Options for new UNRAID NAS inc recycle CPU from gaming rig?

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Currently my NAS is a HP Proliant ML110 G5 Xeon 3065 running 6 x Various 4-12Tb HDD in JBOD mode on Windows Server 2012 (mainly used to stream Kodi to 2 Nvidia Shields, run Jdownloder, SABNZBD and LMS Server)

Have been looking at modernising the above and my homework has taken me from with either building a more modern energy efficient version or buying a new(er) HP Server like a Dell Poweredge t610 lff or building a NAS Killer 4.0 with older XEONS on a Socket 1155 to building a Ryzen 7 1700 NAS from scratch with a Fractal Node 804 case

Plenty of pros and cons -:

Did look at a QSV Xeon rig to re-encode my 80Gb MKV's to X265 however it appears HDR doesn't convert very well without a lot of tinkering so decided to just suck up the storage hit

The T610 Poweredge Option is really not much of a power saving quieter move over my existing setup

The NAS Killer option depends on buying parts from China or on the 2nd hand market and a lot of time spent building/troubleshooting for again not too much power/quiteness gain

The Ryzen 7 1700 build would probably cost double the other options and then there's the whole ECC RAM minefield to traverse

However there may be a leftfield alternative (new build with 3700x /
Fractal Node 804 case) by using the 3700x CPU in my gaming rig and building the NAS around that and buying one of the new Ryzen 3300x to slot into my gaming rig

Ryzen 7 3700x
MSI B450 Tomahawk
G.SKILL F4-3200C14D-16GFX 16 GB
5700XT

For my needs, do I really need Server grade parts or would I get away with consumer MB with no ECC RAM?

Thoughts??
 
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So thinking that I should sell my MSI B450 TOMAHAWK Motherboard ATX (Gen 1) and upgrade my motherboard to a 8 SATA port X570 or B550, double up the RAM to 32Gb, invest in a 1TB PCIe NVMe 4.0 and run my gaming system as a 24/7 Unraid box (keeping my 2 x Samsung 830 128gb SSD as UnRaid Cache Drives)

Cost wise £150/200 for the MB, £150 for the HDD, £120 for the RAM & £80/100 for the Fractal Node Case (2nd hand) & £70 for the UnRaid license

So approx £470 minus whatever I can get for my old NZXT Case Hush Silver, MSI B450 Tomahawk Gen 1 and my 2 x Crucial MX500 500GB SSD& 1 x Samsung 850 256Gb SSD (hopefully around £150/170)

Are the B550 boards worth getting over an entry level X570 board?
 
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Soldato
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This reads as though you read a NASKiller build and got suckered into the idea that it sounds cool and you need one because.... <insert no obvious reason here>. What may make some level of sense in the US where the abundance of cheap hardware and potentially cheap power doesn’t automatically make sense in an entirely different market/part of the world.

Lets take a step back, your usage seems to be quite minimal, LMS can transcode, but Kodi just direct plays everything, that leaves JDownloader and SAB (no Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr etc?). SAB unpacks as it goes, so even with gigabit WAN, you're going to struggle to meaningfully saturate a remotely modern 4c/8t CPU, even if the IO is all on NVMe rather than AHCI. Similar story with ECC, in almost 3 decades of building/repairing/maintaining all sorts of hardware i've specified ECC on numerous occasions, but it's only been useful twice (one of those was last month). On FreeNAS or similar it's slightly more desirable with the likes of ZFS, but it's not required, merely a nicer to have. In Ryzen terms i'm not sure where the minefield point comes from, ECC works with every 3 and 4 series board board i've ever tried it on, the CPU MCU supports it (64GB limit on earlier chipsets), i've seen a tiny number of reports of OEM's not enabling BIOS support, but at least two of those were users buying registered ECC which obviously won't work.

If you want to build a NAS that's power efficient with the ability to grow, then do it, but an HBA gives you 8 SATA3 interfaces for £20, UnRAID is lacking in write performance a cheap 4-6c Ryzen wins on price/power/performance (unless you specifically need to do AV transcoding in something like Plex/Emby/JF, in which case iGPU=WIN), but be realistic about what a NAS needs to be a NAS for your needs, overkill for the sake of overkill only really works if you already have spare bits sat doing nothing that you don't want to sell/use on something else or hate whoever pays the power bill. As to combining your gaming rig and UnRAID, it's not really that great an idea, it makes a nice YT video for Linus, but it's things you do fo the sake of it rather than because you want to.
 
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You definetly got my number :D:D

However thanks for the constructive "criticism" and for saving me money :)
My main objective was to retire the old HP Server which took me on the "journey" above

However as you rightly point out (for my usage) my current rig (with a new case & HBA card) takes care of my storage / usage requirements

Regarding the other dockerr addons (was aware of Sickbeard back in the day) however it looks like there's windows versions available so no need to install UnRaid
 
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So decided on selling my Proliant Server for beer money and keeping my Gaming Rig and transplanting it into a Fractal Node Define R5 which can host 8 x 3.5" HDD's and run Windows 10 as a home server

Only issue is that my B450 Tomahawk MB only has 6 x SATA's and I've got 4 x SSD's & 6 x 3.5" HDD's currently (4 x 4TB, 1 x 10Tb & 1 x 12Tb)

Looked at cheap 6 or 8 port PCI-E cards but put off with dodgy reviews of ports failing or not working
Also looked at buying an IBM LSI ServeRAID-M1015 card in IT Mode for around the same money but it only runs up to 4000Gbps and runs hot?

Am I being overly cautious or would I be better off just buying a X570 8 SATA Motherboard + NVME Drive to save adding another controller card into the mix?

Money wise the cost differential between the add-on card option or new MB & NVME is around £100/150 extra for the X570 route

Or another option is to sell 3 of the 4Tb HDD's and replace them with another 12TB HDD (would be a £20/40 hit)
 
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So decided on selling my Proliant Server for beer money and keeping my Gaming Rig and transplanting it into a Fractal Node Define R5 which can host 8 x 3.5" HDD's and run Windows 10 as a home server

Only issue is that my B450 Tomahawk MB only has 6 x SATA's and I've got 4 x SSD's & 6 x 3.5" HDD's currently (4 x 4TB, 1 x 10Tb & 1 x 12Tb)

Looked at cheap 6 or 8 port PCI-E cards but put off with dodgy reviews of ports failing or not working
Also looked at buying an IBM LSI ServeRAID-M1015 card in IT Mode for around the same money but it only runs up to 4000Gbps and runs hot?

Am I being overly cautious or would I be better off just buying a X570 8 SATA Motherboard + NVME Drive to save adding another controller card into the mix?

Money wise the cost differential between the add-on card option or new MB & NVME is around £100/150 extra for the X570 route

Or another option is to sell 3 of the 4Tb HDD's and replace them with another 12TB HDD (would be a £20/40 hit)


sell off the 4tb HDD's also who really needs that much storage? i just re-download anything when i need it. as in i'll only keep stuff if i'll re-watch it and that is rare
 
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Given how unlikely you are to saturate the £20 HBA with mechanical drives given UnRAID's normal usage profile (write once, read often) under normal circumstances, and that a modern case has reasonable air flow and some of us have been running this way for many, many years it seems like you're asking if it's a good idea to spend significantly more money so you can continue to use small drives because theoretically it sounds like in extreme circumstances you could hit an on paper limit. If you have money to burn for the sake of it, then have at it, if not then have a look at the UnRAID forums. The curve ball you probably want to consider is rclone + GSuite, but that's another story.
 
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sell off the 4tb HDD's also who really needs that much storage? i just re-download anything when i need it. as in i'll only keep stuff if i'll re-watch it and that is rare
Due to UHD rips being 50-80Gb a shot, it's not too long to fill up a drive as well as older archived stuff not readily available to re-download
Also factor in family pics and videos grow exponentially (aware you could cloud this out)
More smaller drives against less bigger drives gives a tad more security given I'm not running RAID or a Parity Drive
 
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Given how unlikely you are to saturate the £20 HBA with mechanical drives given UnRAID's normal usage profile (write once, read often) under normal circumstances, and that a modern case has reasonable air flow and some of us have been running this way for many, many years it seems like you're asking if it's a good idea to spend significantly more money so you can continue to use small drives because theoretically it sounds like in extreme circumstances you could hit an on paper limit. If you have money to burn for the sake of it, then have at it, if not then have a look at the UnRAID forums. The curve ball you probably want to consider is rclone + GSuite, but that's another story.
TBF given your earlier comment on the thread, I was going down the line of just using Windows 10 as the home server and if I was running into utilisation problems when gaming if the family was watching a MKV or Jdownloader was unpacking (TBF I could always schedule that for OOH) then look at UnRaid further down the line

My main concern was the robustness of the HBA Controller especially the cheap ones on the rainforest website given the reviews, however for a £20 gamble second hand going down the LSI or IBM Clone route appears to be a no-brainer in the short term given it's more a server level component and my needs are as you stated "write once, read when required sporadically"

Re your suggested cloud usage, I do have 200Mb VM Broadband, however their upload speeds aren't the best and you're at the mercy of the provided bandwidth coupled to having 20TB of MKV's, 2TB of Music & god knows how many TB of ISO's it would take months to upload

However it's something I'll definetly have a look at for the longer term
 
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Due to UHD rips being 50-80Gb a shot, it's not too long to fill up a drive as well as older archived stuff not readily available to re-download
Also factor in family pics and videos grow exponentially (aware you could cloud this out)
More smaller drives against less bigger drives gives a tad more security given I'm not running RAID or a Parity Drive

yeah but how many of those rips will you actually watch several times?

also you can use the H.265 codec to get those really down in size. there is no real need to have them in RAW format.

get yourself a parity drive and upload whatever you can to the cloud. i don't store any pics on and hard drive and videos are a rarity. even so max they shouldn't be filling up more than a blu ray disc at best you could write them to as a backup for the cloud.

I'm building a server and i've specified myself 8TB total including a parity drive so a lot of that won't be usable. i'll se ehow it goes but i will be re-encoding everything to H.265 to keep file sizes to a minimum.
 
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yeah but how many of those rips will you actually watch several times?

also you can use the H.265 codec to get those really down in size. there is no real need to have them in RAW format.

get yourself a parity drive and upload whatever you can to the cloud. i don't store any pics on and hard drive and videos are a rarity. even so max they shouldn't be filling up more than a blu ray disc at best you could write them to as a backup for the cloud.

I'm building a server and i've specified myself 8TB total including a parity drive so a lot of that won't be usable. i'll se ehow it goes but i will be re-encoding everything to H.265 to keep file sizes to a minimum.
I did look at re-encoding (mentioned it in my opening post) but I factored the cost of either a 6th Gen Intel QSV or using my 5700XT and it wasn't worth the upgrade cost and/or processing time vs cost of storage to cut UHD size in half especially given that it doesn't handle HDR correctly at present

You could easily fill a 8Tb HDD with just re-encoded UHD H265's and be full just after 250/300 films
 
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Caporegime
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I did look at re-encoding (mentioned it in my opening post) but I factored the cost of either a 6th Gen Intel QSV or using my 5700XT and it wasn't worth the upgrade cost and/or processing time to cut UHD size in half especially given that it doesn't handle HDR correctly at present

You could easily fill a 8Tb HDD with just re-encoded UHD H265's and be full just after 250/300 films

just get a google business account then and upload the full lot to that. yes it may take a while but you can sell your server and all the hard drives and never have to worry about storage again.

or just stop hoarding stuff you will never watch again.
 
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just get a google business account then and upload the full lot to that. yes it may take a while but you can sell your server and all the hard drives and never have to worry about storage again.

or just stop hoarding stuff you will never watch again.
Unlimited GB requires 5 users or more for unlimited so about £45PM to run, so within 13 months I'd be cashflow negative (if the T&'Cs stayed the same, likewise if the sub remains the same)

TBF if you factor in the electricity savings of not running the server and HDD's it would maybe add a few extra months

You're also at the mercy of a 3rd party to access your own data, no thanks
 
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Soldato
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Unlimited GB requires 5 users or more for unlimited so about £45PM to run, so within 13 months I'd be cashflow negative (if the T&'Cs stayed the same, likewise if the sub remains the same)

You're also at the mercy of a 3rd party to access your own data, no thanks

Meanwhile back in reality that £585 is over 6 years of unlimited storage (based on the last 4) and likely much longer once you add in power/backups/administration/dealing with RMA’s. As to uploads, it’s a short term problem running off VM, 3 days/TB at 35Mbit, other obvious solutions that would reduce that to hours and days exist and cost bugger all. Either way, go with what you are comfortable with.
 
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Meanwhile back in reality that £585 is over 6 years of unlimited storage (based on the last 4) and likely much longer once you add in power/backups/administration/dealing with RMA’s. As to uploads, it’s a short term problem running off VM, 3 days/TB at 35Mbit, other obvious solutions that would reduce that to hours and days exist and cost bugger all. Either way, go with what you are comfortable with.
I do appreciate all the responses and I'm not discounting any final solution however not sure how you're getting the 6 years maths (unless there's a trick to get past the 1 user / 1Tb limit?)

However you're right going down the GB route means no drive failures or admin to deal with plus the power savings

TBH I could probably get my work to pay the sub for GB, however what's the reality of being able to reliably stream a 80Gb 2160p ATMOS MKV from GB via VM without buffering through my Nvidia Shield? Or streaming two MKV's at the same time or if the kids are watching a stream while the wife is watching Netflix?*

*Based on 200Mb down / 20mb up / 32ms latency

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/bt41z5/streaming_from_google_drive_performance/
 
Soldato
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It’s under £8/m, yes you need a domain (free or otherwise). In terms of performance, I have servers on a shared 10Gb connection that comfortably pull/push over 500MB/s from GSuite when imaging, that’s SSD sequential speeds (obviously not when it comes to latency). Is it easily possible to stream 80GB on a 200Mbit connection in real time? Yes (subject to VM’s network), I’d personally question if that’s really required, but it’s one of those highly subjective things that people get very excited about.
 
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It’s under £8/m, yes you need a domain (free or otherwise). In terms of performance, I have servers on a shared 10Gb connection that comfortably pull/push over 500MB/s from GSuite when imaging, that’s SSD sequential speeds (obviously not when it comes to latency). Is it easily possible to stream 80GB on a 200Mbit connection in real time? Yes (subject to VM’s network), I’d personally question if that’s really required, but it’s one of those highly subjective things that people get very excited about.
Interesting, as an aside we currently host our works website with 1&1 / Wordpress, would I be able to transfer the domain to Google Business to host our website as part of the "unlimited" data per month?
 
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