is Unraid the right thing for my needs


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Hi Guys,

 

I've been lurking around for the past 2 weeks, reading up on unraid, dockers, hardware requirements and common problems. I'm at a point where I have the hardware sitting next to me and needing advise if I should go with unraid and if so what the best way to set this thing up. I got the basic installation steps and how to install dockers (again, only read about it - haven't touched a thing yet).

Here is what I have:

 

Motherboard: MSI B350 AMD chipset

CPU: Ryzen 7 1800x

PSU: EVGA 650W

Mem: 32GB DDR4 3200

HDD: 4x 6TB WD Black (1 Parity, 3 Storage) & Samsung M.2 500GB (Cache)

GPU: 710gt (just to get through the basic installation)

PCI-e card:  SYBA SI-PEX40108  (to add 4 additional SATA ports for future expansion)

 

Here is what I want to do at the moment. Maybe more down the line but this is bare minimum:

 

* Plex media server (saw the docker, so this should be a no-brainer)

* qtorrent (everybody refers to transmission but I really like and got used to qtorrent, so my heart is kind of set to it)

* DVDfab Video conversion - Occasionally I would like to run DVDFab to convert movies from x264 to x265

 

At the moment I manually transfer files received through qtorrent to my movie folders where Plex picks it up and does it's thing. If I have 1 docker for Plex server and another one for qtorrent how do I easily move files from the download folder to where Plex looks?

 

Should I maybe setup a windows VM for qtorrent and DVDfab and RDP into it if I want to convert files? I could easily move files through network shares if I have to.

 

What about the cache drive? I understand it's purpose and that files get moved from it to the unraid later but I'm not sure how that will work with the above mentioned applications. Should I have Plex download and read all the media files to it but what happens when it moves off the cache drive? is there some sort of pointer/shortcut that tells plex look at the drive array instead of the cache disk to find it? Same for qtorrent: downloaded torrent files are initially on the cache, get moved over night to the disk array and it still finds them later? This part is a bit confusing to me. Generally speaking I get the cache drive but I'm not sure how that works in setting it up in unraid and pointing to it for config files or meta data, etc.

 

I'm looking for the most efficient way to complete the tasks I'm doing right now just through a dedicated unraid server. I would appreciate any ideas or best approach so I can set this up via the trial, verify it works as intended and join the unraid community.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Edited by sheldon
fixed typo
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1 hour ago, sheldon said:

is there some sort of pointer/shortcut that tells plex look at the drive array instead of the cache disk to find it?

 

Hello and welcome.

 

unRAID supports the concept of drive pooling via User Shares.  A user share can span multiple drives, including the cache drive.  For instance, from your Windows PC you'd refer to something like \\tower\Movies.  Within unRAID that translates to a mount of /mnt/user/Movies.  Underneath the covers, unRAID will potentially have /mnt/disk1/Movies, /mnt/disk2/Movies, /mnt/cache/Movies, etc. - but by referring just to the user share Movies, unRAID keeps track of which files are on which disks.  Hope that helps.

 

There are several torrent options on unRAID via Dockers, but I don't see qBittorrent currently - but there are Dockers for it on github so you might be able to bring it down to unRAID.  VM is another option.

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8 hours ago, sheldon said:

 

At the moment I manually transfer files received through qtorrent to my movie folders where Plex picks it up and does it's thing. If I have 1 docker for Plex server and another one for qtorrent how do I easily move files from the download folder to where Plex looks?

 

 

Have a look at the radarr docker (and sonarr if you download tv shows).  They let you add tv shows and movies you are interested in, you add your indexers (e.g via jackett - another docker) and they automatically keep searching for, upgrade and manage your downloads by adding them to and moving completed downloads to your chosen final directories.  radarr in particular is excellent as you can add your wishlists via trakt, imdb etc and also have it automatically add movies based on certain criteria e.g. all new movies rated >7 on IMDB

8 hours ago, sheldon said:

 

Should I maybe setup a windows VM for qtorrent and DVDfab and RDP into it if I want to convert files? I could easily move files through network shares if I have to.

 

 

I would try and steer away from using VMs as much as possible and use dockers, where you can access if needed your full server's potential.  Have you checked out deluge?

8 hours ago, sheldon said:

What about the cache drive? I understand it's purpose and that files get moved from it to the unraid later but I'm not sure how that will work with the above mentioned applications. Should I have Plex download and read all the media files to it but what happens when it moves off the cache drive? is there some sort of pointer/shortcut that tells plex look at the drive array instead of the cache disk to find it? Same for qtorrent: downloaded torrent files are initially on the cache, get moved over night to the disk array and it still finds them later? This part is a bit confusing to me. Generally speaking I get the cache drive but I'm not sure how that works in setting it up in unraid and pointing to it for config files or meta data, etc.

 

out of the box the cache drive uses a script called mover that runs on a set schedule e.g. overnight to move files to the array.  There's also custom scripts available e.g. for my 500GB cache pool, my custom mover script runs when the cache gets to 400GB full so it only runs when needed rather than every night and moving files unnecessarily  to the array.

 

For each of your shares you set whether they use cache only, prefer cache (store on cache if space), or array only i.e. it's set at a share level not per docker. 

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Thanks for all the advise received so far. I did see some past issues with Ryzen but haven't seen anything recent so I assumed it was resolved by now. I guess I'll give it a try with the trial and see how things goes. Luckily I'm not moving anything to the server as of yet, so any issues I run into would not cost me a huge headache, I'll just wipe it and try again.

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