Feedback on new home server build and Disk setup.

[Strongside-TA]

Hello everyone.

 

Im new to Unraid and would love for some feedback on my current Build.

 

The idea behind the build is to use it for Plex Server, NAS for files and backup ect. Home automation. VM's Both for Win10 and MacOS. Later on will be used for version check on both OS for my work.

 

Build:

 

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 - 3700x or maybe wait til the 4th gen comes out later this year ?

Motherboard: Asrock 570x Creator 

RAM: Kingston's KSM26ED8/16ME - (16GB) DDR4-2666 ECC Ram 4 sticks so 64GB in total.

PSU: Seasonic Prime ultra platinum 650W

CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D9

Disk Array: 16 TB Seagate IronWolf NAS. gonna start with 3 and add more along the way.

Cache and OS: Seagate Ironwolf SSD 960 GB Is 960GB enough ?

GPU's: P2000 or a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super for Plex transcoding, anyone can give some insight on what's better ?

GPU 2: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 super for VM's

 

Can anyone give some feedback on a good SLI Controller, im quite lost on what exactly to look for ?

 

This build will be racked in a Silverstone RM400 with a StarTech 4-Bay Mobile Rack Backplane: Link

 

[testdasi]

Get a Gigabyte motherboard unless you are 100% sure you can live with having the P2000 on the 1st PCIe slot and RTX 2080 on the 2nd PCIe slot.

Gigabyte BIOS would allow you to pick any PCIe x16 length slot to boot Unraid with so you can put any GPU anywhere.

With a non-Gigabyte mobo, if you put the 2080 on the 1st slot (why? a lot of the 2080 are 2.5 slots width) then the mobo BIOS will boot Unraid with it. That will cause you issues passing the 2080 through to the VM.

Getting a Gigabyte mobo doesn't guarantee passthrough but it will help a lot.

 

If the reason you picked AsRock was for the ECC RAM support then note that you don't need ECC RAM for Unraid (unlike for example FreeNAS which uses ZFS which basically requires ECC).

 

I would pick the P2000 because it's unlocked with number of streams. With the 1660 you will need to use the (frowned upon) Nvidia patch. The P2000 will work out of the box. And it's single-slot so you can put it at the bottom most PCIe slot (which comes back to the point about Gigabyte mobo allowing you to boot Unraid with a GPU on any of the 3 long slots).

Note: will need to install Unraid Nvidia build which is a community build i.e. you need to use the plugin to update Unraid instead of using the official method.

 

960GB is enough for most users.

Note though that 650W PSU may not be enough with all (future) the HDD's in place. Make sure you check the power requirement (e.g. use pcpartpicker).

 

What is "SLI Controller"? You mean HBA controller i.e. for SATA / SAS?

[Strongside-TA]

19 hours ago, testdasi said:

Get a Gigabyte motherboard unless you are 100% sure you can live with having the P2000 on the 1st PCIe slot and RTX 2080 on the 2nd PCIe slot.

Gigabyte BIOS would allow you to pick any PCIe x16 length slot to boot Unraid with so you can put any GPU anywhere.

With a non-Gigabyte mobo, if you put the 2080 on the 1st slot (why? a lot of the 2080 are 2.5 slots width) then the mobo BIOS will boot Unraid with it. That will cause you issues passing the 2080 through to the VM.

Getting a Gigabyte mobo doesn't guarantee passthrough but it will help a lot.

 

If the reason you picked AsRock was for the ECC RAM support then note that you don't need ECC RAM for Unraid (unlike for example FreeNAS which uses ZFS which basically requires ECC).

 

I would pick the P2000 because it's unlocked with number of streams. With the 1660 you will need to use the (frowned upon) Nvidia patch. The P2000 will work out of the box. And it's single-slot so you can put it at the bottom most PCIe slot (which comes back to the point about Gigabyte mobo allowing you to boot Unraid with a GPU on any of the 3 long slots).

Note: will need to install Unraid Nvidia build which is a community build i.e. you need to use the plugin to update Unraid instead of using the official method.

 

960GB is enough for most users.

Note though that 650W PSU may not be enough with all (future) the HDD's in place. Make sure you check the power requirement (e.g. use pcpartpicker).

 

What is "SLI Controller"? You mean HBA controller i.e. for SATA / SAS?

Well reason I choose the Asrock board was the 10 Gbe and ECC, since the server will hold some crucial data I thought of going ECC instead of Non-Ecc is that a bad idea though ? Ive looked on Gigabytes website and the only equivalent board with 10Gbe and support for ECC I could find was X570 Aorus Extreme which seem like overkill being a E-ATX Board and rather pricey.... If I went threadripper I could use the Designer board but that is again more expensive aswell as a higher TDP on the CPU.

 

Ill stick to the p2000 and upgrade the PSU to a 850W then.

 

I meant a LSI Sata controller or HBA as you said.