new unraid build (noob)

Already posted this hardware but posting here to get some more input.

Hello World,

I am building a unraid 6 box. My budget is 500-600$. I am flexible with the budget but want to avoid overkill/overspend.

CPU: i3 6100 (I intend to run to machine 24x7 so picked this chip for its low power consumption)

Motherboard: msi H170M PRO-VDH

RAM: 8G Single DDR4 2133 Patriot

PSU: 500 watt corsair (from existing machine)

Hdd: SanDisk PLUS 240 gb and 2 x WD red 2 TB. (already own the WD red drives)

I plan to run the computer as a NAS and backup my main computer, terminal,couchpotatoe,crashplan, plex (stream to 3-4 clients and transcode to 2 sometimes), win 10 VM and ubuntu VM.

The VM will be to play 4K videos by hooking up to the TV, of course I will throw in a video card at a later stage.

Please give me a reality check if all of this will fit together fine or does something needs changing, also prefer the build to be littlebit future proof.

I'm running an AMD chip with similar performance to an i3, and a single or two 1080p plex streams pins it at 100%. With CPUs, almost all of the CPUs that fit that socket will pull bugger all power on idle, it's the high load power consumption that could be a problem. I'd suggest go with at least a fast i5, maybe even an i7.

Since you're going to be doing at least two steams of transcoding, check your processor's Passmark score, I'd say to run all the stuff you want get at least a 8000 chip as Plex recommends 2000 per transcode.

Are you planning for a Parity drive?  If not, you really should be.  Most folks typically start with 3 drives - 2 data and 1 parity.

And yes, an i3-6100 is underpowered for your requirements.  For unRAID, a few dockers, and a single 1080p Plex transcoding stream I recommend starting with a 4,000 Passmark CPU.  After that plan for another 2,000 Passmarks per additional transcoded 1080p stream depending on your source material and how much transcoding is needed.  So the 6100 could come up a little short just based on Plex usage - and you want to run VMs as well.

You should also plan on at least 16GB if you want to run VMs.

I don't think more than 8GB of RAM is required for VMs necessarily.

It rather depends on what exactly you are planning to do with them.

If you will be running only one VM at a time then 8GB probably will be fine unless you will perform something within that VM that can benefit from large amounts of RAM.

In case you plan to run multiple VMs at the same time or one VM while the server is transcoding streams etc. at the same time, then more than 8GB of RAM is probably required.

I don't like running unRAID 6 with less than 4GB of RAM (though it will), and I personally won't run Win10 with less than 4GB of RAM.  That sounds like it will work on an 8GB machine, but turning on VM support under unRAID chews up a bunch of RAM as it virtualizes the hardware (not sure exactly how much, but not trivial).  So if you only have 8GB and you give Win10 4GB then you're running unRAID with a rather sparse memory allocation... but why?  Life is short, memory is cheap, and go with at least 16GB if you're running "serious" VMs like Win10 - you won't regret it.

yes, RAM is cheap and more RAM usually can't hurt. So get as much as you can afford. 

But I don't see why unRAID itself while not doing anything else than running one VM at a time should utilize more than 2GB of RAM. This would leave 6GB of RAM for the Win10 VM. I am running such a configuration and it runs perfectly fine (engineering sw, games, video editing).

In my opinion one (of the many!) advantages of unRAID is that when used as a the hypervisor layer for running VMs it does need very little resources compared to other systems like Windows Server.

More RAM would be necessary in the other use cases that I mentioned.

What you said is technically correct but not recommended. If you build a machine that is just barely enough then you get a barely enough machine. Running fine doesnt necessarily mean running well.

Gaming, sure, you dont really need that much RAM. Video editing... hm... my 1080p export regularly uses more than 8GB of RAM.

A side note: UnRAID will also use extra RAM if available as cache (dont confuse this with the cache drive) so more RAM will make things more responsive.

Also, the OP wants to run several Dockers.  My system regularly floats at about 2GB for unRAID with Sab, SickRage, Plex, Sonarr and Crashplan.  Sab, SickRage and Plex tend to be pretty well behaved and don't use much memory.  Sonarr seems fatter but well behaved.  Crashplan is definitely fatter and not always well behaved - I've seen 4GB RAM used at times with unRAID and these 5 dockers, though a restart of Docker cleans things up and gets back to around 2GB.  So 2GB may be fine for plain vanilla unRAID but don't forget the Docker requirements in addition to VMs.

I agree with testdasi on caching, by the way.  It's great to be able to copy a few GB of files to unRAID at full network speeds and have unRAID cache it in RAM before flushing to disk.

My server with 8gigs, several dockers (plex and the usual media supporting ones) + a Plex Media Player VM hovers around 45-50% utilization.