Light Gaming Station for two

Hi all!

 

I'll fist post my objective, how my setup is placed so far and where I want to get.

 

The main objective is to use my new hardware as a gaming station and provide a lighter gaming station for my daughter to play her games remotely over RemoteFX or Steam Play.

 

My running setup so far is: Windows 10 with my software and games and tensorflow software development, a VMware virtual machine with her games (6 cores, 6gb of ram, vmware Virtual 3D video card, no pcie passthrough possible) with Windows 10 installed as well.

 

Where I want to get is: a decent virtualized setup using existing hardware and providing real graphics card both for me and her. Have tried hyper-v solution but felt both buggy and bureaucratic, needed professional video cards for DDA, etc... And I have no budget to buy a windows server licence (everything tight and licenced is very important to me).

 

That said, trough Linus channel I've heard about Unraid solution, seems to fit my needs, have downloaded, walked around menus, understood that this is a linux solution that configures qemu to virtualization and hardware passthrough and this seems very promissing to me!

 

Now, for my hardware list and doubts:

 

 - b450 MotherBoard with 4 SATA ports, 2 PCI-E 16x, one NVME slot.

 - 16GB of 3200mhz RAM (XMP profile 2 and rather stable! )

 - Ryzen 2600x (this version has no GPU)

 - Nvidia 1050ti 4GB (this is my head card now)

 - a spare RX 570 XT 4GB (waiting to buuurn in her games)

 - As monitor I use my livingroom TV, nice big screen for gaming

 - Common cabled 1Gb ethernet for internet and connectivity

(i'm expecting to have some new video cards, probably a NV 2060 super and a rx 5700, but that's future)

 

Storage:

 - 1 512GB NVME Western Digital, OS and some games and tools installed

 - 1 512GB SATA SSD, with her VM and my machine learning work

 - 1 512GB 5200 WD Blue for backup (no problem using as another hard drive, that would be nice if possible)

 - 1 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive for music

 - 1 2TB 7200 RPM hard drive for torrent and movies (i'm runing plex as media server, if this could be in a docker instance would be awesome, but could be another VM running ubuntu server, I'll feel better configuring my torrent tools and scripts)

 

 

I understand (at least I think I do) some points so far:

 - Unraid needs to buid it's own harddrive array, so, using my existing instalation won't be possible or feasable

 - Unraid also will need a video card as head for the first setup only, so I could use both my existing cards as heads for me at the TV and for her gaming VM

 - I won't need a parity drive. Whatever, if I lose any of the drives there is no problem rebuilding the system, there is nothing here I couldn't loose, no problem with that, this is no concern for this setup. God bless the cloud and the backups.

 

My concerns are:

 

1. Today I use NVME as OS hard drive, it feels really snappy and fast, ultra responsive and I've spent some money on it to have a responsive workstation. Since Unraid uses the drives as a single array, I have no way to dedicate this drive for my Windows boot drive, my files will spread through the slow disks, and I'll loose this responsiveness, right?

2. Unraid seems to have a nice workaround for that, that is the cache disk. O don't know how transparent this would be, but seems to me a great lost of money (come on, I'm in Brazil, theese things are really expensive and bought in purpose only) to dedicate this NVME drive as cache only drive. Please correct me if I'm wrong anytime.

 

NVME as OS drive was a big change for me, getting out of SATA limitations and have a realy fast memmory was a big shift for me and I would love to keep this enhancemente and to build a system to achieve those goals at the same time.

 

Well, that's what I would like to check with you guys, Unraid has a nice pricing for my tier but a dollar is costing 4.6+ BRL and I would go for it only if all those poits are clear.

For those who read this huge post, thank you all and congratulations to Unraid for the nice work and tool.