New UNRAID Setup for NAS & WIndows PC

[Kyrii]

Hi all

I am new to unraid and am seeking some advice on moving forward with a Home File Server / Roon /Plex / Ubiquiti Camera Server i was setting up. 

Specs as follows.
Ryzen 1600
Asus B350-M
16/32gb DDR4 (Have enough for either)
Samsung Nvme drive
2x WD Green 3tb
2x WD Black 1tb
4tb WD Purple. (new)

Originally i was setting up the above and was just going going to do a Basic Raid 1 setup on the WD Green/Black drives.  I was then going to simply use network file share the drives for "nas" duties (essentially Music and Movies Storage),  Install Roon server, Install Plex server and Ubiquiti Unifi Video sofware all on a windows 10 installation and call it a day. ( I know its probably not the most ideal setup, but It would have been simple and easy)

However, in the process of setting it all up, i have now found one of the WD blacks and one of the WD greens are dying. 

I am now in a situation where I need to buy new drives for the "NAS" portion of this build and if going down the "new hardware path" would probably like to change to an option where i can expand as necessary and set it all up "better". I could probably just grab 2 big drives in raid 1 and continue down the same path/

However, my thoughts are to get 3 New 6tb drives and run un-raid using one as a parity drive. I believe I understand how to do this, but i'm now stuck about the windows side of things. 

Im assuming its not going to be as easy as installing straight windows on the NVME drive and it will "automatically" use all resources that unraid didnt.

My assumption is Windows will need to be run in a VM with "X" of the available cores/ram assigned and the NVME Drive, WD Purple, GPU passed through. I believe this may also need a separate NIC than what the Unraid NAS will be using?

Does it sound like I am on the right track moving forward or is there something i am missing?



 

[Energen]

I don't think you are on the right track with your plans..  I think you are missing the point of using, and the features of, Unraid.

 

While Unraid itself is not really a RAID system, you don't really "need" RAID because of the parity drive.. so while you won't have a RAID-1 copy of a drive, if a drive failed you would be able to rebuild it from the parity drive.   I believe you can pass a RAID-1 drive to Unraid but not sure how that would work, and might be more complicated than it's worth. 

 

Basically, if you want to use RAID, you don't want Unraid.. that's my opinion.

 

Also, while you 'could' run a Windows VM to install the apps you were talking about, that's not efficient.  You'd be creating the unneeded overhead of running a VM and then relying on that VM to work properly at all times, and if something were to happen to that VM, such as a VM file getting corrupted -- there goes everything running inside of the VM.

 

Running any OS inside a VM is not going to the most "capable" system.. while it's usable for a lot of things it's not a 1 to 1 comparison against running the actual OS on your hardware.  So while you could probably use the NVMe drive for a Windows installation, it's still running as a VM and you're limited to that "experience".  If that makes sense...

 

You want Plex --- run it in a docker.  Ubiquity, you probably want the UniFi Video docker.  Roon (music server?), you might be able to get a docker that works, or find another solution. File server would be through SMB shares, no problem there.

 

So let's say you drop the RAID portion of things and go fully Unraid..  get the new drives and then you could run your system like this:

 

1x 512GB SSD cache drive (buy one, or use the Samsung NVME drive)

1x 6TB parity

2x 6TB data drives

1x 3TB WD Green data drive

1x 1TB WD Black data drive

= 16TB storage all protected by parity.

 

But since you already have one bad drive from each existing disk, I'd be somewhat concerned about those other disks too.  Either dump them, or double up on a parity drive.  2x 6TB parity, 1x 6TB data drive.  If one drive fails at a time you can restore from one parity drive, but if 2 drives fail at the same time you can not rebuild 2 disks from 1 parity drive (read the wiki about parity drives).

 

Hope this helps a little..

[Kyrii]

HI. 

Thank you, my midnight brain wasn't very clear.

Have no intention of running raid and Unraid together.  Mentioned raid 1 as my "easier" option i suppose.

Will be dumping the "good" 1tb and 3tb drives for sure.

I didnt realise there was a Unifi video docker. I should be able to direct this to use the  single WD Purple ? or will it need to use the 3x6tb drives?

From a quick google it seems like there is a Roon docker, so i think i would be set.

Thanks for your help!

 

[Kyrii]

Thinking about it further, the WD purple is just over-complicating it.

I should just go for 4x new drives, using 3 for data and one for parity and let the Unifi Docker just use some of the array.