Server Noob-ish

[joelk2]

So background on my setup.

I have a N54L filled with drives running WHS11 turned off in my cupboard.
In my old place it ran flawlessly for absolutely years with plex.

When moving a number of years ago I bought myself a little mini pc as my home server with a 4 TB drive and switched to Emby with a number of the arr’s to handle my media. Again it’s been working flawlessly for years but I’m running out of space.

I have an unused desktop some form of Xeon, 32 GB ram, msi 1030 gpu, m.2 boot drive. Which was my Work CAD machine.

I’m looking into the options of turning this into my home server as I’m sure it has more grunt than my little mini pc plus it has plenty of case space to whack drives in.

I don’t want to run WHS11 as it’s old. I currently use windows as it’s familiar but I’m looking at unraid as an option.
It seems to get mentioned allot but also has good support etc.
would this be the way to go? Anything I should be aware of?

 

[Demon]

So background on my setup.

I have a N54L filled with drives running WHS11 turned off in my cupboard.
In my old place it ran flawlessly for absolutely years with plex.

When moving a number of years ago I bought myself a little mini pc as my home server with a 4 TB drive and switched to Emby with a number of the arr’s to handle my media. Again it’s been working flawlessly for years but I’m running out of space.

I have an unused desktop some form of Xeon, 32 GB ram, msi 1030 gpu, m.2 boot drive. Which was my Work CAD machine.

I’m looking into the options of turning this into my home server as I’m sure it has more grunt than my little mini pc plus it has plenty of case space to whack drives in.

I don’t want to run WHS11 as it’s old. I currently use windows as it’s familiar but I’m looking at unraid as an option.
It seems to get mentioned allot but also has good support etc.
would this be the way to go? Anything I should be aware of?

Unraid for sure..

I went from running WHS to Windows Server full, to then try various Linux based OS' but in the end tried Unraid, and never looked back..

It's just the right mix of well supported, good curated docker system, more than adequate VM system!

My only comment of things to be aware of is they are shortly going to a subscription model but at the moment they have normal lifetime licences, so you could look at moving up a licence level from the start, but that's entirely up to you, all the licencing tiers do is allow more total drives in your system, they don't feature lock which is useful.
I think they've proven their support to the product to warrant a lower cost subscription model to keep the money coming in for support.. the real strength of unraid is the continual development, the guides, the whole eco-system is great for noobs through to experienced people that just want to get things done quickly.

FYI, You don't need a 'boot' drive, Unraid boots from a USB Stick.

I use my two m.2 slots for a mirrored fast 'cache' drive,. which is useful for keeping all the docker images/docker app data for super fast containers.. it's also useful for speeding up file writes over the network, but that's all optional!

 

[joelk2]

Unraid for sure..

I went from running WHS to Windows Server full, to then try various Linux based OS' but in the end tried Unraid, and never looked back..

It's just the right mix of well supported, good curated docker system, more than adequate VM system!

My only comment of things to be aware of is they are shortly going to a subscription model but at the moment they have normal lifetime licences, so you could look at moving up a licence level from the start, but that's entirely up to you, all the licencing tiers do is allow more total drives in your system, they don't feature lock which is useful.
I think they've proven their support to the product to warrant a lower cost subscription model to keep the money coming in for support.. the real strength of unraid is the continual development, the guides, the whole eco-system is great for noobs through to experienced people that just want to get things done quickly.

FYI, You don't need a 'boot' drive, Unraid boots from a USB Stick.

I use my two m.2 slots for a mirrored fast 'cache' drive,. which is useful for keeping all the docker images/docker app data for super fast containers.. it's also useful for speeding up file writes over the network, but that's all optional!

Cheers.

Had a little play tonight and I think the computer I’m using is broke. I wanted to reinstall windows on it anyways just to check it all out etc and the display went off and now it doesn’t display an output.

I didn’t have a chance to test out unraid though.

 

[mi9tchy]

Unraid for sure..

I went from running WHS to Windows Server full, to then try various Linux based OS' but in the end tried Unraid, and never looked back..

It's just the right mix of well supported, good curated docker system, more than adequate VM system!

My only comment of things to be aware of is they are shortly going to a subscription model but at the moment they have normal lifetime licences, so you could look at moving up a licence level from the start, but that's entirely up to you, all the licencing tiers do is allow more total drives in your system, they don't feature lock which is useful.
I think they've proven their support to the product to warrant a lower cost subscription model to keep the money coming in for support.. the real strength of unraid is the continual development, the guides, the whole eco-system is great for noobs through to experienced people that just want to get things done quickly.

FYI, You don't need a 'boot' drive, Unraid boots from a USB Stick.

I use my two m.2 slots for a mirrored fast 'cache' drive,. which is useful for keeping all the docker images/docker app data for super fast containers.. it's also useful for speeding up file writes over the network, but that's all optional!

+1 for unraid was originally running this on my hp N54L but moved to a a lenovo thinkcenter tiny and the latest is am running this n100 mini pc

 

[alex24]

If you’re familiar with Linux based systems then I can recommend the latest Ubuntu LTS as it’s been super stable for me on an old x86 PC used as a server. I’m using the server edition but adding a desktop environment won’t carry much overhead on something powerful. My drives are setup with ZFS. If you’re already Linux literate somewhat then I was toying with the idea of NixOS on my server as it’s running so great on my desktop. Not a good starting point though perhaps. Depends how comfortable you are.

If you’re not familiar with Linux based systems then I heartily can recommend a Linux based system anyway as you’ll have the opportunity to learn about how they work and it ultimately gives you the most flexibility on how you want to setup.

If you’re time poor then Unraid or similar makes sense I guess.

How do you want to configure your storage?