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?

 

[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.

 

[joelk2]

Finally got my old work pc up and running. Was an i7-8700k with 32gb ram.

I’ve currently set my nvme 500gb and an old 1tb 2.5” as my array.

I’ve setup sab and the arr’s. Folder mapping is a right pain in the ass so this took ages despite following YouTube guides word for word. I still have no clue on how I did it.

Now for the fun part. I want to replace my 2 mixed drives with 1x 2tb drive.

How do I go about doing this without changing any settings I’ve setup.

 

[joelk2]

What OS did you end up using?

I’ve gone with unraid.

So dockers/containers/hardlinks/path mappings are all foreign territory to me so the curve so far has been steep!

 

[joelk2]

For long term you might want to think about the cost of running such a machine 24/7. I would use it to try out unraid, and then look to install on something more power efficient.

It would be sitting idle the majority of the time so wouldn’t use that much power I wouldn’t have though?

 

[joelk2]

If you haven't already, check out SpaceInvader One YouTube channel. Lots of great stuff there.

I stumbled across his channel yesterday actually. I used Riffsphere’s guides to setup so far though.

 

[joelk2]

You could run a more modern version of Windows Server with the Windows Server Essentials Experience.

Installing Windows Server Essentials Experience On Windows Server 2019 / 2022 / 2025 « The Office Maven

I liked the idea of unraid as it’s very low resource intense. If I was going the windows route again I’d just chuck windows 11 at it as I know my way around that

 

[joelk2]

For long term you might want to think about the cost of running such a machine 24/7. I would use it to try out unraid, and then look to install on something more power efficient.

Or what would your suggestion be for more low powered?

 

[joelk2]

Sounds like the recently announced Epyc 4004 range would be ideal for Unraid and the like

Essentially a server validated version of Ryzen 7xxx, and with hopefully more server focused motherboards to come

The AMD EPYC 4004 is Finally Here and Intel Xeon E Needs an Overhaul

The AMD EPYC 4004 series is finally here and it absolutely wallops Intel Xeon E in the entry-level server market

www.servethehome.com

I can imagine it would be yeah but would also need new mobo/motherboard and ram which makes it expensive for a single media server.

 

[joelk2]

All up and running now.

Running 2x4tb drives with a 4tb parity and ssd cache.

Should keep me going a while and my licence covers me to add another 2 drives.