Sooo, Ill start with, I'm a total noob when it comes to Un-raid set up.  I have an i5-4690k acting as an un-raid file server at home that a buddy built for me out of some spare parts and a 10g nic, a while ago and it works great.  But, at the office, were running off of a rasberry pi and a Synology NAS some one before me set up.  Because of that, I'd want to upgrade what I've got at the office using Un-raid. 

 

To elaborate a bit, I'm a 3D artist tasked with running a small render farm of 6 machines in the office (that I would like to expand in the future), along side a hand full of other artists, we are all regularly accessing files from the local NAS.  We do a lot of graphically intensive CG work, loading files on and off of the local network while rendering, and my thought was to build a file server made up completely of SSDs so that the process is substantially faster and more effective than it currently is.  

 

The thought process is to build a Ryzen 3600x base system that will be able to manage the larger file-size content (4-8k .tiff textures, 4-6gb psd files, large 3D model files etc) running through it.  My thought was to start by building a system with 4-8, 2TB SSD Drives, making up an a 8-16tb cache of "hot" file storage (active project files and what not).  Then that would back up to the existing 48tb local synology NAS we already have, ie "cold" storage.  The goal is to also upgrade the network to support 10gbe and get some real speed gains over-all. In theory...

 

We would probably be running only one, maybe two VMs acting as licensing servers for the rendering software we use and finally I'm looking at getting an unmanaged 10gbe switch for the go-between for all of the render nodes and a 24port 1gbe switch we already have for the teams computers.   I don't even know where to start regarding a managed switches so I'm trying to avoid those if possible. 

 

Hearing all that, am I headed in the right direction? I want to eliminate the bottle necks of our current solution (there are many), and make everything faster so that we can take full advantage of the 4 2990wx's we have as render nodes.  At the moment it just takes too long to access big files off the spinning drive NAS storage and garbage network we have. But having never touched Un-Raid before on my own, I'm a bit apprehensive.  

 

Thanks for any help from the community here!

1 hour ago, TedVitale_CG said:

At the moment it just takes too long to access big files off the spinning drive NAS storage

It will be same situation if use official common setup. Unraid suitable for large storage and not for multiple high speed access.

 

But it have potential, so you can use different hardware and config it to provide some kind of performance storage, but this still need a technical guy to maintain it, especially when it got trouble.

 

Pls also note most consumers SSD always perform bad, only those high end enterprise SSD can fullfill the requirements.