UnRAID gurus help please

krooton · 29 Jun 2019 at 19:27

Background:

I have been using a Synology DS215j for storage and media duties for a number of years, but I have started to encounter issues with Plex and it is too weak to transcode.

My idea was to re-purpose my old desktop (2700k) to be my NAS and Plex server for transcoding purposes. I don't have multiple streams, so at most it would need to handle a single 4k.

UnRAID was recommended to me, as I ideally would like to keep my storage drives in NTFS and be able to dual-boot in to Win10 on the machine when needed (I will be adding a decent graphics card next year for Cyberpunk 2077 as my laptop will not cut it for that). It is annoying that Synology's file system can't be read in Windows, so I am currently copying everything over the network to a new drive in the machine.

I will be using the 4TB and 1TB WD Reds in my Synology, along with a new WD 2TB.

So the machine will be:

32gb USB for UnRAID
4TB parity drive
2TB and 1TB as storage drives
250GB SSD as cache
250gb SSD for Windows 10 dual-boot

Now looking more in to UnRAID, it looks like I will have to format all the storage drives to a different filesystem for it to work, which I was hoping to avoid, especially as I don't have a way to keep all my data when doing so.

It seems like I could keep the 1TB in NTFS and use Unassigned Device to let UnRAID see it, but all my data is clocking 1.7TB, so if I need to format the 4 and 2TB drives to work in UnRAID, I can't keep all my data.

Is there anything I can do to make this work?

The only thing I can think of is to sacrifice a bunch of data to get stuff down to fit on the 1TB, install the UnRAID array with the other drives, add the 1TB and copy back on to the 2TB.

Halp!

BigT · 30 Jun 2019 at 11:27

Do you have decent internet and access to any cloud storage? You could copy off to that before bringing it back into Unraid. Would take a while though.

Also you could build Unraid to begin with without parity. Copy all your data onto the 4TB disk with a USB SATA adapter or something, install Unraid with just the 2TB and no parity, copy data over to Unraid (so now on the 2TB disk) and then add the 4TB into Unraid machine as a parity disk.

As for Windows dual booting, I’d be tempted instead to look into having Windows as a VM in Unraid with GPU passthrough. I don’t do this but reading around lots do for gaming. You can store the VM on your SSD cache drive easily enough and it will have access to all the Unraid shares too since it still running, unlike if you dual boot.

bremen1874 · 30 Jun 2019 at 12:17

Given what you’ve said so far what’s your backup plan for this data? You don’t appear to have one.

krooton · 30 Jun 2019 at 16:57

bremen1874 said:
Given what you’ve said so far what’s your backup plan for this data? You don’t appear to have one.

I don't have one, hence the appeal of some parity.

The super important things I back up to an external USB drive from time to time, which is 1tb.

Any way, I decided to sacrifice the TV shows and films as I can always get them again, and saved the rest to the spare drive and the external. Now 17% in to building the new array, woohoo.

krooton · 30 Jun 2019 at 17:00

BigT said:
As for Windows dual booting, I’d be tempted instead to look into having Windows as a VM in Unraid with GPU passthrough. I don’t do this but reading around lots do for gaming. You can store the VM on your SSD cache drive easily enough and it will have access to all the Unraid shares too since it still running, unlike if you dual boot.

Cheers, I'll look in to that, would deffo need to upgrade to 16gb ram in that case.
I just assumed running Windows from a vm and gaming would see a performance hit, and I don't mind the nas being offline whilst I'm gaming, it will literally be just for Cyberpunk.