Hi everybody,

 

I think about building a home server with unraid. I want to use it as a media server (stream movies on my TV / connection with my phone for music) and as a file server.

 

I am new to the server section and want to know which performance is neccasary for this application. I want to use it headless.

 

I want to use a Ryzen CPU. Which one has enough performance for the application and has some recources left if I want to use the server for more stuff (VMs, email, smarthome, etc.)

Also thought about using a APU. Do you recommend using one?

 

Do you recommend using a seperate network card compared to the onboard realtek chip? Perhaps you have a mainboard recommandation? I thought about using a b450 board with as many as possible SATA connections.

 

For Storage I want to use the WD red HDDs. At the moment I am not sure how many but propably 2x8TB. How much storage do you recommend for the cache SSD?

 

Last I have a fundamental question:

 

A OS which is using RAID 1 level always uses two drives which are paired and therefore the data is safe if one of them dies.

Unraid uses a parity drive which must have the highest storage capacity. 

 

If I am using a 8TB drive as the parity drive and 3 other 8TB drives to store stuff on, how can the parity drive safe the data on all 3 drives if one of them dies?

 

Thanks a lot for your help

 

4 hours ago, Surfice said:

Hi everybody,

 

I think about building a home server with unraid. I want to use it as a media server (stream movies on my TV / connection with my phone for music) and as a file server.

 

I am new to the server section and want to know which performance is neccasary for this application. I want to use it headless.

 

I want to use a Ryzen CPU. Which one has enough performance for the application and has some recources left if I want to use the server for more stuff (VMs, email, smarthome, etc.)

Also thought about using a APU. Do you recommend using one?

 

Do you recommend using a seperate network card compared to the onboard realtek chip? Perhaps you have a mainboard recommandation? I thought about using a b450 board with as many as possible SATA connections.

 

For Storage I want to use the WD red HDDs. At the moment I am not sure how many but propably 2x8TB. How much storage do you recommend for the cache SSD?

 

Last I have a fundamental question:

 

A OS which is using RAID 1 level always uses two drives which are paired and therefore the data is safe if one of them dies.

Unraid uses a parity drive which must have the highest storage capacity. 

 

If I am using a 8TB drive as the parity drive and 3 other 8TB drives to store stuff on, how can the parity drive safe the data on all 3 drives if one of them dies?

 

Thanks a lot for your help

 

 

If you want an APU, I recommend Intel CPU with integrated graphics.

Intel IGP works very well for media transcoding to enable you to stream to multiple devices with minimal CPU load.

 

Parity performs a calculation across all drives and records the result.

If you know the content of 2 drives + the result then you can calculates the missing data from the third disk.

 

This means that to recover data, all remaining disks have to 100% reliable during recovery.

You should ensure you have an independant backup for anything you can't afford to lose.... if your PSU goes crazy and fries all the discs .... no amount of raid can save you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 10/30/2020 at 12:40 AM, Surfice said:

Also thought about using a APU. Do you recommend using one?

As Decto said, you can use an intel chip to get the IGP but that probably won't make sense in terms of cost.
It's pretty easy to get your hands on a basic single slot PCIe GPU which will do the trick.
 

Quote

Do you recommend using a seperate network card compared to the onboard realtek chip? Perhaps you have a mainboard recommandation? I thought about using a b450 board with as many as possible SATA connections.

The onboard Realtek chip should be just fine. You won't need an addon card.

As for motherboards, start by considering which chipset you need for what you want to do.
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3582-amd-chipset-differences-b550-vs-x570-b450-x470-zen-3

Then limit the range down to something that has the onboard hardware that you need (keep in mind the step above will effect this).
- SATA ports, NVME slots, PCI slots, ethernet ports, etc
Then look at cost, brand, power VRMs etc.

Just keep in mind that if you plan on upgrading to something more grunty in the future (say 5950x) then power VRMs matter.
I recommend getting something good from day one.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/c7qj5e/am4_vcore_vrm_ratings_to_help_you_decide_on_a/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1d9_E3h8bLp-TXr-0zTJFqqVxdCR9daIVNyMatydkpFA/edit#gid=611478281

 

Oh, and always check what the IOMMU groups look like if you plan on running VMs and passing hardware through.

I went with ASRock Phantom Gaming X x570 (basically the Taichi with an extra 2.5GB ethernet port. The hardware support is nuts.
- PCIe bifurcation for dual video cards.
- 3 x 16x PCIe (8x8x4), 2 x PCIe 1x

- 8 x SATA

- 3 x NVME (3rd NVME shares PCIe with the 3rd 16x slot so can only run one or the other)

- Dual ethernet

- Can be upgraded to support the new 5000 series

- IOMMU out the wharzoo

This was great for me because I run multiple VMs (Win/Mac) and wanted each to have their own bare metal (GPU/NVME drive/USB ports etc).

 

Quote

A OS which is using RAID 1 level always uses two drives which are paired and therefore the data is safe if one of them dies.

Unraid uses a parity drive which must have the highest storage capacity. 

 

If I am using a 8TB drive as the parity drive and 3 other 8TB drives to store stuff on, how can the parity drive safe the data on all 3 drives if one of them dies?

 

In RAID1 the data is mirrored.
In Unraid parity the data is XOR.