Looking for advice on new Server with Unraid and a lot of different drives

Hi there,

currently a little overwhelmed with the possibilites I’ve right now. Big problem, right? :slight_smile:

Got my hands on an old server and some drives + drives I already had. And the new test version of Unraid with official ZFS support looks really nice for a home server.

Server:
Supermicro H11SSL-i
AMD Epyc 7302
128 GB ECC DDR4 3200MT

Storage:
2x280GB P900 Optane
4x1TB Intel P4511 NVMe
2x1TB Samsung 860 EVO Sata SSD (would most likely use these for the default array in Unraid)
2x4TB Sandisk Sata SSD
1x512GB Samsung SM960 NVMe (would use this for a VM with GPU/NVMe passthrough)
4x10 TB HDD
2x18 TB HDD
2x3 TB HDD
1x2 TB HDD (It’s pretty old though and would use it as my “garbage” share)

Use case:
My current Unraid server is mostly used as a storage server with various docker containers for media usage and converting (Plex etc.) and gaming station.
I have a VM as my main gaming rig, with GPU/SSD passthrough and another VM for work (cheap Quadro passthrough.

This would still be the main use case for the new server in addition with various VMs for my homelab (domain/fw) and testing new stuff and tech. Plus a few docker containers for various tasks (homeassistant/plex/encoding/pihole). Currently have around 10 containers, but with very little usage of CPU/RAM.
Minus the gaming VM, would turn my current Unraid “server” back to a normal gaming rig :wink:

My question would be about the usage of these drives in combination with ZFS and the various features (L2ARC/SLOG/Special) etc.

Thanks
-Chris

There are not a lot of great ZFS options for you here. The best I can really come up with is to take the 4 10T drives and the 2 18T drives and make a single RaidZ2 with those 6 disks, then if you need more space later you can replace 1 10T drive at a time until they are all gone then the pool should auto expand to the new 18T size of all the disks in that vdev. Use that for your bulk storage.

If you mean for a boot/config drive, thats probs fine.

Mirror?

Striped mirror?

mirror, “garbage” share

door stop

mirror or ZIL for disk pool?

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 273 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.