Unraid HDD and SSD setup with 1 VM (Choosing best setup for HDD and SSD)

[Johev]

Dear Unraid community,

I am resuming my project of building an Unraid server with a Windows VM. A quick spec is a Supermicro X10SL7-F motherboard, an Xeon E3-1265L v3 and 32GB of ECC RAM. From the components you can see how long it has taken me .

As for the storage drives I have 6 - 4 TB Seagate NAS drives for a 2 drive redundant storage, attached to the LSI Broadcom 2308 flashed to IT mode.

The question I have is with how to use the 2 SSDs that I have:

• 1 Samsung EVO 860 1TB
•  1 Intel S3500 480GB (hopefully a bit powerloss resistant)

The purpose is to be able to have Unraid as a storage and hypervisor for a Windows 10 pro which will be used as a workstation. The USB controller and GPU (RC 580 8GB model) should be passedthrough to it, so that it can be used as if it was a normal bare metal Windows 10 install.

• Option 1 is to define the Samsung 1TB SSD as a cache drive, where I would install all the dockers and with the unassigned drive plugin I would use the Intel SSD to install Windows 10.
• Option 2 is to reverse. Use the Intel as the cache and use the Samsung for my Windows 10 installation.

 

I would like to have your input on what you think should be the best setup. I also thought of just passingthrough the 2nd SATA controller to Windows, however that way I could not have the dockers/plugins on an SSD.

I understand that all my options do not provide any redundancy to the SSDs, however I’ll keep all files on the NAS storage and just have the installations on the SSDs.

Many thanks in advance for all your assistance.

 

Edited April 6, 2020 by Johev

[testdasi]

With 6 drives, having dual parity is an overkill based on Backblaze HDD failure stats.

You have to be super risk averse and/or store super important data on the array to require that level of protection.

 

I haven't heard of RC 580 graphics card. I think you meant AMD RX 580? If that's the case, the very first thing you need to do is to try booting Unraid with the mobo integrated ASMedia GPU. The only success stories of passing through RX 580 on here involve booting Unraid with another GPU.

 

Since both SSD's are SATA, using either of them exclusively for a VM (i.e. passing through using ata-id method) will not yield you much (if any) perceivable diff, as compared to putting a vdisk on the drive.

 

With vdisk (and appropriate config), Windows will detect the vdisk correctly as thin-provision and thus enable trim.

An ata-id passed through device doesn't support trim, as far as I have managed to try in the past.

There is the scsi-bus pass through method which may (or may not) enable trim but I haven't tried that when I had a spare SATA SSD.

 

So if you really want to give the VM exclusive use of an SSD, you are better off with Option 1. That is assuming, being an enterprise MLC SSD, the S3500 runs better without trim.

 

 

 

[Johev]

@testdasi Thank you so much for your valuable input.

The GPU is an RX580 (as you have correctly guessed) - I specifically bought an AMD card as I have heard of all the issues with the NVIDIA GPUs when passing them through. - The Supermicro motherboard has an onboard GPU and the Xeon E3 has another integrated iGPU, so I hope that passing through the RX580 will be work.

 

I did not fully understand the vdisk with appropriate config. Could you please elaborate? I would not add the SSDs to the pool as mixing mechanical drives and SSDs does not seem like a good idea. Do I assign the SSDs to the cache?

 

Thank you in advance for assistance.

 

 

[testdasi]

27 minutes ago, Johev said:

@testdasi Thank you so much for your valuable input.

The GPU is an RX580 (as you have correctly guessed) - I specifically bought an AMD card as I have heard of all the issues with the NVIDIA GPUs when passing them through. - The Supermicro motherboard has an onboard GPU and the Xeon E3 has another integrated iGPU, so I hope that passing through the RX580 will be work.

 

I did not fully understand the vdisk with appropriate config. Could you please elaborate? I would not add the SSDs to the pool as mixing mechanical drives and SSDs does not seem like a good idea. Do I assign the SSDs to the cache?

 

Thank you in advance for assistance.

Either iGPU or onboard would be fine as long as the mobo BIOS let you boot Unraid with it.

 

You can put the 860 Evo to cache and mount the Intel as unassigned device (install the Unassigned Devices and Unassigned Devices Plug plugin from the app store).

 

With regards to VM fig, have a read of the VM FAQ, it will answer a lot of your questions.

E.g. below is link to the post about how to enable trim on vdisk