Converting my normal desktop PC into unRAID built? A few questions from a newbie

[toasti]

Hello Community,

I hope it's correct to post this here - if not please move to another sub forum.

 

Actually I wanted to buy an additinal Synology that I can use Docker on it to let a photo / video management software inside a container running, the photos / videos should also be saved on the Synology itself.

Then I discovered unRAID, thought about to build a mall Mini-ITX NAS with a cheap SoC board and 4 disks to achieve what I originally wanted: Docker + photos / video storage.

And now I am crazy and thinking about to convert my current Fractal Design Define R4 into a unRAID built and use a W10 VM as daily driver.

 

Why?

 

- No additional case I need a suitable space for

- I can use all my existing hardware (Intel Pentium G4620, MSI board with 6 x SATA, 8 GB RAM, 1 x M2 512GB SSD, 2 x WD blue 4TB, 1 x WD black 1TB, nVidia GTX560 Ti) and only need to upgrade a few components like the CPU, RAM to fit my needs for an unRAID build.

- My PC doesn't run 24/7, but long enough without working by myself on it and why don't use this time also for other things on the NAS

 

But with all the fascination about unRAID and its possibilities I am really asking me if that make sense?

Only a W10 VM and all is depending if unRAID works or not?

 

What I do on my Windows 10 - I think for that the VM is for 90% enough:

- Internet surfing

- Music listening

- MS Office

- A little bit Gaming (mostly Steam)

- Photo Editing

- Video Editing

 

The last point is the one with big question marks. Will that still work? With the current (not the best performance with my hardware) speed or slower?

 

I planned to upgrade my PC for video editing (CPU, RAM, video card), but then there's no more budget at the moment for a separated unRAID built and with this in mind I got the idea to combine all. Why not upgrade the PC and using this for all without spending extra money on NAS hardware?

 

And what about the gaming experience with shooters like CounterStrike?

 

Maybe I would add more Docker containers and VMs (Linux) in future.

 

What's your experience, does that make sense? Who converted his normal pc into an unRAID built and is using only one machine any more for all?

Performance, power consumption? The fact that this machine will probably not run 24/7 - do you see problems here?

 

Thank you in advance! 🙂

 

Edited August 17, 2020 by toasti

[severalboxes]

I consolidated my gaming machine and file servers needs into one unraid machine and couldn't be happier. After applying some tweaks to the XML and windows registry for better GPU passthrough performance I can't tell any real difference between VM and bare metal. That being said I would recommend you still have at least 1 bare metal machine on your network. I use my wife's whenever I need to do any configuration that requires stopping the array or vm manager.

 

Once or twice I have forgotten that I'm using the windows 10 VM and gone to shutdown VM manager, and been greeted with a Windows Shutdown screen.... and think oh yeah dummy you're on a VM

[toasti]

That sounds brilliant!

How do you use your VM? Is there a mode to boot directly in the unRAID VM manager to open the VM or do I need a separated "Thin Client" to connect to my VM?

What hardware config do you have and which settings did you set for a better GPU passthrough?

Probably it's the best to have the VM on a separated SSD and additionally a chache drive?

 

[testdasi]

4 hours ago, toasti said:

I planned to upgrade my PC for video editing (CPU, RAM, video card), but then there's no more budget at the moment for a separated unRAID built and with this in mind I got the idea to combine all. Why not upgrade the PC and using this for all without spending extra money on NAS hardware?

 

And what about the gaming experience with shooters like CounterStrike?

 

Maybe I would add more Docker containers and VMs (Linux) in future.

 

What's your experience, does that make sense? Who converted his normal pc into an unRAID built and is using only one machine any more for all?

Performance, power consumption? The fact that this machine will probably not run 24/7 - do you see problems here?

Don't think of it as a conversion. Think of it as a combination / rebuild. Same same but different.

If you build a certain hardware based on bare-metal considerations and then throw Unraid at it to do a NAS+PC "conversion" then chances are your path will be fraught with difficulties. There are things that nobody cares about with bare-metal build but vary from make-or-break to quality-of-life stuff for your use case.

A few pointers for you:

• Have a low-end graphics card or Intel iGPU to boot Unraid with + have a separate high-end card dedicated to the VM. The more important having a daily driver VM (with passed-through graphics) is to you, the more you want to do this.
  • It is entirely possible to have just 1 graphics card and pass it through to the VM but it's hard an unpredictable. It's like it's possible to cycle from London to Canterbury depending on your bike capabilities and own ability. But if getting there is critical for you, it's better to buy a train ticket.
     
• Get a Gigabyte motherboard for the "Initial Display Output" BIOS option, which gives you flexibility to pick any x16 length PCIe slot (or iGPU) to boot with (e.g. so you can have a graphics card (a low-end dedicated or iGPU) for Unraid and a dedicated one for the daily driver VM. Other brands may have some models with a similar feature but it's hit or miss (mostly misses) - Gigabyte consistently offers this flexibility.
  • This is not critical but in my own experience was a highly-appreciated quality-of-life improvement. And right now, it's a critical requirement because that's the only way I can fit all the PCIe cards I have to the space that I have.
     
• If gaming is important to you, get an Intel CPU that has an iGPU. The iGPU is due to the 1st pointer I mentioned. The Intel choice is because AMD CCX/CCD design carries innate latency penalty, which means AMD tends to have higher frame rate variability (i.e. random lags). With gaming, the best performance is not necessarily better than the most consistent performance.
  • You mentioned shooters like CS. While I personally can't see any latency-related diff, I have a friend who can (and who successfully passed my double-blind test that he actually could tell the diff) so how important this point is very "YMMV" kinda thing but shooters tend to be more affected by latency than, for example, ARK.
     
• Strictly no overclocking. That includes CPU as well as RAM. Overclocking leads to instability and crashes and annoyances that you will never notice with a bare-metal build.
  • Your CPU (and chipset) is rated for a certain RAM speed for a certain amount of RAM sticks. Exceeding that is overclocking, even if it's "XMP" certified or stuff like that - it's still overclocking.
  • The exception is Intel Turbo Boost / AMD Precision Boost. They tend to be fine.
     
• You don't need to turn off your server. You can, but you don't have to.
  • Modern systems idle really well. Obviously it isn't 0 W but the wattage is generally low enough that if you have to worry about electricity costs when idling, you probably need to worry about things like food and water instead of building a PC.
     
• You probably want a secondary PC (e.g. a laptop) or a big-screen tablet (preferably with a good keyboard) for your initial configuration. It's not a requirement but it just makes things so much easier to test out e.g. to check and tweak your VM config.
  • You can set your main VM to autostart at array start and set the array to auto-start (2 separate settings) to achieve having your primary VM automatically boot up after Unraid has booted. You don't need a thin client if you have a graphcis card passed through successfully to the VM.
  • I have a super old and slow Surface tablet that I fire-up whenever I make major hardware changes so I can freely tweak stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 17, 2020 by testdasi

[toasti]

Thank you for your very helpful notes!

 

Regarding your tips:

 

1. I checked my motherboard which is a "MSI B250M PRO-VD Intel B250 So.1151 Dual Channel DDR" and I have also the option to choose which graphic card should be used to boot from.

2. This motherboard also has an integrated graphic card 🙂

3. At the moment I use an Intel Pentium G4620 which has an iGPU.

4. My motherboard can do overclocking, but I will not. I did that the last time 20 years ago to bring my AMD Duron on a higher clock, but I have no plans to do this again.

5. I think it's not really about energy costs, it's more the feeling that a "big" computer is running all the time. But to be honest, if I have a separated home server both, the server and the workstation would be run most of the time. But I think it's not a big problem to shut the unRAID down - isn't it? Heard about people that do this every evening and it works since 10 years.

6. We have more than one more laptop in our house - so here we are also fine.

 

In total: The requirements are not that bad, right?

 

What I would upgrade at the moment is definitely the RAM to 16 GB RAM and to push the performance on video cutting also a used but better graphic card.

What do you think about the CPU? Upgrade is always possible, so my feeling would be to start with and see how it works.

 

By the way... I missed that I have another 2 TB WD in my computer - so in total:

2 x 4 TB WD blue, 1 x 2 TB WD blue, 1 x 1 WD TB black, M.2 SSD for the system itself.

 

I think another SSD for the cache would be a good idea? One last SATA port is free at the moment.

 

How to convert my W10 that is installed on bare metal at the moment? Is there a converter like VMWare Converter available?

 

Your unRAID setup is very powerful - what do you do with that?!

 

Edit: I forgot to calculate with one additional parity Drive.

Edited August 17, 2020 by toasti

[severalboxes]

4 hours ago, toasti said:

That sounds brilliant!

How do you use your VM? Is there a mode to boot directly in the unRAID VM manager to open the VM or do I need a separated "Thin Client" to connect to my VM?

What hardware config do you have and which settings did you set for a better GPU passthrough?

Probably it's the best to have the VM on a separated SSD and additionally a chache drive?

 

Definitely check out the gpu passthrough videos made by spaceinvader one.

 

I run my VM from the cache, a 1 TB nvme ssd. Even with 2 optical drives ripping blurays and a gpu trancoding in docker (all of this to the cache), I can be playing a game and not even notice.

[toasti]

Just now, severalboxes said:

Definitely check out the gpu passthrough videos made by spaceinvader one.

 

I run my VM from the cache, a 1 TB nvme ssd. Even with 2 optical drives ripping blurays and a gpu trancoding in docker (all of this to the cache), I can be playing a game and not even notice.

Crazy!

What's your hardware setup?

 

I heard about these videos and will check the next days.

[severalboxes]

EVGA X299 Dark

I9-9920X

128GB DDR4

(2) 1 TB Samsung 970 (cache)

(4) 6 TB WD Black (array)

(2) Pioneer bluray drives

Quadro P2000

GTX 1080ti

 

I recently rebuilt it to this. When I first dove into unraid last year I didn't quite realize what all was possible, so my original plans changed quite a bit.

 

[toasti]

Uuuuuiiii, also a very powerful one, crazy!

 

I hope my setup is enough to start 😁

Edited August 17, 2020 by toasti

[toasti]

Anything more I should consider?

M2 SSD as cache or VM space?

What's a compatible and reliable SATA extension card?

[planetwilson]

Is your M.2 slot one which supports NVMe drives or only SATA. The Windows VM will benfit from being on the fast drive it can be. The cache drive will be fine as a SATA SSD I think. I would personally have the VM running on its own SSD. I have an M.2 NVMe drive for desktop VMs with GPU passthrough and a normal SATA SSD for a cache drive.

It really is easier to just leave the machine running than start messing about with sleep modes and the effect on VMs etc. I actually downgraded from a 14 core/96GB unraid box to a 6 core i5/32GB machine as it used a lot less power, to the point where I don't care about leaving it running 24/7.

 

My family are used to running Macs so I have a "desktop" iMac in my office they can just sit down and start using which is a VM with a Radeon RX570 passed through. when I want a game of something, I turned that off and fireup a Win 10 VM instead.

Once you start down the docker route, you can run things like a Plex docker for a media server - whcih could use your iGPU for transcoding as well.

 

 

[toasti]

OK, I will see what is possible with my existing hardware.

The plan was to install 16 GB RAM, but I think 32 GB RAM makes more sense with Docker containers and a W10 VM for my daily business.

Another thing is the CPU - but I think I try it with the G4620 I have and upgrade if really needed.