neo117

Having done some extensive research since my lasst post, i started looking up to 135TDP and saw some decent xeon / i7 6 core options. but then turning my attention to the motherboards, it looks like i am going to be at $200 and up for a decent board which sort of blows up my budget my thinking right now is an i7 7700k which has a similar passmark score to the 6 and 8 core options in that price range, but has a lower TDP and i can also get a good quality MB with all of the features that i want for $100 or so which keeps me well within my budget. I would love to have more cores, but considering the same or similar passmark score as the 6 or 8 core versions, i think it may be enough. most of what i am doing isn't very CPU intensive so i think i will be ok with the 7700k (ii hope) i can always try it and if it doesn't work out repurpose the MB and CPU into an upgrade to my workstation and then build again

I have no problem buying used and i was messing around on passmark using their site to give me an idea or performance vs TDP and using ebay as my go to for pricing. I was having a tough time finding something that would fit my criteria / budget and some of the motherboards are double the cost of the i7 counterparts. this i the main reason that ryzen seems so attractive, but the stability issues worry me. i think given time, the ryzen will be a no brainer but in the meantime i think i might have to go intel

Interesting, and admittedly a few of these concepts i need to study up more on. is there a CPU that comes to mind that fits my criteria for TDP and budget requirements?

yes there may be some light transcoding to 720p, but probably no more than 2 streams at any given time

I have spent a lot of time analyzing my options and am going absolutely nutty trying to make a decision and pull the trigger! I have been running an unraid 5 server for years now and it has been stable and rock solid. that is very important to me, i like the 100% uptime that i have been enjoying. now i am looking to build an unraid 6 server from scratch and decommission the old one. here are my intended uses: plex docker - no more than 3 streams at any given time own cloud several linux VM to handle anything from PXE/TFTP server to open hab or home assistant at least one windows 10 install if all goes well i may branch out and run my music server from here too which involves several audio cards my goal for the system is: a cpu with a passmark of 10K or higher and single thread of around 2k or higher a TDP of 95 or less where things are getting difficult for me is choosing between 1) a 6th or 7th gen i7 (4 cores) 2) a 4 core xeon 3) a dual 4 core xeon setup 4) an 8 core xeon 5) a ryzen build #1 is easy, but only has 4 cores and i am not sure if that will be enough #2 is the same as #1 but depending on the components i choose it may allow me to upgrade to a 2nd CPU or an 8 core CPU in the future #3 seems like it could be a less expensive approach but will put my total power draw at close to double the other options #4 seems to be the most expensive option with #3 a close second #5 seems to be the best option possible except for the fact that it isn't perfect yet and has stability issues? will that be fixed? probably....maybe... ugh! i would love to hear some advice for people who have gone with any of these options, or advice on these options based on my intended usage, but please keep in mind i am trying to maintaina low TDP and would like to keep the motherboard / cpu costs below $500 thanks!

well my current usage scenario is as follows: i store about 12GB of media on the server which typically would handle no more than 1 to 2 data streams I also store a backup of all of my important data from my personal computer and workstation (both of which employ raid 1 on their data drives) upon upgrading, i plan on having a plex docker, and serve media from the unraid box with some light transcoding. I would also like to run my pxe server on there and maybe even my imaging server too. once i get involved with all of the possibilities of docker i may expand to more stuff , but i don't expect to have a huge load on the server i planned on putting a cache drive because my current transfer rates are in the 15-25Mbps range and my previous research said that a cache drive would give me full gigabit etwork speed. if you are saying this is no longer the case then i may rethink it. also, as an app drive, does it need to be an SSD or could i use a regular magnetic based drive?

this is all good info and i appreciate it. I am not sure if i have new hard drives in the budget right now though, but based on the input so far, i may have to consider it are there any downsides to XFS? is a cache drive still recommended, and how large if i only write occasionally to the drive?

yes, and it says i can upgrade OR do a fresh install, but i am looking for recommendations on which route to go that are more specific to my particular situation. i was interested to see everyones input as well as experiences from anyone who has maybe done something similar

I currently have an unraid 5.0.6 server that has been running happily for several years now. it employs 4x 6TB hard drives (3 raid one parity) I want to migrate to new hardware but maintain the current hard drives and also add a cache drive i also want to upgrade to unraid 6 my current setup is an older AMD based and i was planning on moving to a spare i5 2500K CPU and motherboard that i have sitting around. after upgrading i want to run plex in a docker container with no more than 2 simultaneous streams so i think that the i5 is enough my questions are as follows: should i stick with the older i5 when i migrate or upgrade to something newer? should i upgrade my current rig to 6.0 and then transfer over to the new hardware or just build a new unraid 6.0 server and drop my drives in? i was planning on a 128GB cache drive as i don't write to the array often so i think that should be enough. is it? should i consider some other configuration? lastly, should i add the cache drive now, or wait until the new setup is up and running any advice would be appreciated, and even more appreciated if you can offer actual experiences or reasoning behind the "why" of your advice thanks!!

Did you mount it internally to the other computer, or use a USB connection? Some USB adapters munge existing data by doing some internal translation in the SATA-USB controller and require a fresh format to work, or they just plain don't work correctly with drives over a certain size. Also, not all linux distributions include reiserfs support out of the box, it has to be downloaded and configured with the applicable package manager. i am using it internally now, but will monkey around with it once i save all my data. I did try two different enclosures, one was USB2.0 and the other 3.0 so i figured at least one would work i will try it under linux and windows internally (after i finish) and see if it works. i am just happy to have it working at this point

ok, this actually turned out to be a golden idea. I didn't want to mess with my existing unraid server, so i setup another computer with a new USB drive and unraid install. put both drives in and assigned them both as data drives as per your suggestion. lo and behold, the data drive came up fine and all of the data is there! I am copying data from it now, and there was a reiser FS error that i will post here later. I want to grab everything i can from the drive before i do anything else. so now, my question is: why is this disk readable in a new unraid server, but not on any linux computer? I want to make sure that my other disks would be readable outside of the array, this is supposed to be a feature of unraid, and in my opinion, an important one!

i ran that on one of the two drives. at this point there is a 50/50 chance that it was on the old parity drive so there is still a 50/50 chance that the data drive is still recoverable, as it is untouched at this point. Either way it is still unmountable so someone with a more low-level understanding than I have will have to help. I don't really have a lot to add to this but I would like to try to fill in a few more details of how you got to this point in case it might be instructive. You mentioned power outages. Did any of these occur while you were trying to fix your problems, or were they all before? (Get an UPS!) When you restarted after the power outages, did you let unRAID complete the parity check that happens when you have an unsafe shutdown? Did you run preclear on the new drives before trying to use them? i had a UPS which eventually died and i had not yet replaced it the best way to answer this is that before i removed those two drives, the entire array was up and running with valid parity and no issues. the drives were replaced as a precautionary measure. You didn't actually answer all of the questions. If you don't want to for some reason then I will drop it. i thought i had covered the partiy question in my previous response when i said "valid parity" so, yes it did run a parity check no, i did not preclear the new drives, but i am not sure why you ask that? i am focusing on the old drives at the moment, and how to get them to be readable under linux. what significance would preclear have on this task?

i ran that on one of the two drives. at this point there is a 50/50 chance that it was on the old parity drive so there is still a 50/50 chance that the data drive is still recoverable, as it is untouched at this point. Either way it is still unmountable so someone with a more low-level understanding than I have will have to help. I don't really have a lot to add to this but I would like to try to fill in a few more details of how you got to this point in case it might be instructive. You mentioned power outages. Did any of these occur while you were trying to fix your problems, or were they all before? (Get an UPS!) When you restarted after the power outages, did you let unRAID complete the parity check that happens when you have an unsafe shutdown? Did you run preclear on the new drives before trying to use them? i had a UPS which eventually died and i had not yet replaced it the best way to answer this is that before i removed those two drives, the entire array was up and running with valid parity and no issues. the drives were replaced as a precautionary measure.

i ran that on one of the two drives. at this point there is a 50/50 chance that it was on the old parity drive so there is still a 50/50 chance that the data drive is still recoverable, as it is untouched at this point.

OK - so the /dev/md?? devices were not available. However that means the partition had to be specified to get correct behaviour from reiserfsck as it works at the partition level - not the whole disk level. most of the info i have given in my original post is basically just for background. I think my real question is: i have 2 drives, one is parity, one is data. nether can be read in a linux computer, both show up as drives via command line. i need to figure out which one is the data drive, and find out how to mount and read it in a linux machine that supports the reiserfs i am using an unraid server as my linux machine using that as the basis of my problem, would would you suggest?