Switching from a Mac Mini to unRAID on a Dell PowerEdge T110 II


idwxyz

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Hi all,

 

I have just made the jump to unRAID from my 2011 Mac Mini with an external USB drive which had been my plex server for the last nine years. I recently started playing with Docker and it was all a bit too much for the poor little Mac. So I picked up a used tower on eBay, threw in a PCI Sata card and some drives and it's currently transfering all my data over.

 

Dell PowerEdge T110 II

Intel Xeon E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz

16GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM

2x 1Tb Samsung QVO SSD (cache drives)

4x 4Tb WD White drives (one for parity)

 

Once I've finished copying over all the media and other backups I want to setup Plex, HomeAssistant & MQTT. Plus I'm tempted to look into the letsencrypt container to give myself easier URLs to access the services running in Docker.

 

Also I bought a XFX Radeon HD5450 GPU because apparently there are issues using modern GPUs on these machines due to the way the motherboards were designed. Apparently you can get around it by triming down the PCI connector on a supported card like the HD5450 and replacing the stock PSU with one that has GPU power connectors. I'll see how I get on without any GPU and hope it's not needed but for £15 it seemed like a potentially helpful thing to have in the drawer.

 

I just thought I'd say Hi and thanks for all the posts in the forum, I've been doing a lot of reading over the last week while deciding how to go about this.

 

One thing I learnt the long way was that for the PowerEdge T110 II you have to toggle the Enable UEFI setting under advanced in the unRAID USB Creator and then be sure to set the boot mode to UEFI in the BIOS on the machine. I tried every permutation before I saw the advanced options in the USB creator!

 

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  • 1 month later...

Hi, I'm looking for a cheap entry level server. I'll run Plex on it (max 1 transcode at a time), Home assistant with just a few basic plugins and MQTT. DoI found the Poweredge for around 60$ with 1tb of storage and 8gb of RAM.

I'd like to ask you a few things before buying it: how loud is it and how much does it consume on idle?

Cheers

Edited by Sasso0101
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/19/2020 at 8:23 AM, Sasso0101 said:

Hi, I'm looking for a cheap entry level server. I'll run Plex on it (max 1 transcode at a time), Home assistant with just a few basic plugins and MQTT. DoI found the Poweredge for around 60$ with 1tb of storage and 8gb of RAM.

I'd like to ask you a few things before buying it: how loud is it and how much does it consume on idle?

Cheers

Hey, I'm running a PowerEdge t110ii on Unraid and thought I'd chime in. I'm not sure what CPU yours would have but regardless it will be mediocre for transcoding. I opted to upgrade my server Celeron to the i3-3220 which has a slightly newer revision of QuickSync for hardware transcoding, as well as a much better clock speed than anything else it normally comes with(plus HT). Should be fine for 1 transcode tho, but don't plan on doing anything with 4k. It's a great little server, and to answer your question it's about as cool and quiet as it gets. It's completely inaudible and runs very cool, as there's a thermal shroud over the cpu and memory like most servers. There is a total of 5 x Sata 2(3Gbps) ports available for Unraid that should be fast enough to handle most mechanical drives. I added a 5.25" hot swap bay, as there are only 4 internal spots for 3.5". It's an ideal unraid NAS as there are 2 internal USB headers to hide your boot drive. The one real drawback I've found is it appears to only support ECC UDIMMS, or unbuffered ECC, which is kinda rare/expensive. I had zero luck running non-ecc unbuffered memory, even with the i3. You should be fine with the included 8GB RAM, but there's one more thing to note about this server. It's biggest drawback is that it can only support low power PCIE graphics cards, there's a wattage limit on the slot... So don't plan on running dedicated graphics for anything serious, like HW transcoding. You could probably still pass-through video for other purposes tho. Holler if you need to know anything else.

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