Hardware specs for a new unRAID server??

[StevieP]

I've currently got unRAID running on a HP Microserver with the following specs:

Intel® Xeon® CPU E31260L @ 2.40GHz
16 GiB DDR3 Single-bit ECC

Within the system I've got a 250GB MX500 SSD and 3 x Western Digital RED hard drives (2 x 4TB and 1 x 2TB)

I use the system predominantly as a storage NAS for movies, photos etc along with Plex but am also hosting a number of game server dockers for a few mates for when we want a dedicated server. (7 Days to Die, Satisfactory, Valheim etc)

My issues is that the RAM and CPU seem to be holding me back when I'm hosting multiple servers so I was looking at a full revamp, including case, CPU and RAM.

Can anyone recommend me a decent spec for this sort of use - ideally with low(ish) power usage for 24/7 operation?

Thanks...

 

[sja360]

Is that a single stick of ram? Might be worth getting another but how much performance that gives i dunno.

I think a 45w 4 core isn't bad, to go for more power would require upgrading maybe costing £200-250 to go 8 core and 32gb ram with a new cpu/board and memory. And likely looking at 65w for cpu consumption.

 

[TangoEchoAlpha]

Get something recent with plenty of cores, so you can pin cores/threads to the game dockers.

I run a 5600X with 32GB of DDR4 memory in my Unraid server. I'd want something with more cores/threads for your use case.

 

[StevieP]

Is that a single stick of ram? Might be worth getting another but how much performance that gives i dunno.

I believe its 2 x 8GB sticks but the issue is that the motherboard and CPU doesn't support any more RAM than 16GB! (a quick Google seems to suggest this anyway!)

To be honest, as good as the Microserver has been, I'm definitely leaning towards new hardware from the ground up.

 

[Armageus]

As an alternative - why not just keep your NAS doing what it's good at (i.e. hosting Files and being a NAS), and add a Mini PC to give you the RAM/CPU capacity you need?

You can get Mini/Micro/Tiny HP/Dell/Lenovo business PCs cheaply second hand, and they can often have 32GB or more RAM, as well as 2 NVME drives, and decent enough CPUs (e.g. 8500T 6 core/12 thread), and they are the ideal companion to a HP microserver, being small form factor and low power consumption

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[Silent Bob]

If ECC is important to you a cheap AM4 system is an option. I’m using a Ryzen 5 1600AF and an ASRock board which supports ECC RAM. Idle power usage tends to be a bit higher than a typical Intel system but it’s better under load.

 

[StevieP]

If ECC is important to you a cheap AM4 system is an option. I’m using a Ryzen 5 1600AF and an ASRock board which supports ECC RAM. Idle power usage tends to be a bit higher than a typical Intel system but it’s better under load.

If I'm honest I don't fully understand the benefits of ECC??

 

[Silent Bob]

For a home file server I don’t think there’s much benefit. In theory it is possible that data being read/written to disk could have random bits flipped from 0 to 1 and vice versa but it’s very unlikely. It’s even less of a problem if you’re also backups of important data elsewhere.

 

[Armageus]

And if you're that paranoid then you also need ECC in your client pc to avoid data being corrupted before you copy it to the NAS.

 

[MTA99]

ECC was a requirement for FreeNAS/TrueNAS. I think it's been downgraded to recommended.

Unraid has never had ECC as a requirement/recommended. Ironically as the support for ZFS in Unraid matures, ECC might become recommended and eventually a requirement

With these two "philosophies" you end up with users who swear by ECC and those that don't see what all the fuss is about (then another group who didn't even realise error correction was a thing). If you're sticking with Unraid don't worry about it too much either way.

 

[GR63]

If you ever want to transcode it would be much cheaper power-wise to go Intel with iGPU

 

[jigger]

If you ever want to transcode it would be much cheaper power-wise to go Intel with iGPU

Define much? 12-16p a year?

 

[jigger]

You’d first need to decide if you want ECC or not, as that will define the build.

 

[GR63]

Define much? 12-16p a year?

Sure, you define how many transcodes and bit rates and how many in a year... but is of the order of 5W vs 50W

 

[jigger]

Sure, you define how many transcodes and bit rates and how many in a year... but is of the order of 5W vs 50W

AMD are maybe as much as 1/3 of the power use of Intel. I doubt many people would see a lower power bill with an Intel system over a year TBH.

 

[Armageus]

AMD are maybe as much as 1/3 of the power use of Intel. I doubt many people would see a lower power bill with an Intel system over a year TBH.

When "hardware" transcoding with Intel Quicksync, then power consumption is insignificant compared to any AMD or Intel chip doing "software" transcoding