advice on hardware for first unRAID build

[steven_76]

hi there

 

story: i have a HTPC upstairs in living room, with a small ssd for OS and a 8 TB disc for content. that disc is now full and i needed to start thinking about extending. started thinking about a NAS, and so learnt about existence of unRAID - which is my preference over the freeNAS because it can add disks to an array on the fly.

 

ok, so i have this: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-970A-DS3P-rev-2x/sp#sp lying around. i also have the 8TB disc (which is full), another 3TB disc in another station. as case i have leftover: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1160574-REG/corsair_cc_9011048_ww_carbide_series_air_540.html - which has room for 4 small 2.5" discs, 2 x 3.5" discs and 2 x 5.25 bays which could fit 3 more 3.5" discs (if i can find such thingy that converts the bays in 3.5 cage)

 

now, i will use this SAN only as a storage for movies, series, music and pictures. i will stream from the NAS to my kodi HTPC. 
 

i was thinking of getting 4 x 5TB in 2.5" discs ( https://azerty.nl/product/seagate/948915/barracuda-st5000lm000-5tb-vaste-schijf-intern ) 

and getting a 16 TB disc ( https://azerty.nl/product/toshiba/4017357/mg08-series-mg08aca16te-vaste-schijf-16-tb ) for the parity - as i had (correct?) understood that that parity disc needs to be the biggest possible and cant be upgraded afterwards.

 

do i need a disc for caching? is it necessary for my purposes?

is there a way to get the 8 TB disc in the array, with the data intact? (i suppose not, but ask anyway)

i would like to get an extra SATA controller - which one do you guys advise?

 

any other things i have overlooked? tips or advice?

 

i thought it would be best to ask questions here before i started buying stuff

 

thanks in advance for all reactions

 

br

s.

 

[trurl]

15 minutes ago, steven_76 said:

as i had (correct?) understood that that parity disc needs to be the biggest possible and cant be upgraded afterwards

No. Parity must be at least as large as any single data disk, and can be upgraded.

[trurl]

18 minutes ago, steven_76 said:

do i need a disc for caching? is it necessary for my purposes?

Cache is often used for dockers and VMs for performance. 

 

19 minutes ago, steven_76 said:

get the 8 TB disc in the array, with the data intact?

Unraid must format any disk it will use in the array. You may be able to mount the disk with Unassigned Devices plugin and copy its data to the array. What filesystem is it? 

[steven_76]

Just now, trurl said:

Cache is often used for dockers and VMs for performance. 

 

Unraid must format any disk it will use in the array. You may be able to mount the disk with Unassigned Devices plugin and copy its data to the array. What filesystem is it? 

i ought to be NTFS i suppose, its from a windows 10 system

[steven_76]

so guys, this setup is going to be workable right?

1. a box in living room, with i5 + 32gb ram + 4gb vid card with kodi on it, which is set to look for data via SMB network share on the unraid server

2. unraid server with AMD FX6300 + 32gb ram, a parity disc (10tb) and an array of 4x 5tb 2.5" barracuda discs (on which to add more 3.5" discs afterwards)

do i need a (ssd) disc to function as cache? i would want the kodi client to function as fluid as possible (saw a lot of topics about kodi hanging and stalling)

 

which PCIe SATA controller card do you guys recommend? which minimum power for the PSU

 

thanks again guys, sorry bout all the questions

br

s

 

[Jorgen]

do i need a (ssd) disc to function as cache? i would want the kodi client to function as fluid as possible (saw a lot of topics about kodi hanging and stalling)

The cache is only used for writing to the array (if you’re not using VMs and dockers) so won’t give you any performance benefit for Kodi reading from the shares.
From your use case I don’t think you need one.

On another note, that motherboard has a Realtek NIC which can cause problems with unRAID and is not recommended. Safer to use an intel based card. But you can add that later IF you have problems with the onboard NIC.

Other than that I don’t see any problems with using your gear as a pure NAS.


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[steven_76]

hi jorgen, ok thanks, that takes care of the cache drive question. thanks for the headsup on the NIC, i wasnt aware on that and certainly keep it in mind. thanks a lot