Is Unraid the right OS for me and what to look out for?

[Pixel5]

Hello People,

 

im currently building my own NAS to replace my previous Synology NAS.

Im doing that both to upgrade to better hardware to run a VM or two (was basically impossible on Synology) and to upgrade to 10G Ethernet where my Synology wasnt even able to deliver a steady 1gig at times.

 

You can see the hardware im going with below and i am wondering if im better served with Unraid or TrueNAS.

 

My research seems to indicate that Unraid would be much better for the VM´s and Docker containers i wanna run but could have a much slower transfer speed overall.

Now i know i wont be getting a solid 10G transfer speed with my setup unless i run all HDD´s in RAID0 or transfer exclusively from the SSD´s but i just wanna get a feeling for what i can expect.

These HDD´s deliver about 220-250mb/s read speeds without a problem when we talk about sequential reads and a bit less for writes, is it realistic to get that performance in the real world or will it be significantly slower?

 

Also im planning to use one of the SSD´s as a cache and the other to run the VM and docker containers but i could also add more SSD´s later if it would help with the performance of the array.

 

Any recommendations as to what i should try out in terms of settings or what kind of speeds i can expect?

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-10100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor  (€107.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte H470M DS3H Micro ATX LGA1200 Motherboard  (€98.99 @ Computeruniverse) 
Memory: Kingston 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2666 CL13 Memory  (€66.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Storage: Western Digital Black NVMe 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Black NVMe 250 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red Pro 3 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 8 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 8 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Storage: Seagate IronWolf NAS 8 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  (Purchased For €0.00) 
Case: Silverstone CS381B MicroATX Desktop Case  (€291.00) 
Power Supply: Silverstone SFX 450 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply  (€86.69 @ Alternate) 
Wired Network Adapter: Asus XG-C100C PCIe x4 10 Gbit/s Network Adapter  (€73.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) 
Total: €725.38
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-11-30 11:59 CET+0100

[JorgeB]

30 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

These HDD´s deliver about 220-250mb/s read speeds without a problem when we talk about sequential reads and a bit less for writes, is it realistic to get that performance in the real world or will it be significantly slower?

Yes, for writes you'd need to enable turbo write, also note that HDD speed is not constant, they are much faster when empty and the outer tracks are used, they will get progressively slower as they fill up and start using the inner tracks, usually around half the speed as the outer tracks.

[Pixel5]

On 11/30/2020 at 1:05 PM, JorgeB said:

Yes, for writes you'd need to enable turbo write, also note that HDD speed is not constant, they are much faster when empty and the outer tracks are used, they will get progressively slower as they fill up and start using the inner tracks, usually around half the speed as the outer tracks.

how about SSD cache, is there any good setup i could do to improve the performance with that?

 

and generally this hardware config will be fine for unraid or are there any limitations i should expect?

[JorgeB]

2 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

how about SSD cache, is there any good setup i could do to improve the performance with that?

Fast NVMe device is enough for close to 10GbE line speed, another option is a multiple device SATA SSD raid pool.