unraid advice please

[encephalopathy]

looking to replace several decade old hp microservers and consolidate with an unraid setup. looking for advice on cheapish mobo, cpu, ram setup that will give me enough grunt going forward to store and serve mainly films and tv episodes. not sure if unraid does bitorrent clients but this would be good. at the tv end i have a couple of fire cubes and a vero4k running osmc. Pointers towards appropriate OCUK bundles gratefully received!

Thanks

 

[russ9898]

Unraid can indeed run torrent clients, most people do so using docker. I personally use binhex qBittorrent docker which riutes all torrent traffic via a vpn service

 

[Demon]

looking to replace several decade old hp microservers and consolidate with an unraid setup. looking for advice on cheapish mobo, cpu, ram setup that will give me enough grunt going forward to store and serve mainly films and tv episodes. not sure if unraid does bitorrent clients but this would be good. at the tv end i have a couple of fire cubes and a vero4k running osmc. Pointers towards appropriate OCUK bundles gratefully received!

Thanks

I usually just buy something a couple of generations old second hand (from these very forums!) for this kind of thing.

If streaming media, getting an Intel CPU with Xe/Iris integrated graphics is useful for transcoding..

Other than that, it depends on how many HDDs you want, although most people buy a cheap HBA card that is preflashed in 'IT' mode (just search on ebay for "HBA IT Mode Unraid") and get an 8 port card.. that with a few motherboard SATA connectors should see you right!

Unraid is not that fussy with hardware, I'm running a Ryzen 3600 + 32Gb RAM and that is overkill.. loads of containers running (including the same Qbittorrent with VPN as mentioned above!)..


Once you experience Docker containers, you will absolutely love the simplicity of installing/running loads of applications.

 

[Avalon]

How many drives? What else do you plan on running? General advice is buy anything 8th gen onwards with iGPU (useful for hardware transcoding), save a small fortune at the cost of 4-6w of power (£12-18/yr when we were at our historic high electricity prices, less now). I believe by '8 port card' the above post means a 2 port HBA with a pair of breakout cables which would give you 8 SATA connections. Docker is king, run the *arr stack that way and add an NVMe for docker/VM use.

 

[decto]

As above, intel 8th gen if you might host a media server and want transcoding.

I'd avoid HBA, they use more power than needed and should have active cooling. A 5 port JMB585 or similar is cheap and plenty for spinners. There is a pinned list of recommended controllers in the unraid forum.

Just watch some motherboards are tight on PCI-E so disabled one or two Sata ports when you use an expansion or M2.

Unraid needs very little itself, though hosting services on docker can add up.

A reasonable SSD is recommended as a cache drive so services etc. aren't waiting on the array. E.g.your media index.

 

[encephalopathy]

thanks - off to do some more reading!!

 

[Sanchez]

I've recently started looking at an Unraid server. I've probably outgrown my Pi now as it's running quite a lot of services now. Has anyone got any decent suggestions for mini ITX setups? I fancy something compact and low powered. Anyone running a N100 setup?

 

[Avalon]

N100 is decent upto a point, it’s just woefully lacking in PCIe lanes and that often leads to compromises when you start filling it up, eg NVMe will be running/sharing fewer lanes (not a massive issue usually) and the PCIe slot will be x1 which limits expansion and speed. I helped a friend build one in a node and stack it with 16TB drives, it’s very quiet and small with low power consumption, but he already knows he’ll build another server sooner rather than later and it’s only been a few months. That said his usage may not be your usage, so what is it going to be doing?

 

[R.C.Anderson]

I've been running Unraid for close to a decade now. Started with a Dell T20 (actually have this in the MM *wink*), which worked great for me, but then upgraded to a more powerful machine with more PCI-E slots (the main thing I was limited by).

Just a warning though... Whatever you get, you'll end up wanting more before long, as you start to think "what if I did this", or "wouldn't it be cool if it did that". For example, I've recently just upgraded my dual 1GB onboard NIC to a PCI-E dual 10GB NIC instead... Do I need it? No, not really but I wanted to!

I use mine primarily as a Plex server (and related gubbins for media management etc), but also run pihole, unifi controller, home assistant, tranmission (my torrent client of choice), backup SW (all as docker containers), and a couple of VMs

 

[Sanchez]

N100 is decent upto a point, it’s just woefully lacking in PCIe lanes and that often leads to compromises when you start filling it up, eg NVMe will be running/sharing fewer lanes (not a massive issue usually) and the PCIe slot will be x1 which limits expansion and speed. I helped a friend build one in a node and stack it with 16TB drives, it’s very quiet and small with low power consumption, but he already knows he’ll build another server sooner rather than later and it’s only been a few months. That said his usage may not be your usage, so what is it going to be doing?

It would replace my Pi which currently runs Prowlarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, OpenVPN, Transmission server, Pi hole and SWAG. Some via docker. Other natively. It mostly serves my media and shares it with a friend. Some transcoding might be needed. Only ever really needs to be able to provide 2 or 3 media streams max.

Maybe I'll just got for an older i3 (10100?) and Mini ITX setup. It will obviously be more versatile and future proof, if a bit more expensive.

 

[Sanchez]

I've been running Unraid for close to a decade now. Started with a Dell T20 (actually have this in the MM *wink*), which worked great for me, but then upgraded to a more powerful machine with more PCI-E slots (the main thing I was limited by).

Just a warning though... Whatever you get, you'll end up wanting more before long, as you start to think "what if I did this", or "wouldn't it be cool if it did that". For example, I've recently just upgraded my dual 1GB onboard NIC to a PCI-E dual 10GB NIC instead... Do I need it? No, not really but I wanted to!

I use mine primarily as a Plex server (and related gubbins for media management etc), but also run pihole, unifi controller, home assistant, tranmission (my torrent client of choice), backup SW (all as docker containers), and a couple of VMs

I work with people who have been using Unraid for a while. They're constantly mentioning new things they have their setup doing. I just know I'll want mine to be able to the same!

 

[Avalon]

It would replace my Pi which currently runs Prowlarr, Sonarr, Jellyfin, OpenVPN, Transmission server, Pi hole and SWAG. Some via docker. Other natively. It mostly serves my media and shares it with a friend. Some transcoding might be needed. Only ever really needs to be able to provide 2 or 3 media streams max.

Maybe I'll just got for an older i3 (10100?) and Mini ITX setup. It will obviously be more versatile and future proof, if a bit more expensive.

At the kind of scale you're talking about, that's probably the sensible option. I quite like the 8th/9th gen for value, but it just depends what comes up.

 

[Sanchez]

At the kind of scale you're talking about, that's probably the sensible option. I quite like the 8th/9th gen for value, but it just depends what comes up.

Thanks for that. I'll take a look around. Hopefully I can pick up something for a decent price.