First Unraid build - HW feedback

[WellThen]

I have been pondering setting up my own server for quite a while now since I want to remove all mass storage from my main computer and build a small form factor gaming rig. I have a NAS today, but it's so slow and doesn't give me the flexibility I want (e.g. no Plex server options). For some reason I only came across FreeNAS when I started researching a while back and I was close to pulling the trigger, but I held off to see it the new i3 Intel processors were worth the wait. Watching a Linus Tech Tips video a week back he mentioned that he much preferred Unraid to FreeNAS which led me down a rabbit hole of articles and YouTube videos and I'm fairly convinced now that Unraid is pretty ideal for my use case. 

 

The hardware I have:

 

- 4 x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro

- 2 x nvme M2 256 GB SSD

- 1 X Samsung 500 GB SSD

- Sony 16GB USB drive

 

The hardware I'm considering:

 

- Supermicro X11SCH-F

- Intel Xeon E-2234

- Noctua NH-U14S

- 1x Crucial DDR4 2666 MHz 16GB ECC (CT16G4WFD8266)

- Seagate IronWolf 8TB

- Fractal Design Node 304

- Corsair SF600 SFX 80 PLUS Platinum

 

The server won't contain any critical data, pretty much only video and music files. It would suck to loose the data, but it's not irreplaceable. For now the main use case for the server will be Plex (maybe Sonarr and Radarr) and network storage for my main computer. I try to only do direct play, but there might be two or three simultaneous 1080p transcodes from time to time. I suspect the HW I have chosen is overkill for this use, but I want something future proof.

 

First I was tempted to go with Ryzen 3600 since it would be cheaper and almost double the Passmark score of the E-2234, but my reasoning for the HW suggestion above is that I want something established and stable with as few head aches as possible while still being fairly modern hardware. And if I do need more processing power down the line, I might be able to snag a used more powerful Xeon for a decent price in a few years. I chose the 8 TB as a parity drive to easily be able to expand the storage in the future. I'm managing fine with around 11 TB today and this config would be able to get me up to 25 TB by adding another 8 TB drive and replacing one of the 4TB drives with an 8 TB drive, should be sufficient for the foreseeable future for my needs.

 

The motherboard has two m2 slots, would it be beneficial to run my nvme SSDs in raid0 and have a very fast 500 GB cache pool? And perhaps setup the extra SATA SSD as a backup? I have read quite a lot about the cache pool, but I'm still a bit unsure how this actually works and how to best utilice the HW I have and what size it actually needs to be.  

 

The motherboard only has a VGA connection, which I don't really have anything that supports at the moment. I'm considering getting an adapter to hdmi, but I know those can be a bit fidgety. If I have understood it correctly the motherboard has ipmi, but can I actually install and configure the setup from scratch using this? Or would I need a monitor to get things started?

 

Is there any benefit in going with Ironwolf Pro for the 8 TB? I got the first three 4TB drives for free, that's why I have Pro per now. But cost wise the non-pro seems to be a better option for my use case when/if I need to expand the storage capacity.

 

In my country this would run me about 1400 USD which is around what I'm comfortable spending. 

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Edited March 14, 2020 by WellThen

[testdasi]

2 hours ago, WellThen said:

The hardware I'm considering:

 

- Supermicro X11SCH-F

- Intel Xeon E-2234

- Noctua NH-U14S

- 1x Samsung 16GB DDR4-2666 CL19 REG/ECC (M393A2K40CB2-CTD) 

- Seagate IronWolf 8TB

- Fractal Design Node 304

Going for Xeon does not mean stable and no headache etc. The only thing guaranteed with going Xeon is $$$.

 

If you want Intel build (particularly for the iGPU), just go for i3 / i5 etc. There is really no point paying over your head for Xeon. Intel purposely prices Xeon ridiculously higher than equivalent consumer CPU because of market segmentation (i.e. you don't have as much money as a company).

It's a similar situation with Supermicro. Just get consumer-grade mobo and you will be fine.

 

With regards to RAID cache pool, as a matter of principle, I would discourage the use of RAID-0.

If you don't need protection for the cache pool (i.e. don't need RAID-1) then mount the other NVMe as Unassigned Device and then separate write-heavy and read-heavy data. That will pro-long the lifespan of your SSD, which would be way more beneficial than any real life speed diff that a NVMe RAID-0 pool could ever offer.

 

You should not be running single stick of RAM. That is not controversial.

What would be somewhat controversial is that I do not advocate for paying extra for ECC RAM. Some will disagree with that to some extents.

However, I had run ECC for quite some time in the past and then switched to non-ECC. There was ZERO diff in stability.

If your RAM is good, the chance of a single-bit corruption (which ECC is meant to fix) on consumer servers is rather remote.

And I'm running 96GB of RAM. If there's no stability diff in my server, the chance of it to matter on your 32GB server is even more remote.

 

For Unraid and the number of drives you have, there's no benefit of getting Iron Wolf Pro.

 

 

[WellThen]

Hmm, interesting. Thanks for your response. I guess I'm a bit colored by the feedback I first got over at ixsystems, where ECC RAM and Supermicro seemed to be the only thing worth considering. 

 

If I'm ditching the server motherboard and ECC, maybe an i5-9600k could be the way to go. I see that has a higher passmark as the Xeon I initially considered. How beneficial is the iGPU for transcoding in Plex compared to using the processor for that job?

 

I see, I'll drop the RAID-0 plans for the cache pool and go with RAID-1. Would 256 GB be sufficient in general for the setup I'm considering?

Edited March 14, 2020 by WellThen