I take it its better to have one parity drive than none though, right?
All the data I cannot afford to lose I backup in the cloud given the billions companies such as Google and Microsoft spend on their infrastructure I like to think its better than anything I could do alone.
At a certain point storing your data online becomes too cost prohibitive to make sense.
Parity is great, but remember raid and parity are primarily for uptime. This is why I back up to another computer running a separate array.
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So I’ve went ahead and ordered the WD Elements drives. Rightly or wrongly it was just too good of a deal to pass up on. When they arrive I’ll hook them up to make sure they are working then I’ll set about ordering the other parts (when I’ve managed to not keep changing my mind over which CPU, RAM, SSD to get).
I was looking at another forum talking about Blue Iris and a couple of guys were adamant that an i7 is needed but I’ve read several accounts of people getting by with i3s and i5s just fine and just saying i7 is needed is no indication of the performance when you compare a new i3 with a several generations old i7. Synology Surveillance Stations manage with a 2 core Celeron after all. So I’m still on the fence between the i3 9100 and the i5 10400 with a £70 difference between them.
RAM - I think I’ve decided against 2 4Gb sticks I’ve been looking at the RAM usage of Blue Iris and it can function on 4GB with 4 cameras or less but 8GB is still the preferred option. I’ve also got to factor in I will be running it alongside Plex so now I wonder whether to get 2x8GB or 1x8GB and what speed, can I go for 2400 or 2666MHz? I don’t plan on setting up blue iris just yet I’m still mulling the idea over in my head.
SSD - Do I really need it or can I save £58? I don’t really know what I will be caching with it?
If you want to run VMs then I suggest it heavily
Would that be to run the VM on the SSD?
Yeah
Can I add the SSD in at a later date for things like VMs or caching or does it need to be done at the beginning?
You can add and remove cache as you see fit with unraid in particular.
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I think you’re making life difficult for yourself using that case. It’s pretty neat but makes buying parts expensive and performance limiting.
If this thing really is just a file storage (NAS) then don’t waste a RYZEN on it.
Find a case which can support 8 3.5 drives.
Get an HBA for SAS drives;
Get two of these to connect 8 drives;
Get a job lot of these SAS drives;
Mine worked out at £22.50 for 3TB
Get a decent PSU.
Get a Xeon based board like this that can take a lot of DDR3, especially DDR3 REGECC which is cheaper and better;
The advantage of the right sized case is you can put a lot of great value gear inside. Buying cheap 3TB drives rather than expensive 6TB drives is now easy. SAS drives are similar to SATA but cheaper and require special cables and card to make them work. Don’t get RAID but HBA card.
If it’s just NAS then install FreeNAS. If you want to run VMs then Proxmox but in that case the RYZEN would be a better choice.
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Using the SSD for caching is good. Put the OS on part of it and another partition for the cache. Anything which needs the speed will end up on the SSD.
The biggest difference between the RYZEN 3600 and 3600X is the better cooler the faster one comes with. In terms of performance the faster one is a little faster and a lot hotter. Ideally you want the 3600 with a decent cooler.
Ok so my drives will be arriving middle of the week if tracking is believed to be accurate. I’ve been thinking about checking the drives for issues. I know Unraid has pre-clear and it is recommended to run it 2-3 times. I was wondering as I don’t have NAS set up and running with hard drives in it already is there a way to run pre clear without the NAS and without having to pay out for the Unraid license which I’m not yet using.
Unraid has a 30 day trial
Does it matter what motherboard I go for? @Adubs you were saying originally (when I was looking at using FreeNAS) that SATA controllers matter when picking out a motherboard is that the case still for Unraid? And why?
It matters the same for any OS really. I wouldnt worry about it too much though. Whatever you pick will probably be ok.
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Should I look for a motherboard that supports Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology? I was originally looking to get anything cheap but after reading into it the cheap LGA1151 boards are H310
Ok so settled on the B365 chipset now looking at these four
ASRock B365M-HDV https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/B365M-HDV/index.asp#Specification
Gigabyte B365M DS3H https://www.gigabyte.com/uk/Motherboard/B365M-DS3H-rev-10/sp#sp
MSI B365M https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B365M-PRO-VDH/Specification
ASUS PRIME B365M-K https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/PRIME-B365M-K/specifications/
Is there anything that makes one stand out over the other or just go with the cheapest of the four they are very similar in price (couple $/£ difference)
I did note the max memory speed for them all was 2666MHz.
Max memory speed is kind of misinformation. That’s as fast as the jedec standard is but they can likely go faster.
I like the asrock the most because of the Intel lan. The rest are realtek which I don’t trust to have the best support in Linux or BSD down the road if you want that.
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XMP is considered overclocking by Intel and thus only supported on Z-series chipsets.
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interesting. I havent paid much attention to the lower end boards.