I am considering going to unraid on my main Gaming PC, few questions..

[Zeal]

I have a gaming rig, with a 4TB Black WD HDD, 1 TB Blue WD HDD, and a 512 GB SSD Samsung Evo, a 1060TI, and I believe it was a I5 and 16 gigs of ram [forget the cpu off hand, fairly powerful, built it maybe 3 years ago.]

 

Heres my goals and everyday uses for my PC, and hopefully unraid.

 

1. Pi-Hole

2. Torrents

3. Plex [fairly large media server, currently im at 5 gigs, but I plan to expand, as I am currently maxed out.]

4. VPN

5. Server for retroarch games, basically, I want all of my roms/iso's to be on this server, accessable from my Nvidia shield and phone, or what ever retroarch device I am using.

6. VM, this is perhaps the most important part, as I will be dedicating my gaming rig to the unraid server, so running a VM that can handle gaming, windows 10, and every day computer use.

7. My PC runs on a UPS, due to chronic power surges in the area due to shit power lines.  With this UPS I havent had any issues.  PC runs 24/7 in the living room, fairly well ventilated, with a air purifier to suck up all the dust, so she stays pretty clean.

 

I plan to buy the following.

 

1. M.2 Samsung Evo 1 TB SSD [This is soley for the Windows 10 VM]

2. a 2nd 512 gb SSD Evo, to match the first, for cache.

3. 2x 4 TB Ironwolfe Seagate Reds for storage, Plex, games, etc.

 

Questions--

1. Any suggestions on good thumb drives?  I am hearing that thumb drives going bad is a big deal, so I want something that will last, maybe 2-3 spares just for backups just in case it goes down.   Its not worth it if my system dies every few months and im fucked.

 

2. Any common issues I should look into and or look for?  Anything at all, perhaps even common mistakes from newbies.

 

3. How dangerous is random pc power offs?  Not that I anticipate this, I just would like to know for my own purposes.

 

4. Lastly, any other cool things/dockers that you guys use that you find incredibly useful?

[John_M]

1. I use Verbatim Nano USB 2 flash drives and haven't had any issues with them. I like them because they are so small and are much less likely to be disturbed than the usual size drives. Choose a drive with a brand name you've heard of and just get a basic USB 2 one. USB 3 ones are less reliable as boot devices and, since the OS loads into RAM and runs from there, the difference in speed is of no consequence. 4 GB is plenty but disproportionately expensive and difficult to find now. I have several 8 GB ones and some 32 GB ones and they all work just fine. Larger sizes than 32 GB can sometimes prove problematic when it comes to formatting them with FAT32, as needed by Unraid. There is an installation tool that can cope with larger capacity drives.

 

2. Two common mistakes are trying to do too much too quickly and not asking for advice when you need it. You've set out what you want to achieve, which is good, but take it a step at a time. Get the basic NAS working, then read about dockers and install Plex. Set it up and when you're happy with it install another and set that up. The read about VMs and set that up. If you get stuck then don't be afraid to ask. There's no such thing as a stupid question, especially if asking it helps prevent data loss.

 

3. Uncontrolled shutdowns are never good and should be avoided if at all possible. The system is aware if it was shut down uncleanly and will force a parity check on the next boot. Best case scenario is that a few parity errors are corrected. Worst case scenario is physical damage to the power supply and/or anything it powers, if it's a particularly dirty brown-out. Corrupt file systems are quite common following a power outage, but they can usually be repaired with little data loss, with btrfs being somewhat more susceptible to corruption and less easy to repair than XFS. It's a good idea to use a UPS, as you've already discovered.

 

4. What's "cool" is a matter of personal taste but the two dockers I find most useful are Plex and MakeMKV as I have a huge collection of optical media that I'm gradually working through to get it into a more convenient format.

 

One thing to bear in mind is that your gaming VM will never have quite the performance you enjoyed when running Windows on the bare metal. It can get close, but naturally some resources are taken up by the Unraid OS itself and by whatever docker containers you are also running concurrently with the Windows VM. Be prepared to dedicate a whole CPU core and 2 to 4 GB of RAM to Unraid.

 

[Zeal]

5 minutes ago, John_M said:

1. I use Verbatim Nano USB 2 flash drives and haven't had any issues with them. I like them because they are so small and are much less likely to be disturbed than the usual size drives. Choose a drive with a brand name you've heard of and just get a basic USB 2 one. USB 3 ones are less reliable as boot devices and, since the OS loads into RAM and runs from there, the difference in speed is of no consequence. 4 GB is plenty but disproportionately expensive and difficult to find now. I have several 8 GB ones and some 32 GB ones and they all work just fine. Larger sizes than 32 GB can sometimes prove problematic when it comes to formatting them with FAT32, as needed by Unraid. There is an installation tool that can cope with larger capacity drives.

hmm, So I was worried about over heating, not so much the visual or potential obstruction, as it will be behind the machine, in a place that is never disturbed.  But this is a good point, I do have my UPS mounted on the wall behind the PC, and if my wife goes back there...  Im gonna have to wife proof that area.  Glad you told me 2. drives are where its at, as I was looking into 3.0s.

 

7 minutes ago, John_M said:

2. Two common mistakes are trying to do too much too quickly and not asking for advice when you need it. You've set out what you want to achieve, which is good, but take it a step at a time. Get the basic NAS working, then read about dockers and install Plex. Set it up and when you're happy with it install another and set that up. The read about VMs and set that up. If you get stuck then don't be afraid to ask. There's no such thing as a stupid question, especially if asking it helps prevent data loss.

Unfortunately this is not really possible.  At this point my 1 PC runs everything.  I will focus on 1 thing at a time, but the migration is gonna be, well its gonna be instant, as I won't have any computer access on the in between.  I'll probably focus the VM first.  This has actually been a long time plan of mine, and I am also a fairly experienced computer tech, so hopefully some of my experience proves usefull, but then again, I have never messed with a NAS/Unraid before so who knows.

 

10 minutes ago, John_M said:

3. Uncontrolled shutdowns are never good and should be avoided if at all possible. The system is aware if it was shut down uncleanly and will force a parity check on the next boot. Best case scenario is that a few parity errors are corrected. Worst case scenario is physical damage to the power supply and/or anything it powers, if it's a particularly dirty brown-out. Corrupt file systems are quite common following a power outage, but they can usually be repaired with little data loss, with btrfs being somewhat more susceptible to corruption and less easy to repair than XFS. It's a good idea to use a UPS, as you've already discovered.

So this begs the question.  Can I set up some sort of automation for auto shutdowns if the power goes out?   Perhaps some sort of wifi device that reads the wall power, and if it disappears for more then idk 5 seconds, it forces a shutdown on a script?  This is just a random spitball idea that I had when reading this.   Nothing more frustrating then a dead disk.....  [that said, on a side note, I have gone through 4 SSD's since 2012, and I have damaged 0 HDDs.  It seems I am in the minority here lol]

 

13 minutes ago, John_M said:

One thing to bear in mind is that your gaming VM will never have quite the performance you enjoyed when running Windows on the bare metal. It can get close, but naturally some resources are taken up by the Unraid OS itself and by whatever docker containers you are also running concurrently with the Windows VM. Be prepared to dedicate a whole CPU core and 2 to 4 GB of RAM to Unraid.

yea, at this point in my life, my 30s, I am not really doing heavy gaming on my PC.  Im typically playing LoL, Legends of Runeterra, maybe an odd game here and there, some emulation [Rarely], then most of my gaming is back on PS4.   Its funny, I went from hardcore console, to hardcore pc gamer, now back to more console gaming.

[John_M]

11 minutes ago, Zeal said:

Can I set up some sort of automation for auto shutdowns if the power goes out?   Perhaps some sort of wifi device that reads the wall power, and if it disappears for more then idk 5 seconds, it forces a shutdown on a script?

If it's the right kind of UPS Unraid contains native support for it and will automatically shut down after a pre-configured time of running on battery power.

 

I'm a bit older than you. My gaming rig consisted until a couple of months ago of ScummVM on my laptop, though I recently built myself a MiSTer FPGA console.