Recommendations for RV low power unraid

[David Spivey]

Hey guys. I need hardware recommendations. I want to buy a low power consumption, small form factor unraid box to be used in an RV.
I will place files on unraid from gigabit ethernet, and maybe occasionally USB3.
I need it to be physically small and power efficient, without hindering bandwidth over ethernet.
I will be using 2 parity drives, and plan to have 3 or so standard size data drives, so 5 total.

I won't be using VMs, nor dockers, so CPU / memory is unimportant unless it would limit ethernet throughput.

[CS01-HS]

My setup meets your requirements but what's your use case? Unraid might be overkill.

[SiNtEnEl]

"without hindering bandwidth over ethernet." Are we talking gigabit speeds?

 

Im running a low power NAS on a pentium chip, about 25watt idle with 6 disks incl. 1 cache SSD.

The setup has a 10GBe nic, and im CPU bound speedwise, capping it on about 5GBe with 100% CPU load.

Mainly shfs and smb are eating up the CPU at those speeds. With gigabit speeds there is no issue.

 

[David Spivey]

On 8/29/2020 at 9:55 AM, CS01-HS said:

My setup meets your requirements but what's your use case? Unraid might be overkill.

The main reason I intend to use unraid is because of dual parity and flexibility for swapping drives / adding drives as necessary.

[David Spivey]

2 minutes ago, SiNtEnEl said:

"without hindering bandwidth over ethernet." Are we talking gigabit speeds?

 

Im running a low power NAS on a pentium chip, about 25watt idle with 6 disks incl. 1 cache SSD.

The setup has a 10GBe nic, and im CPU bound speedwise, capping it on about 5GBe with 100% CPU load.

Mainly shfs and smb are eating up the CPU at those speeds. With gigabit speeds there is no issue.

 

Yes, gigabit. However, I would assume that newer processors would be more efficient than a Pentium, saving power, right?

[SiNtEnEl]

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199285/intel-pentium-gold-g6600-processor-4m-cache-4-20-ghz.html

 

This is the most current Pentium, just some what faster then mine the g4600, same powerdraw and GPU onboard.

Advantage i found of using these chips are powerdraw, onboard GPU (transcoding), very cheap, ECC support (never ending debate).

 

More known (Intel core) consumer processor, draws more power then above one. For example:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199280/intel-core-i3-10320-processor-8m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html

Costs more, slight more powerdraw, no ECC support and costs about the double of the pentium. But about 20% more performance.

 

You could go with a Mini-Itx with a soldered on CPU.. but less performance in my opinion and nearly same powerdraw.

Sometimes costs more then a Pentium including motherboard, depending on your region etc.

[CS01-HS]

3 hours ago, David Spivey said:

The main reason I intend to use unraid is because of dual parity and flexibility for swapping drives / adding drives as necessary.

Right I was asking what you'd use it for. If, for example it's movie storage, a raspberry pi with a single external drive would be very low-power. I don't think many setups run 3 data and 2 parity so you may want to research the pros and cons.

 

4 hours ago, SiNtEnEl said:

Im running a low power NAS on a pentium chip, about 25watt idle with 6 disks incl. 1 cache SSD.

That's impressive. I'm about 24W with 6 2.5", 2 cache but no ECC.

[David Spivey]

3 hours ago, CS01-HS said:

Right I was asking what you'd use it for. If, for example it's movie storage, a raspberry pi with a single external drive would be very low-power. I don't think many setups run 3 data and 2 parity so you may want to research the pros and cons.

I actually have a full 40tb unraid / esxi server at home, so this is temporary storage as I travel until I get back home and dump it there. I record 1-to-2-hour videos at 4k which runs about 40-150 GB per recording. When I'm busy I'm doing that 7 days a week, and sometimes twice daily. I then need to edit those videos over gigabit ethernet (also leveraging an SSD on the editing laptop) in order to upload them to YouTube and Facebook. Since I need to ensure the source videos never get lost, and eventually get placed in permanent storage, I use 2 parity drives.