store media, but I do like having parity in case of drive failure. Is there a good guide to how ZFS works in UNRaid and how to set up the parity? I lose about 25% of my raw capacity with Storage Spaces to parity, is it about the same in ZFS? I was planning on only having 1 parity disk per vdev with 5 drives in each one.

 

2.       How does UNRaid handle RAM allocation? More specifically part of the reason I am getting Threadripper is for the Quad Channel memory. Will I still see the benefits of that by chopping up the RAM in UNRaid between the VM (Or VM’s) and anything else I am doing with it? Or is that lost in the process?

 

 

3.       Is it worth it to set up a Cache Drive in UNRaid for the large Storage Pool I will be creating? I would probably use one of the NVME SSD’s I will be installing. Some of the files I copy over to it can be hundreds of GB’s in size so that is something I have been considering.

 

4.       I currently run Plex on a Windows computer and have it connect to a local storage pool and another server on the network that has additional media on it. I was going to set up an additional Windows VM to run it and pass-through the GPU as I need GPU trans-coding. I keep hearing about running Plex in a docker container though. Is that as full featured as the Windows install? Can I access the management GUI for it remotely? Can I dedicate CPU cores and RAM to it the same as a VM? My Plex server is used fairly heavily so performance is a big deal.

 

5.       How does UNRaid handle splitting the USB ports on the Motherboard? I would like to be able to allocate one or 2 for UNRaid and the rest for the VM (Or VM’s) That I will be running. Is that possible/easy?

 

6.       Is there any benefit to running UNRaid on an SSD instead of a Flash Drive?

 

7.       I also use PiHole installed on a Raspberry Pi. Is there a Docker container for that?

 

Thanks in advance for the help everyone. This build is going to be awesome and kind of a present to myself after years of just throwing hardware together to make things work.

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13 hours ago, Sgt.Ogre said:

Thanks in advance for the help everyone. This build is going to be awesome and kind of a present to myself after years of just throwing hardware together to make things work.

I would advice against water-cooling. For servers, stability is more important than bling and boastability. Competent air coolers such as those made by Noctua are more than sufficient to cool even Epyc so there's really no need to increase the number of potential points of failure by going liquid. (Of course, you shouldn't be overclocking storage servers so no overclocking cooling argument here please).

 

With regards to GPU, AMD GPU for Plex transcoding means you need to pass it through to a VM. The reset issue plaguing AMD GPU's (which AMD isn't fixing any time soon) will make your plan tricky at best and impossible at worst. If you are planning to use hardware transcoding, a better option probably is to rely on the Unraid Nvidia build from the LS.io guys + something like a Nvidia Quadro P2000. It wil also save you needing a low-end GPU for Unraid to boot with (Unraid will boot with and use the P2000 for transcoding in the Plex docker) + any VM overhead.

 

Btw, I recommend Gigabyte motherboard to give you more flexibility to place your GPU (i.e. don't have to waste the fast 1st PCIe slot on a GPU that Unraid boots with).

 

With regards to HDD, due to how HDD fails in probabilistic manner, it's always better (statistically) to get fewer large capacity drives rather than more lower capacity drives. And spread out your acquisition of drives to reduce the risk of buying a whole lot of drives from the same problematic batch (which makes acquiring fewer large capacity drives even more beneficial).

 

With regards to NVMe SSD, avoid QLC like the plague. Also make sure you double check the controllers of the SSD. Some controllers don't like being passed through and/or requires special syslinux boot option etc. (Google is your bestie here).

 

Now to your questions.

1. ZFS is not official supported although there's a ZFS plugin (which Wendell trusts enough to recommend Steve for his prod server).

To be honest though, if you are not happy with Storage Space write speed then you won't be that much happier with ZFS write speed and 100% definitely won't be happy with Unraid native array write speed.

What sort of speed are you expecting? Why would you want ZFS instead of Unraid native array?

 

2. Your concern about RAM is not valid (assuming you populate the full quad channels) due to (a) 3rd gen TR using IO die instead of the old gluing method and (b) Unraid RAM management is no different from any other Linux distro RAM management (i.e. depending on the kernel).

TL;DR: no need to worry about RAM distribution.

 

3. The Unraid cache pool has evolved from being just write cache to being a vital part in a full Unraid experience, particularly with dockers and VM. So you will need a cache drive.

How often do you copy over those hundred-GB files? (and similar to Q1 - what sort of speed are you expecting? how critical is such speed requirement?)

 

4. Yes to everything you asked. Dockers to Unraid is like apps for your phone / Windows. I have not heard of any diff in terms of functionality.

 

5. The number of USB controllers available for passing through depends on the chipset. You should be able to pass through at least 1 controller to a VM. I would not call it difficult - took me 15 minutes, 10 of which involved watching a Youtube video.

 

6. You can't run Unraid on an SSD. Strictly USB stick only. (not that there's any benefit).

 

7. There's a Youtube video for that.

Edited by testdasi
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