Rajahal

Server Part Deals deserves a shoutout in this thread, great source of manufacturer recertified drives, with free 2 day shipping within the continental US. I just ordered two individual drives from them, and they came very well packaged (ESD bag, and very strong custom bubble pack, in individual cardboard boxes, then both packed into a larger cardboard box with additional padding). https://serverpartdeals.com/

Thanks! I looked at the 804 as well, looks like a solid case, but I get the sense that its cooling for the hard drive bays isn't as strong. Have you had any drive temp issues with it? Meshify 2 is looking like the one.

Thank you, I'm afraid that one is out of budget. A decent value for someone who needs hot swap though.

Howdy, I'm contemplating a server facelift, as the old Thermaltake case I'm currently using has some noise/fan rattle issues. My server mostly lives in a closet where airflow can be an issue too, so I would like to improve the airflow for the drives (I have one in particular that sits above 50C most of the time, the rest stay in the 40s). I'm using old hardware and don't see much of a need to update it at the moment, so I'll stick with: - microATX motherboard, CPU has a standard factory heatsink and fan. - 5 HDDs (1 parity, 4 data, and I have another 3 or so spare smaller capacity drives I could add with a PCIe SATA card) - 1 SSD (2.5" SATA) - ATX PSU, can be mounted with fan up or fan down Based on recommendations in these and other forums, I've found these two cases that fit my budget: Meshify 2 - $150 https://www.newegg.com/black-fractal-design-meshify-2-atx-mid-tower/p/11-352-131 Define R5 - $125 https://www.newegg.com/black-fractal-design-define-r5-atx-micro-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811352048 I prefer the look of the R5, but I'm leaning towards the Meshify 2 since it comes with 3 x 140mm fans, whereas the R5 comes with only 1. So assuming I would have to add more fans to the R5, I figure the Meshify 2 is actually about the same price. The Meshify 2 also supports up to 11 x 3.5" drives, whereas the R5 maxes out at 8 x 3.5" drives. I'm fine with a total of 8 drives, that feels like plenty, but storing 'cold swap' drives in the extra drive bays of the Meshify might be nice to help with quick and easy recovery. What do y'all think? Both of these cases get rave reviews so I doubt I'll be disappointed with either. For fun: my 'workhorse' PC is still rocking the Antec P180 from many years back, what a rock solid (and silent!) case that's been. I wish they still made them! Not ideal for unRAID, but I love it nevertheless: https://www.newegg.com/silver-antec-performance-one-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811129154

I'm going through a similar failure recovery, and my server is of a similar vintage (hardware from 2010 - 2012, with only drive upgrades since then). When I first noticed the problem, I found that my server was running, but the dashboard was showing the flash drive had failed (was in read-only mode), and one of my data disks had failed and was being emulated for the past month. I did a backup of the flash drive contents, but much of it was corrupted, so it wasn't helpful. I do have older backups of the flash that I could reference if needed, but thus far I haven't needed to. So while all of this won't apply to your situation, some of this may help you or others who find this post: If prepping a new flash drive for older hardware, keep in mind that you may want an older model flash drive as well. I got the Sandisk Cruzer Glide USB 2.0 which was recommended in these forums. The motherboard I'm using doesn't support USB 3.0, so its a safer bet to use a USB 2.0 flash drive. Also keep in mind that while flashing the new drive, it is very likely that you'll need to uncheck the UEFI box on the drive flashing utility, as many motherboards of that era did not support UEFI. If you are swapping to a modern motherboard, then you probably want UEFI enabled. Either way, you'll have to tell the motherboard to boot from the flash drive, and may need to disable its attempts to boot from the other drives in the system. If you have the ability to grab a screenshot of the server dashboard Main page before powering it down, it is useful to do so, so you can associate the drive serial numbers with their disk assignment slots. If you aren't able to do this, its not a huge deal. When powered up the new server for the first time, if you are using your original flash drive then the disk assignments should be remembered. If you are using a new flash drive, then you will likely be faced with a blank config. If you have a screenshot to reference, you can easily assign the drives to the correct drive slots based on serial number. If you don't, then this is a critical step: DO NOT ASSIGN A PARITY DRIVE This is the biggest potential to lose data. If you accidentally assign a data drive to the parity slot and start a parity build, that data will be lost. If you don't know which is the parity drive(s), the safest bet is to assign drives one by one to the data slots, and make a note of which ones show as valid formatted drives. If the parity drive(s) is assigned to a data slot, unRAID will show it has having an invalid format, and that's your clue that it isn't a data drive. Now in some cases a failed data drive could show up as unformatted as well, so its still best to exercise caution here. If you previously had an array of 5 data drives and 1 parity drive, and through guess-and-check you are able to assign the 5 data drives and they all show up as valid, then you know the final one is the parity drive. If you wind up in a situation where you only had 1 parity drive previously, but more than one drive is showing as unformatted or invalid, then reach out here in the forums for help. You may want to start the array without parity assigned just to confirm the contents of the drives, that your data is all still there. The parity drive is the least important drive in this recovery process, and it should be saved for last in terms of assigning disks. Best of luck! In my case the recovery is going easier than planned. I had bought two new drives to upgrade parity and the failed data drive, in addition to the new flash drive. It turns out that just replacing the flash drive seems to be enough, and the rest of the array is OK after all. I'm still watching that previously flagged 'failed' data disk closely, and I'm ready to swap it out if in fact unRAID flags it again.

https://www.newegg.com/red-wd100efax-10tb/p/N82E16822231546 + $40 off w/ promo code 93XPK57, limited offer Normally $269, comes out to $230 after promo code Limit 2 per customer/account If you don't mind shucking external drives, and don't care about the slightly slower speed, this one is an even better deal: https://www.newegg.com/black-wd-elements-10tb/p/N82E16822234350 10 TB for $190 The best deal that I'm finding today (in terms of price per GB) is the 8 TB version of that external drive: https://www.newegg.com/black-wd-elements-8tb/p/N82E16822234349 8 TB for $140

Edit: Follow the below with caution, I've asked Spaceinvader One to review this to make sure it is correct. I'll update this if he does. Grateful for this thread, as I had the same issue. After watching the Spaceinvader One video linked above, it seemed like switching to the official Plex container was the best and easiest option (that part of the video starts at 13:19, and you don't need to watch the rest). Here's the tricky part for me, which caused much frustration, so I'll spell it out and hope that it helps someone else. On Spaceinvader One's server, he has all of his movies and tv inside a single user share, like this: media > movies media > tv So that's a user shared named 'media', and inside that are folders named 'movies' and 'tv'. Plex sees that as this path: /mnt/user/media/ (so that's the path of a user share in unRAID named 'media', as viewed from Plex's perspective) My shares are organized differently, I have separate user shares for movies and tv, like this: Movies > subfolders containing movies TV > subfolders containing TV shows So Plex sees the path like this: /mnt/user/Movies & /mnt/user/TV Therein lies the problem, I have multiple paths to map to Plex, not just a single 'media' user share. The key to get this to work is in the 'Host Path 3' settings on the new Plex container (not the old LimeTech one). I've attached a screenshot of my settings, I believe this points Plex to all of your user shares, so that in Plex you can then specify Movies vs TV vs whatever for each library. What is also confusing is that Plex will display a file's path as starting with /data, even if you don't have any user shares named 'data'. I thought this was an error, but it seems like that is just how Plex works - you specify what path to point to /data (with the Host Path 3 settings), then internally in Plex it will refer to this path as /data going forward. So for example, my Movies library in Plex shows the path /data/Movies, which looks wrong but is actually correct. You can think of this like a shortcut inside of Plex, anytime Plex writes /data it is actually using the full path that you specified, which in my case is /mnt/user. To effectively, /data/Movies is the same thing as /mnt/user/Movies. Confused yet? Adding to that, if you do end up having to manually remap each of your Plex libraries to the correct folder, as I did, then in Plex you'll look inside the 'data' folder, and find your user shares there. So I think I've got this working. Unfortunately, since I did it wrong the first time (following Spaceinvader One's settings verbatim), Plex added my library full of broken links, so everything was visible but I couldn't play anything. Now that I've fixed it, I'm running a library scan, which should fix all of the broken links. I'm finding some stuff will play and others are broken, but once the scan finishes I believe everything will be back to normal. Annoying, but still better than losing the whole library and starting over.

Newegg: WD Elements 8TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN Black $10 off promo code (requires you to sign up for newsletter): EMCFUVTV2 Similar deal, but the Seagate brand instead: B&H: Seagate 8TB Expansion Desktop USB 3.0 External Hard Drive no promo code needed

Looks nice! How's the noise? The poweredge servers I've worked with have all been pretty loud.

beautiful work! I too am impressed with the Kindle/iPad hack. Have you found that the iPad consumes much more power? I've always wanted to use an e-Ink screen for this type of always on display because it seems like it would be incredibly efficient (and no backlight to add light pollution to a room). I've been thinking about this in relation to a smart mirror type project.

The best 8 TB drive deal got even better: Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive USB 3.0 (STEB8000100) Currently $142.49. I ordered one yesterday, it arrived today, and I just shucked it to reveal an 8 TB Seagate Barracuda Compute ST8000DM004, identical to this one selling for $210. I have one of these already as my parity drive, purchased and shucked a few months ago. Same model as above. The major downside is of course voiding the 1 year warranty by shucking the drive, so there's a gamble there. A more sagacious person would probably run burn in testing on the drive before shucking it, but I'm much too impatient for all that

No longer available

If you want to add a cloud backup component to a few shares on your server (the family photos and truly important stuff), here's a killer deal that makes that an easy process: https://deals.androidauthority.com/sales/zoolz-cloud-storage-lifetime-subscription-2tb expires in 4 days It is a pretty no-frills backup service, but it does support backing up network drives and external hard drives, and doesn't require them to be connected on any sort of schedule (which is a huge limitation of several other cloud backup services). Also supports end to end encryption. Their backbone is Amazon AWS. You will need a Windows or MacOS install as an intermediary between Zoolz cloud and your unRAID share. Presumably you could set that up as a VM on your server, but I'm just using a Windows desktop I have running anyway. A few notes I've found from setting this up myself - the deal includes up to 2 users and 2 computers. While it isn't explicitly stated, it is limited to 1 computer per user. So if you want to backup 2 computers, you just have to create 2 users for yourself (so you'll need a second email address). No big deal, just an annoyance. Also, I'm not sure if the full 2 TB can be used to backup your server. It is split into 1 TB of cold storage (which does work for network shares) and 1 TB of instant (hot) storage. I think the instant storage is for direct uploads through HTTP, which won't really work for this (well, it would as a one time upload, but it would take forever and be rather annoying). Not 100% sure on this point yet. I'll see what happens once I fill my 1 TB of cold storage.

Ah, I see, the NUC is a separate box, I didn't catch that before. So the Roku doesn't support surround sound? That might be a deal breaker for me.

Great, thanks for catching me up! I've used Roku before and liked them, I'm definitely happy with that option. I have a Chromecast already that works well for streaming stuff (Youtube, Netflix, etc), but I figured it wouldn't work as well for this since it is WIFI only, and I didn't want to bog down my network with server traffic. Roku uses Ethernet, so that looks like a better option, as I can contain all of my video traffic within a hardwired section of my LAN. The i3 540 in my test system has a passmark score of 2694, so it sounds like that's the one I should be working with. And according to Biostar the H55A+ motherboard supports up to 16 GB of RAM, so I'm happy to throw more RAM in there. I only plan to stream to a single TV. With your setup, is PMP (which I assume stands for Plex Media Player?) running in Docker or on a VM? I might just try to copy your setup for now, and play with it as I learn more.