Hello all.  First time poster.  Loving what I'm seeing out of Unraid so far and after looking at FreeNAS and running 2 QNAP servers at home I've decided I need a dedicated file server for the office and Unraid seems to be the best of all worlds.

 

I'm moving to an M1 iMac from my hackintosh build I've currently got in place and I'd like to use that hardware to build my Unraid server.  I've already downloaded the image and run a test server for a weekend so the hardware definitely seems capable.

 

This server will be mainly used as a file server in a mixed Win/Mac environment (although mainly Mac) but I will probably also use it with a VPN docker.  Not much else to start off.  I do imagine I'm going to be building something new at home to replace my QNAP servers that I use for photos/editing/PLEX as I'm sick of the speed issues there but that's for another day....

 

Here's what I currently have in place for the hardware:

 

i7-8700
Gigabyte Z370
32GB (16x2) Corsair DRAM (3kMHz)
Samsung 970 Pro 512 NVMe
Termaltake Water 3.0 Cooling
Sapphire Radeon
EVGA 750 BQ 80+ Bronze 750w Power Supply

Phanteks Pro M Series (PH-ES515PTG_BK) case

 

I'm looking for advise as to what to throw at it drive wise and if I need any sort of controllers or if I can just attach them to the board.  I suppose it would be nice to have a SATA enclosure that would allow me to easily swap out drives.  I just don't know how it's best to handle the NVMe as I'll probably just be booting the OS off of a flash drive as I've been doing during this test phase.

 

I'll want to have a parity drive in place and my space requirements are modest -- probably 4TB but I'm figuring I'll just configure for 8-10 while I'm at it.  My biggest requirement is that I'll want to optimize for speed of file access across the network.

 

I will also put a dedicated 10GB card in as the onboard NIC only is 1GB (I believe).

 

Thanks in advance.  Excited to be 'official' and to be part of the community.

Jason

6 hours ago, jasonjolly said:

I'll probably just be booting the OS off of a flash drive as I've been doing during this test phase.

Not probably but certainly. The flash drive is the only way and its GUID is also the way the license is verified. The archives of the OS are unpacked fresh into RAM at each boot and it runs in RAM. Think of it as firmware except easier to work with.

 

The nvme will be good as cache drive for caching User Share writes and as fast storage for Dockers / VMs so they will perform better and not keep array disks spinning.