Hi, I am new to NAS, I've wanted one for a long time but never had the budget. I've been doing research on/off and Unraid seems like the best choice for what I am trying to do. I have the opportunity to save some money by repurposing my wife's old computer into a NAS with the following purposes (in priority order):

1. Storing/Sharing/Backing up Family Pictures/Videos (I understand that backup means more than one location, this would not be the only place they live)
2. Storing/Streaming TV/Movie Library - at least 1 for us, 1 for our kid. Plex seems to be the goto here, can you do 2+ plex libraries? 
3. Storing/Backing up miscellaneous files
4. Occasionally hosting 1-2 dedicated game servers (whichever games we are currently playing, e.g. Ark Survival Evolved, or Minecraft)

 

The old computer in question has these specs:

• Case - MSI Interceptor Series Nighthawk ATX Mid Tower Case
• Mobo - gigabyte ga-z77-d3h Rev 1.0
  • 2xSATA 3
  • 4xSATA 2
• i5-2500k
• 2x4gb Ram (DDR3 1600mhz)
• XFX Radeon HD 6870
• CM 600W PSU (eXtreme Power Plus RS-600-PCAR-E3)
• It will be etherneted to my router

 

I am planning on purchasing

• Short Ethernet Cable (open to suggestions on the cat rating here)
• 16 GB Sandisk 2.0 USB drive
• 500 GB 2.5" SSD for cache - likely samsung evo
• 4x 4TB HDDs (1 for parity, 3 for storage) - likely WD Red?

 

I am looking for simplicity and to keep budget low, while maintaining quality. My biggest question for y'all is will this hardware setup work for what I am looking to do with this NAS and Unraid? Will it be able to handle all 4 of my purposes? Is there anything I'm missing and/or am I approaching this correctly?

thanks!

Edited December 1, 20205 yr by Grayswandir

That should work. I used to have an i7 2600 system that was very similar and used it to run unraid 6 through 6.8.

One thing to note is that the x series processors do not support hardware pass through to virtual machines, so IF you are hoping to do hardware pass through to a vm, it'll be a problem.

20 hours ago, SeeGee said:

That should work. I used to have an i7 2600 system that was very similar and used it to run unraid 6 through 6.8.

One thing to note is that the x series processors do not support hardware pass through to virtual machines, so IF you are hoping to do hardware pass through to a vm, it'll be a problem.

Hi SeeGee,

 

Thank you for the answer - I am not sure what "hardware pass through a vm" means? I wasn't planning on running any VMs, but is that needed for some of what I am looking to do with this NAS? Also the processor I have is a k series, is that what you meant?

 

Thanks again!

Hardware pass through is when you want to give dedicated access to hardware from within a virtual machine, bypassing the host os. A common example of this would be if you were running a windows virtual machine that you wanted to use for gaming. You would tell unraid to essentially ignore the graphics card, so it could be used exclusively in Windows. This can be done with a wide variety of hardware including USB cards, capture boards, etc. And yes, I meant the k series. My apologies. If you do not intend to do this, then there's no problem. You can still run virtual machines if you ever decide to do so, you just won't be able to pass hardware directly to said vm. I know that you didn't even mention virtualization as a need, but I just thought I would point out that limitation as a FYI.

Also on a side note, plex does support multiple libraries within a single instance. You could make one library called Movies, and another called Kids, and that would keep them separate while only running one instance of plex.