New to UnRaid - need some parts advice


bsm2k1

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Yes, it's worth restating too that this is a key advantage of UnRaid for home enthusiasts- the drives are not dependent on a hardware raid card / motherboard / appliance, that can die and kill your data array (weak point for RAID), so UnRaid can survive hardware failure (or hardware migrations / upgrades) quite well.     And the other advantage is the drives don't have to match, a key advantage (esp for up front cost) vs ZFS or similar RAID formats where you have to plan/buy/build in advance and can kind of lock yourself in.   And for simple migration up to that nicer machine, the XFS partition format for the array is even individually readable by most Linux distributions even if a drive is just plucked from the array (don't do that, I was just making a point for disaster recovery options)

 

Theres good guides here and YouTube videos about this (check out Spaceinvaders YouTube channel) for replacing / upgrading drives, best of breed plugins to help automate things / hold your hand etc.  THAT is the real secret sauce of unraid - the custom built apps the community has built for us to enjoy.   And these forums of course ?

 

Remember to back up your USB boot drive and keep your config settings documented well.   

 

Strategic decisions are to be careful where your docker and VMs "live" - great to put them on a cache drive (SSDs) for speed and learn good hygiene for the system management, then back them up into the array (lots of great plugins to help you there) to keep you out of trouble and keep the system as simple and cost effective as per design of Limetech.   

 

Then as as budget allows, grow to that new maotherboard / CPU and plan toward that second parity drive and second or third cache drive for even more data loss AND hardware failure protection to gain back most of the benefits of the hardware based raid environments.  

 

Happy hunting!

 

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Thanks again for everyone's advice so far!

 

I thought I'd go looking through any old parts etc I have in storage or that I could use for a build.
I have these parts that I could use for a budget build, with the idea some core parts (case, cages etc) can be transferred over to a more powerful build in a year or so when I have more Unraid experience:

 

Power Supplies

  • Seasonic S12II-380 380W
  • Enermax MODU82+ 525W

Case

  • Cooler Master Centurion 590

Motherboard

  • Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H

CPU

  • Core i3 530

RAM

  • 4GB DDR3

Hard Drives

  • 2 x 2TB Samsung HD204UI
  • 1 x 2TB WD Red
  • I'm sure I have an SSD somewhere but have been unable to locate it...

I'm wondering is could I combine the parts above to create a usable (assuming basic) Unraid setup? I'm thinking the motherboard, CPU and the RAM along with one of the power supplies might work OK? If so which power supply do you think would be more suitable? I would like to have to change as few parts as possible when I do an upgrade in the future - would the power supply be suitable then or would you recommend a new one now?

 

Pretty happy about about finding the case in the attic! Room for 3 x 3-5 cages for a total of 15 possible disks. Any reason not to use this? I remember it being a great case when I used it a number of years ago for my gaming rig.

 

Lastly I need to decide what to do with the hard drives. The drives I listed are currently in use with my WHS2011 server. The 6TB of storage is pretty much all in use and I would need to get that data onto the new server some how (some of the other parts are being used on this server too).

 

I know I need a parity drive - what size would you go with? Looking at drive prices in the UK, 4TB drives seem to be a tiny bit cheaper per TB and as I don't have a huge storage pool I was thinking of buying 3 x 4TB drives - that would cover my current storage (and a bit more) plus parity. Other option would be 2 x 6TB/8TB I guess, but a higher cost.

 

Thanks!

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Case is excellent. You need a bit swap drive cage (like CSE-M35T-1B)  to install.

 

The PSUs each have 3 12 rails. The Enemax says it supports 15 derives, so suggest that one. You really want single 12 volt rail PSU.

 

MB, CPUx memory ... should be ok for a basic build. You won't be running VMs. But this is an ok pace to start.

 

Hard disks ... maybe. We'll have to see the smart reports.

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26 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

Case is excellent. You need a bit swap drive cage (like CSE-M35T-1B)  to install.

 

 

I'm actually planning getting these: https://www.xcase.co.uk/collections/storage-caddy/products/bpn-de350ss-trayless-3x-5-25-to-5x-3-5-sas-sata-6-gbps-hdd-hot-swap-rack as recommended by CHBMB earlier in this thread and the price is good compared to other options available in the UK.

 

29 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

The PSUs each have 3 12 rails. The Enemax says it supports 15 derives, so suggest that one. You really want single 12 volt rail PSU.

 

 

So you recommend I get a new PSU rather than try and re-use an old one? I've had a look through the PSU thread but I can't find most of them for sale (guess its because of the age of the thread). I've always been partial to Seasonic from previous experience. I had a look at what I could find here and found these, any opinion?:

 

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/430w-seasonic-bronze-ss-430w-80-plus-bronze-single-rail-1x120mm-fan-atx-psu
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/450w-seasonic-g-series-80-plus-gold-hybrid-modular-single-1-rail-37a-plus12v-1x120mm-fan-atx-psu
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/450w-corsair-cx-series-cx450-psu-80plus-bronze-fully-wired-single-rail-374a-plus12v-120mm-fan-atx-ps

 

Not sure on what power I will need exactly, taking in to account my future possible use case and if they are enough - quad core/Reizen with probably a mid range GPU plus up to 15 HDDs in the distant future.

 

32 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

MB, CPUx memory ... should be ok for a basic build. You won't be running VMs. But this is an ok pace to start.

 

 

Good to hear. I'd just like it to run Unraid without VMs for a year or so so I can get to grips with it before any further more costly upgrades.

 

33 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

Hard disks ... maybe. We'll have to see the smart reports.

 

I'll take a look and let you know. Not overly tied to them, but I do need to move all the data over to Unraid some how. They would need replacing in the near future anyway (other than the WD Red probably as that's a lot newer).

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I'd give the Enermax a go. Says it supports 15 drives. You won't be going near that anytime soon, or beyond that maybe ever. GPU and CPU on separate rails so won't interfere. I honestly think it will be fine. Others you posted are single rail also seem fine. But I'd be looking at 500Watt or close to it. The reason people recommended single rail is that the GPU rail was useless to unRaid as a basic NAS. Now people are looking to run mostly VMs and pass through multiple GPUs, it is not such a clear argument. And you could always get a Molex splitter off the GPU plug to use that power for drives. Like I said, i'd stick with the Enermax.

 

The CPU is 2600 passmark, 2 cores, 4 threads. Not bad actually. One transcode at a time with Plex. The 4G ram may hold you back from running dockers you want. If you could add 4G cheaply I'd do that. 

 

I'd seriously look at new drives. Aging 2T drives don't have a great track record here. I'd suggest 4T or larger. HGSTs are excellent. If you have an SSD, great. Otherwise suggest using one of the 2T drives as cache to leave more funds for the unRaid array disks - they should be the priority.

 

The next priority (for me at least) would be an updated MB and CPU, and maybe new memory. If you looked at Haswell you could probably reuse the memory. Probably looking at socket 1151. You want an i7 or E3 Xeon that supports vt-d. Something close to 9000 passmark. Used you could probably do under $400 USD. Upgrade to 16G or 32G RAM and you'd be positioned for 4 transcodes, a Windows 10 VM with passthrough, and most anything else you might want to do.

 

Cheers!

 

 

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19 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

I'd seriously look at new drives. Aging 2T drives don't have a great track record here. I'd suggest 4T or larger. HGSTs are excellent. If you have an SSD, great. Otherwise suggest using one of the 2T drives as cache to leave more funds for the unRaid array disks - they should be the priority.

 

Do you happen to know if HGST go by any other brand in the UK? Can't find HGST drives for sale in any of the usual online stores here - seems to be WD Reds, Toshiba and Seagate drives.

 

19 minutes ago, bjp999 said:

I'd give the Enermax a go

OK will do, thanks! That's a bit more money saved towards drives :)

 

Good advice too on the CPU/MB - will definitely look to upgrade when budget allows. At least this way I'll be able to dip my toe into the world of Unraid and get a better idea of what I'm doing!

Edited by bsm2k1
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Technically WD owns HGST after purchase from Hitachi, but they operate autonomously, and I believe HGST has a superior product (which is substantiated by BackBlaze published statistics, which although not directly comparable to typical unRaid usage, is the best info I am aware of on long term drive failure rates.)

 

Is this a good vendor in UK?

 

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb-hgst-0s03665-deskstar-nas-35-hdd-24x7-use-sata-iii-6gb-s-7200rpm-64mb-cache-8ms-ncq-retail-box

 

Cheers! 

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Yep them and Ebuyer I think are the 2 biggest suppliers. I found that one but you can't order as its showing as end of life.
Found it here though: https://www.ballicom.co.uk/hgst-0s04005-.p1346528.html?ref=PLA&gclid=CjwKCAjw2s_MBRA5EiwAmWIac-ofctqQMBN2h-cqXy6NMqTTGkoRt5-qujc5DQqF7rckP6XwgCYKaBoChaoQAvD_BwE

Not heard of them before but their reviews seem reputable. Thanks for pointing out which drive it was to look for though. They sell the 6 and 8TB versions too and the price per TB is basically the same as other drives.

 

Now to decide what sizes and quantities to get...

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Definitely the Enermax.  Combined it supports 40A on the 12v rails, but any of the three rails seems to support up to 25A which should take care of your HD needs for a while.

 

I think your existing hardware will work just fine to get you up and running.  But, I'll play devils advocate regarding incremental upgrades.  The case and PSU look fine for a while.  But let's look at the the other components.  You could plug in the GA-H55M-UD2H, 530, and 4GB of RAM.  Then later you could upgrade the RAM...  Then later you could upgrade the CPU... It would be better each step of the way but compared with modern systems you'd still wind up with an older system with older parts.  My recommendation would be to get the Gigabyte and 530 up and running.  It will be absolutely fine for unRAID and a few dockers.  Then save your money, and do a full MB/CPU/RAM upgrade when money and time allows.  Maybe that works for you, maybe not - but hopefully it's food for thought.

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4 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Definitely the Enermax.  Combined it supports 40A on the 12v rails, but any of the three rails seems to support up to 25A which should take care of your HD needs for a while.

 

Thanks for confirming, I'll definitely go with that then.

 

5 minutes ago, tdallen said:

Then save your money, and do a full MB/CPU/RAM upgrade when money and time allows.

Yeah that's exactly what I'm thinking. I might get another 4GB RAM just to help out a little, but I'll see how much the cost will be.

 

I'm leaning towards buying:

  • 2 x 4TB (would love to go 6TB but not sure budget allows at the moment...)
  • 1 x 3 to 5 cage

With the use of a 2TB external drive I have, this would allow me to migrate the data from the WHS2011 drives drive by drive (I think...) and end up with a 4TB parity, 1 x 4TB, 3 x 2TB storage drives. In the near future I could then replace the 2 oldest 2TB drives with another 4TB drive.

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On 8/16/2017 at 9:02 AM, bsm2k1 said:

 

Now to decide what sizes and quantities to get...

 

Now (good news) we're down to the hair splitting, but just so we keep you off balance lol, wanted to throw in that though my suggestion of drive is not a NAS drive per se, there's also the thought that if you're mostly just using the NAS features of UnRaid in a typical home user setting, there's the reasonable option in unraid to spin the drives down @ idle to save power - however that's not necessarily a typical NAS feature and not what most NAS drives are built for -- and I've read where NAS rated drives aren't necessarily the happiest to be doing that and that can potentially become it's own early failure point for them.   So just as a devils advocate I'll throw in that I've found cheap ($<100 US) prices quite frequently on the Seagate ST4000DM000 (4TB Seagate 5900 RPM drives in Seagate's removable storage external cases (caveat, I pulled them from the case to install them in UnRaid after some light testing, thus likely damaging my warranty options).   These drives would not necessarily guarantee the max time between failure (statistically speaking) like a NAS drive, but then if you do choose to spin them down alot and (as seems to be the case) aren't trying to use them in some enterprise high demand use case, it's a thought that their design to be friendly to that use case of popping external storage drive in and out would be a potential advantage towards longevity.   You can find the 5 or sometimes the 6TB versions of this drive now getting cheap ($<150 US) on sale at times, at least here in the states.   I also find they run extremely cool and quiet.   Zero issues with my set of 4 of them so far (>2 years).   Not throughput performance champions due to the lower RPM, but basically for a home NAS if they'll saturate the speed of your Gigabit LAN, that's rather irrelevant unless you're doing gigantic file transfers routinely.   Again, until we get 10Gigabit per second networking equipment in our homes, that bottleneck is the main one for NAS to be subject to.   Meaning hard drive choice (speed wise) is not mission critical for the array drives.   Obviously advantageous for the Cache (Docker / VM) drive to be speedy (SSD).   Most SSD's now have very low failure rates if kept cool and safe.   sd

 

I certainly would second the thumbs up for HGST as a solid choice, just wanted to point out there's no one school of thought (and thus long story short, no right answer).   I think the one right answer is to say if this data is important to you a new hard drive (not what you have lying down) for the array drive and particularly the Parity drive (which gets the most use) is the main point.   But frankly with your sample size of 2-4 drives, you're more subject to random chance of getting a dud drive from any vendor than you are having some early failure where this vendor vs. that vendor would have likely made a difference.   Most failures are going to occur in first minutes / hours / days.   Some folks like to stress test the drives for a 2-3 day stretch (while warranty / receipt info is handy and often the vendor you bought them from will take them back vs. a warranty claim) and see if they can root out the duds.   Seems like a good strategy.   UnRaid's Pre-Clear feature also gives them a shakedown.   I recommend the podcast TechSnap (just a week or two before this post actually) where they are talking about replacing / stress testing drives in a big storage array.   Lots of "good hygeine" information there.

 

Hope we've thoroughly perplexed you - now the hard (but fun) part -- YOU have to decide :)   In the end, the beauty of UnRaid is the flexibility.   Budget / baby NAS build, massive build, industrial strength build, screaming speed build, etc - all possible and supportable on this platform.   

Edited by jsdoc3
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On 8/16/2017 at 9:48 AM, bsm2k1 said:

 

 

Yeah that's exactly what I'm thinking. I might get another 4GB RAM just to help out a little, but I'll see how much the cost will be.

 

I'm leaning towards buying:

  • 2 x 4TB (would love to go 6TB but not sure budget allows at the moment...)
  • 1 x 3 to 5 cage

With the use of a 2TB external drive I have, this would allow me to migrate the data from the WHS2011 drives drive by drive (I think...) and end up with a 4TB parity, 1 x 4TB, 3 x 2TB storage drives. In the near future I could then replace the 2 oldest 2TB drives with another 4TB drive.

 

Good logic, very classic way to start a grow as you go NAS.   Dual parity is an option if you start finding that the data on it is irreplaceable.   And remember the laws of 3 - 3 backup copies is a backup, otherwise it's a backup system with failure points.   One of the 3 copies should be offsite.  Note that Backblaze has extremely competitive online backup prices.   And can of course segregate that to the truly mission critical data only that it backs up.   
Another great option is the CrashPlan docker on UnRaid.   Can backup (for free) to a friend's drive / another drive of yours offsite or another drive you own and automate the process.   Even use it to load a drive locally then take it offsite and connect that data back to the Crashplan backup scheme

 

Edited by jsdoc3
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1 hour ago, jsdoc3 said:

Now (good news) we're down to the hair splitting, but just so we keep you off balance lol, wanted to throw in that though my suggestion of drive is not a NAS drive per se, there's also the thought that if you're mostly just using the NAS features of UnRaid in a typical home user setting, there's the reasonable option in unraid to spin the drives down @ idle to save power - however that's not necessarily a typical NAS feature and not what most NAS drives are built for -- and I've read where NAS rated drives aren't necessarily the happiest to be doing that and that can potentially become it's own early failure point for them.   So just as a devils advocate I'll throw in that I've found cheap ($<100 US) prices quite frequently on the Seagate ST4000DM000

Thanks for the input, its appreciated :) I found these drives: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb-seagate-st4000dm005-barracuda-4-35-hdd-sata-iii-6gb-s-64mb-cache-5900rpm for just over the £100 mark which seems quite good. However just before your reply I bought 2 x HGST drives O.o Total of £20 more per drive than those ones above... Do you think I should reconsider and send them back when they come, or stick with them?

 

1 hour ago, jsdoc3 said:

Good logic, very classic way to start a grow as you go NAS

Thanks! I actually got 1 cage on the weekend and cleaned out the CM 590 case. Unfortunately I decided at some point to stick sound dampening foam in there in places... No idea how to get that off and make it look tidier! The cage is in though, so I just need to transfer the parts from the old to the new server, add the new drives and work out how to move the data over... Also need to work out where I can install the SSD cache drive.

 

Good points about other backup copies. That's something I haven't worked out yet but do want to tackle sooner rather than later.

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Quick update on this. My 2 x 4tb HGST drives arrived today so I've loaded those into the cage and built everything into the cm 590 case. Currently doing parity sync! 

 

I do need some advice on fans though. The fan (80mm) on the drive cage is especially loud and needs changing. As the server is in my living room it needs to be pretty quiet. What would everyone recommend for 1x 80mm and 2-3 120mm fans with an emphasis on low noise? 

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