wayner Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 I am building a new unRAID system to act as a media server in my home. The primary application is to run as a file server and a SageTV server – I will be using the unRAID/Docker version of SageTV. I will also be installing the Dockers for Plex and AirVideoHD but this will be used much less frequently. I will also want to install Ubuntu in a VM and WHS2011 in a VM which I will continue to use for backups of the Windows PC on my LAN. I may be doing some transcoding from time to time as I may use Handbrake to re-encode recorded TV files. And I may want another VM or two to play around with other OSes from time to time. For hard drives I am likely going to buy a new 4TB to use as a parity drive and recycle 3 x 3TB (or similar size) hard drives. I would then likely use one or two 128GB SSDs as cache drives. I would be sure to have my SageTV appdata on this partition to make sure that it runs as quickly as possible. I can recycle the components mentioned above. Will they be suitable? One potential negative is that the mobo only has 2x6Gbps SATA and 4x3Gbps SATA. But if I want more drives it should be easy to add a PCIe SATA controller. Is 16GB enough memory for this system? I currently have 2x4GB sticks in the system and I was going to add 8GB more, although I guess I could go to 24GB by adding 2x8GB. Is mixing RAM sizes an issue? I don’t think it is as long as the specs like timing are the same, or am I wrong here? Anyone have any experience in using this mobo or a similar Asus mobo for unRAID? Anything to be aware of in the UEFI/BIOS settings for virtualization? Anyone know if the mobo’s firewire port would work in unRAID for channel tuning in the SageTV Docker? I read somewhere that there are benefits to using two cache drives – why is that? Here are some of the CPU specs. Do I need the VM stuff that this CPU does not support? Intel® Turbo Boost Technology ‡ 2.0 Intel® vPro Technology ‡ No Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology ‡ No Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) ‡ Yes Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) ‡ No Intel® VT-x with Extended Page Tables (EPT) ‡ Yes Intel® 64 ‡ Yes Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 Hi - A few answers, but I don't have experience with that Motherboard. - Your plan for the hard drives makes sense. - Your plan for the SSD(s) makes sense. There are two reasons for implementing a pool of cache devices - increasing the size of the pool and redundancy. The default when you add a 2nd cache device is Raid 1ish pool (two copies of your data). - 16GB sounds fine for unRAID, some Dockers, and a VM or two. It sounds like you'd like to be able to run several VMs, though, and it could be light for that. There's a lot of overhead to account for. - Only having VT-x means that you can't do hardware pass-through. Your VMs will have to run headless, accessed via RDP or VNC. So good for server type functions but you won't be passing in a GPU, for instance. Quote Link to comment
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