First Timer Looking for Critique

[lviperz]

First off, Hello everyone. I've been lurking here for a few weeks now and thought I would say hello and get some advice and critique on my planned system. I finally have everything to get started and also wanted to make sure things will work together.

 

I'll start off with what I have.

Gigabyte GA-Z97-D3H motherboard

i7-4790K processor

16GB (2x8GB) G.Skill Sniper Series DDR3 2400 (PC19200) Ram

Dell H200 / LSI 9211-8i IT Mode from ebay here

SAS Male SFF-8087 to 4 SATA Female Cable from here

2 - Samsung Evo 860 Pro 1TB SSD for the cache

4 - WD 8TB Red Shucked

EVGA SuperNOVA 850W G2 80+ Gold PSU

Rosewill Rise Glow case

 

I was thinking of starting with 1 parity drive, 2 drives for the array and holding on to the 4th drive for either a spare or add it when I need more space. If I add it for more space I plan on getting a 5th drive so I can add a second parity. I was also thinking of running both SSD's for the cache.

 

My plans currently are fairly simple. First priority is storage space. I have an old qnap that is reaching capacity. It has 4 2TB WD Reds in raid 5. I also have an Emby server with 3TB space, 4 1TB seagate constellations (Raid 5) with 1 bad drive and 3 showing caution. I also find myself deleting files for the sake of space and I would rather keep them a while longer. Both the qnap and emby server are for movies, tv series and recordings. On my daily driver I have 1TB that is holding my music. I would like to offload that to the new unraid system as well.

 

The next thing would be backups for the computers I have. I wanted to backup photos and other personal stuff to unraid. Once the qnap is moved over to unraid I was going to backup the backups to the qnap. Photos will also be backed up to the cloud.

 

I don't know if I will run Emby in a docker or not since I have a running system for it now. However, I do run sonarr, and radarr on my emby server which I would like to move over to dockers in unraid. Also run SABnzbd and Qbittorrent that I can move to a docker but would have to figure out how to make it use my torguard vpn.

 

I'm sure I'll find something else I will want to do in the future so I was hoping this setup would give me room to grow. I'm not a gamer and don't plan on any VM's for windows. I might run a Ubuntu VM and just VNC in to it. Mostly this is a system to store my movies and tv series.

 

I do have a question about the use of the cache. I know the dockers will use it. I'm just wondering if I should also use it for my Emby recordings. Sometimes we will watch a recording in process so I thought the speed of the cache would be beneficial rather than writing directly to the array. The downloads and backups would be fine writing directly to the array. But if I use the cache for the recordings, I guess I just run the mover to move those files to the array every night? Do the dockers have any affect on the mover?

 

That's about all I can think of at the moment. Sorry for the rambling long post but your insight is helpful and welcomed.

[JesterEE]

Welcome to the community @lviperz!

 

I think your build looks completely reasonable and a great place to start with Unraid to get your feet wet.  I started much the same way as your intended build, and Unraid is very flexible and allowed me to do exactly what you're intending.  Though the baked in functionality works for your use case, it works better with some community plugins.  You may want to check some of them out and see what will work best for you.  If you haven't watched @SpaceInvaderOne's video's on YouTube, I'd start there.  I posted one in particular that will give you a taste of what the community has added to the OS.

 

 

For backups from Unraid to Qnap, I think you will have a choice on how you want it to go.  After you get your network configuration figured out (at the router level), you can write a simple script with a rsync command and have it fire at a set interval using the CA User Scripts plugin.  Coming from a QNap, you may wonder where the custom action (i.e. cron) scheduler is.  And ... it's not there in Unraid 😭.  Commonly requested, feature ... hopefully we will see it one day.  Till then, the User Scripts plugin is likely good enough for most things you will want to do.  If you want to get a little more sophisticated for just backups, you can get a rclone or duplicati docker and use those.  Some setup required, but pretty straight forward.

 

I use a VPN docker (PIA) as a client and have other containers attach to it via docker network bindings.  There are some limitations to docker network configurability, and those change based on how you choose to configure your LAN, but it's completely doable (and isolated!). This is one of those "you probably need to play with it yourself" things.  It may take a while to get working like you want it, so give yourself some time in the sandbox.

 

The cache works a little differently than I think, you think it does.  Note: SpaceInvaderOne has a video about this too, you should watch it!  Quickly though, the cache intercepts user directories (based on your chosen user share configurable settings) located on the array, so it writes data to the cache first without bothering the array.  The Mover offloads that data on a schedule (i.e. daily) to the array which will cause the array to recompute parity as files get migrated.  So, when you write to the array, the only thing that gets utilized is the cache ... Unraid understands that the files are split between the cache and the array at that point so if you look for your data, it is transparent.  Note, unless you use a cache RAID1 (i.e. 2 cache drives, Unraid uses BTRFS for this), the data on the cache is unprotected until the mover runs.

 

IMO, you should not use the array for storing any files you don't want to store.  That's what the cache (or Unassigned Devices [another plugin]) is for.  If you use the array, you will constantly be rewriting parity to make sure the array is protected.  Unraid will do it, but you're asking it to do a lot more than it probably needs to ... and your taxing not only the drive that you're writing to, but the rest of the array as it computes parity.  You can keep a user share dedicated to the cache so it never gets moved, so that's an option if your cache is big enough to store these files AND the files you intend on moving to the array.  Note though, the cache can fill up! Since the mover only runs at a set schedule, if you overrun your cache size, you will write directly to the array till the cache is moved at the set schedule.  And if a directory is dedicated to the cache, and you fill it up ... honestly I don't know what will happen, but it will likely be an error of some kind.

 

I use an unassigned device (i.e. parity unprotected drives) to store things that I don't care if I lost ... like a DVR recording, my Plex database, or some Linux isos I download 😀.  Even most applications that run databases offer a data backup feature, so when those run, I place the backup location on the array (e.g. backup -> array location (cached) -> mover -> array location) so I have parity protected backups in case something goes wrong ... but those get written on a less frequent schedule.

 

Hope this helps and again, welcome!

-JesterEE

 

[lviperz]

Hey JesterEE, thanks so much for the detailed response.

 

My thoughts on my DVR recordings was to use the cache mainly for the speed. There are times we will watch a recording in progress so I thought things would work faster and lessen the load on the array by using the cache. I do keep these recordings for a little while but lately I've been deleting them for space. I would like to keep them longer so figured record to the cache and move to array for storage.

 

I've been keeping tv series and movies on the qnap. These don't get deleted but I don't see any reason save to the cache drive first as these aren't usually watched right away.

 

Also, I have looked in to plugins and have started watching spaceinvader one's videos. I haven't watched the one you posted or the one on cache drives yet but plan to. I did see the video about emulationstation and was like wow, I can move my retropie setup over and maybe crazy taxi on dreamcast will run. So I'm already starting to expand the use without it even being built yet.

 

Thanks again. Hoping to start assembly this weekend.