New build for treasured family photos, work and study stuff, Vm's

[Grumpybeard]

Hi,

 

Having owned a 6 bay QNAP nas for 10 years now (incidentally it's been rock solid), I'm starting to get paranoid that it's ageing (drive health checks OK though). Looking around at off-the-shelf recently, it appears to me the consumer market has become somewhat stagnant (guess due to cloud storage, streaming). So I'm looking to build custom NAS for the next 10 years! Have experience with gaming custom watercooled PCs but not servers/NAS. 

 

Use case is reliable storage of treasured family photographs and movies, work and study materials. Currently have ~3tb of data but imagine this will at least double over the next years, mostly of pics of the kids and family holidays!  Occasionally stream movies and series, dont do any transacoding etc. I would also like to use it for messing around with VMs without endangering the data store. I would also like to have some easily available plugin that can back up selected folders to gmail drive/hotmail onedrive.

 

Below is first draft hardware spec:

 

Case - Fractal Define 7 (quiet, discrete, room for expansion)

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/fractal-design-define-7-black-solid-midi-tower-pc-cases-12757901

 

Motherboard - Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/gigabyte-x570-aorus-elite-am4-amd-x570-atx-motherboards-11412004

 

CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/amd-ryzen-5-3600-am4-360ghz-6-core-processors-11156643

 

PSU - Seasonic Focus Plus Platinum 550

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/seasonic-focus-plus-platinum-550w-power-supply-computer-6412487

 

HDD - 4 x 6tb WD My Book (shuckable?)

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/wd-my-book-6tb-external-hard-drives-5942033

 

RAM - 2 x Kingston ValueRAM Server Premier (1x, 16GB, DDR4-2666, DIMM 288) ECC

https://www.digitec.ch/en/s1/product/kingston-valueram-server-premier-1x-16gb-ddr4-2666-dimm-288-memory-10089358

 

 

If I was going traditional RAID it would be RAID6 for dual parity drives (?) but unsure how this translates to unRaid. No idea yet about GPU, or any need for additional SSD's/NVMEs for unraid/VM/caching store etc, and grateful if someone could advise me here.   Most grateful for feedback on above spec, e.g. ECC ram required etc. I assume plugins available for backup to cloud (have fibre line) and messing with Vms will not endanger data store?

 

Thank you very much!

[trurl]

Unraid IS NOT RAID. It does allow 1 or 2 parity, but data is not striped. Each data disk is an independent filesystem and each file is completely on a single disk. Folders can span disks (user shares).

 

Unraid (or any RAID) is not a substitute for backups.

[Grumpybeard]

i was hoping for something more constructive given I mentioned backup to cloud already happening :)

 

I also understand unraid is not raid. So the benefits, in one sentence, would be? As I see it, i can have documents stored on disk volumes that are secured from failure if I use parity. How would you sell it in one sentence? Thank you

 

 

 

 

[Michael_P]

Easy expansion is the main benefit for me.

 

Many confuse high availability with data security, which is why the first reaction is to correct that misconception.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, Grumpybeard said:

I also understand unraid is not raid. So the benefits, in one sentence, would be?

We get all kinds with first posts. Many people don't know that Unraid is not RAID. What else do you already know about Unraid then maybe we can fill in the gaps.

 

6 minutes ago, Michael_P said:

Easy expansion is the main benefit for me.

The fact that Unraid is not RAID, and

1 hour ago, trurl said:

Each data disk is an independent filesystem

allows you to mix different sized disks in the parity array and add disks to the array without rebuilding.

[trurl]

Also

3 hours ago, trurl said:

Each data disk is an independent filesystem

means each data disk can be read all by itself, regardless of what happens to all the other disks. If for some reason you have more than parity can recover, you still haven't lost everything.

 

[Grumpybeard]

With regard to my understanding of unraid to date, here goes

 

Based on Debian Linux. You can add any disk of any size and brand to expand the pool. You have data stored hdd(s). Additional hdd(s) act as parity disk(s), which give me the chance to get data back from a lost disk. If I lose the parity disk(s) and any data disks, then it's only from those disks that I lose data, the others are intact and useable.  The solution also has "plugins" for vms and containers etc. I also hear that read/write performance is poor? 

 

Above Q's in op still stands. Thanks very much

[trurl]

5 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

Based on Debian Linux.

Unraid is a custom version of slackware linux.

[trurl]

5 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

hear that read/write performance is poor?

Since there is no striping, read performance is at the speed of the single disk that contains the file. Write performance is somewhat slower due to realtime parity updates.

 

11 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

No idea yet about GPU

Depends on how you want your VMs to work. Many VMs can just run with VNC as the virtual display, but if you need more graphics performance then you would want a graphics card for it. Note that not all CPUs and motherboards support hardware passthrough.

 

11 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

need for additional SSD's/NVMEs for unraid/VM/caching

Solid state storage is good for the cache pool, and you can have multiple disks in the cache pool for redundancy. Cache can be used for dockers, VMs, and as temporary storage to speed up writes to the server.

 

11 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

ECC ram required

Not required. Some recommend it. I don't have it.

 

11 hours ago, Grumpybeard said:

I assume plugins available for backup to cloud (have fibre line) and messing with Vms will not endanger data store?

There are containers for cloud backup.

 

Looks like there are currently 684 dockers and plugins listed on the Apps page. Plugins are typically enhancements to the Unraid webUI or other things that add functionality to Unraid itself. Docker containers are standalone VM environments designed to run a specific application.

 

VMs and containers will not endanger the underlying host OS. You will probably give many of them read and/or write access to some of the data store depending on what you need them to do.

[Grumpybeard]

Thanks for taking the time for such a comprehensive reply @trurl, that's so helpful, really appreciate it.

 

After further reading I think I'll go for just 2 larger hdd's for data and just 1 additional for the parity. Looking at the WD My Book 8TBs, I see these are good to shuck?

 

Thank-you, it looks like this will suit my requirements just fine.