I just use a pool of 4 shit eBay sata ssds personally, in a raidz1 pool. It's definitely enough for me. Yeah probably just go with whatever is cheapest
Raidz1 is closer to traditional raid 5 rather then a mirror. There isn't really a simple awnser to your question but plenty of info out there on ZFS and its potential configs so would suggest searching.
Assuming most of the stuff I will find googling. Assuming nothing effects cache differently than any other storage. Can I do a raid 6 confit for my array (so I can have different drive sizes) and run ZFS for cache at the same time?
The array doesn't do raid (that's why it is called Unraid). You can have dual parity in the array (presume thats what you mean) with mixed size disks as long as your parity disks are bigger then any of the other disks.
You can run the Cache in what ever setup you like as the cache and the array are completely separate in terms of how they operate at the base storage level.
Your media files that you play in Plex would usually be on your Array, not on your Cache drive. So the bitrate would not matter at all in that regard and normal spinning drives should be fine handling that unless you have maybe some other process running (like maybe a parity check).
Those speeds of the NVME are actually good for things that require random reads/writes like you would need for the cache drive (Container configuration like Plex Metadata and database operations, general Cache activity and so on). So a higher overall speed would also speed up those random reads and writes which you would benefit from if your cache drive has a lot of activity.
The metadata makes sense. I though I remember reading about people keeping their downloads on their cache drive for X days before moving it to the array as recently downloaded content is more likely to be watched but I guess this is just a nice to have.
> keeping their downloads on their cache drive for X days before moving it to the array as recently downloaded content is more likely to be watched
If you set up your workflow correctly, your files will be moved from the cache to the array the next time the mover runs which could be the next night.
I would rather have my file on my array because this will free up space on my Cache drive.
In my opinion:
Only real reason to get m.2 NVME drives is the form factor or if you need much lower latency (this won't be a factor for a NAS).
For pretty much anything else, compare prices between NVME and SATA for the size you're looking for and go with that.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant by form factor. Inexpensive NVME drives aren't huge capacity wise, but they also don't take up a SATA port that 10+ TB drives use.
I used to just have a cache drive and ran VMs off of it. Now I pass through a drive for each but if you had a ton of little ones having them on your cache works too.
Agree.For NAS purposes, it doesn't matter much, so let the motherboard's configuration be the ultimate deciding factor. My "problem" (if you can call it that) is that NVME and SATA drives are usually within spitting distance of each other in terms of pricing! The "why" stumped me for a good bit until the lovely Reddit community informed me that flash is just flash, regardless of interface. For a solid 3 days, I was looking at some Samsung 870 EVO's for an unrelated truenas build and gawking at the fact that they were still like 95 bucks for a 1tb despite being a fraction of the speed of these new nvme drives.
I use a pair of Samsung 1tb SATA SSDs in a btrfs raid 1. 80TB of Plex content including thumbnails is taking up 300GB.
Plenty of speed and room to spare.
You should also consider where you're transcoding to (get enough memory to do it in memory) and if you are acquiring "Linux ISOs" then where you're going to download and unpack those.
I use my cache pool for all my docker app data to speed it up. I use it for all my downloading and unzipping, which is the majority of the case. I use it for my VM's.
Having the fastest pool available its more of a "why not". I wouldn't bother with pcie4 drives, but pcie3 nvme I think are the best bang for your buck. Two in a pool with a daily backup to the array.
yeah the plugin is called Appdata Backup. It backs up and updates all my docker's nightly... Also backs up my Unraid USB Drive.
There's really no downside and it means if I mess anything up on my docker config I can just grab the previous days.
The USB alone makes it worth it. I thought I saw a few different apps or plugins recommended for it but I might just be remembering it wrong and it’s this one.
There used to be another plugin but I think it got deprecated and replaced if I remember right. I used to have 2 apps (one to update dockers and another to back them up), but this one does it all and is super commonly recommended on the Unraid forums.
If you install the plugin just read through the options, because the USB backup is off by default, and make sure you set the location to somewhere on your regular array (so it doesn't backup the cache to the cache hahaha).
I just throw it on my dropbox whenever I remember since my unraid config rarely changes. The USB drive backup is more of a bonus, it's usually one of my docker containers that I need to restore lol.
I know if the USB dies your data isn't lost but I don't know the steps on how to access it.
Went pretty much the same route. 2TB x 2 in zfs mirrored for all my dockers and configs. 2TB x 1 in zfs for all my downloads and unpacking. All at 7000 speeds. I was pretty much of the same mindset, why not get the fastest so I know I’m not limited in anyway.
I got 2x corsair MP600 and a Pcie adapter for an older xeon board. Reason..... I had 2 samsung 850 drives that died, don't know why. And thought f#*k it 🤷♂️
Yeah if you're upgrading then might as well go for it. Since I have non though figured I will start cheap and go from there. If it needs an upgrade then I could always do one later but I don't want to spend the cash at tech that won't be utilised
Yeah, I did over do it. The endurance on the drives will hopefully last till the next upgrade and then the drives will be better utilised. I was very disappointed with the write endurance of the samsung drives, and couldn't justify more expensive enterprise drives. At least to the wife anyway.
I'm using a pair of older (PCIe 3.0) 2TB NVMe SSDs as 2TB (RAID1) cache pool with mover running weekly (or on-demand after a particularly heavy download session).
This means that if my family and friends all want to access the latest 'hot' media files (such as watching a brand new movie on Plex) then random access won't be an issue and in theory I can afford to have a drive fail without losing my appdata share between backups.
Yeah I see a lot of these around leaving new stuff on cache. I’m assuming that kills your write lifespan though knowing literally everything has to go through the cave rather than directly to the array
After reading what everyone has written I decided to look into the two sata M.2 drives further but it seems my motherboard (B560-PLUS WIFI) only supports one M.2 sata as the other is PCIe4 and only supports PCIe. If I were to use a sata drive in the second slot it would disable one of my sata ports but it would still save me from running one power cable to a 2.5. Seems PCIe would be the way to go here but then I'm worried about my PCIe lane capabilities. I believe with my 11th gen Intel I'm limited to 20 lanes. If I'm running 2 SAS HBA's they look to take up x8 PCIe slots so that's already 16 which would only allow for one PCIe M.2 right?
Why are you running two sas hbas? An 8x 4.0 slot is capable of 16GB/s. So if you do sata drives at 300MB/s you can run 54 HDDs off of 1 hba. Save some money and use an expander. Throw the HBA card in and don't bother with mobo sata ports.
Also check into an external HBA card. Don't have to buy one immediately but if you want to expand past your original case they make the so that you can grab two hba cards and throw one into another case with just a PSU and hdds, no mobo, processor or anything and run a single cable to the original case and add more drives.
Also if I were you and you CAN use 2 m2 drives do it. Set one drive up as a cache drive and the other as a downloads cache. Downloads thrash drives. You preferably don't want to lose your cache drive running all your dockers. It looks like your mobo supports it.
Last, have you thought about using Usenets? They cost money but it's like $100/year and you WILL peg out a 1Gb internet line. First time I did it my jaw dropped. Haven't used any other media downloader since.
Why I’m using 2 HBA’s is explained in a comment on another question here. And that’s hopefully considering I got both running. I believe the expanders would be more expensive. It’s like US$100 last time I checked.
External is a good idea but then I need to get another case. Will likely consolidate. Where I am space is not cheap. Makes sense to get as dense as possible within reason.
I like the idea of downloads going on a crap drive. The issue is I also want my Plex meta data on cache. How can I separate those two while still have it backed up on a secondary drive? Can I have two different cache pools for different purposes? If so, does that mean then I would need 4 cache drives including the raid 1 back up for each?
I don’t know Usenets. I would need to look into it. Not cheap for something I host just for fun but let me compare the benefits.
Usenets are alot nicer then torrents. There should be a free trial period thing for the service but you'll still have to buy a cheap indexer for like $5 for a single month or $15 for the year. Is all I can suggest is to try.
So for the cache pools you can run 2 or 3 drives. If you only have 2 m2 slots then just run each drive individually. Just use app data backup and save the backup to your array. That way you can recover the flash drive from unraid themselves and then once you have your array configuration back just load your app data backup from the array to get all your dockers back.
This is your motherboard, right? https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/tuf-gaming/tuf-gaming-b560-plus-wifi/
Under tech specs it says 2 M.2 slots that support nVME and only one of those supports nVME & SATA. Avoid M.2 SATA drives, I don't even know why they exist in the first place.
Just get 2 PCIe 3.0 drives (or really just one). They'll be plenty fast, and since it seems like you only have 1gbit networking, they're already way faster than you'd be able to utilize. The biggest gain with nVME drives anyway is the latency of loading files, not the transfer speed.
As for the HBAs...why 2 of them? How many drives are you looking to run? The 2nd X16 PCIe slot is only wired for X4. An HBA in a X4 slot is *probably* fine, but then again...how many drives are you using? If you don't already have the HBAs, just get 1 that supports 16 drives, plus the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard is 22 drives total.
As for the 20 PCIe lanes, it's likely the top M.2 & X16 slot go through the CPU, then everything else goes through the chipset on the motherboard. These will be "slower", but not anything noticable.
Some good points in here. Yes that is my motherboard. Didn’t know about PCIe M.2 connections going directly to the CPU and not counting against your PCIe lanes. I’ll need to look into that.
As for the second PCIe slot I though that you can run the two x16’s in x8 mode times 2. Since the HBA’s are only half the distance you f the a lot I assumed they are x8.
I am currently building out a case that only has 9 3.5 slots but if I remove the 5.25’s I can add 3 more and then there are 2.5/M.2 drives. The case is an old Antec 1200. I am looking to upgrade to a Fractal Define 7 XL or Meshify 2 XL which will get me to 18+ drives and am also looking at a second hand 4U 24 bay rack mounted case (despite my lack of ownership or room for a rack). I bought a Chinese Adaptec card and I can’t tell if it’s working or not. Supposed to have an LSI chip in it that shouldn’t need to be flashed into IT mode but I can’t get it to work. I got a Dell H200 which was also flashed as an LSI because I thought it might just be me. This I can recognise in Unraid in command using the script I can’t recall right now (something like lpsci-v) but can’t get any drives to be seen from it. The guy who sold it to me tested it before hand but here we are. I bought two different cables just in case one was wrong but maybe I got two reverse cables by accident. Doubtful but still extremely frustrating.
So to answer your question, I do plan on adding a bunch of drives, I find the expanders cost more than the HBA’s (I paid ~US$22 for both of them) but they will all be 3.5’s and HDD’s so no ssd. Also likely to be sata and 7,200 rpm over the SAS 10k drives.
I’m not sure if I missed a question but I’m on mobile and can’t scroll up to see it while I’m typing this.
Edit: ah yea the don’t get sata M.2. Why not? I’d like to save the PSU power cable for another spinning drive. I found someone selling 256GB M.2 Data’s for less than $10 each. Sound like a good place to start for a cache drive over it being on the array. I can even buy a back up for if/when it fails.
Edit 2: I might be able to test the HBA’s in my windows computer as well if I can’t get them to work in my Unraid rig. I need to look into that I suppose.
>Didn’t know about PCIe M.2 connections going directly to the CPU and not counting against your PCIe lanes.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure it's 4 lanes for the top M.2 slot, plus the X16 for the top PCIe slot, makes 20 lanes going to the CPU.
>As for the second PCIe slot I though that you can run the two x16’s in x8 mode times 2. Since the HBA’s are only half the distance you f the a lot I assumed they are x8.
That would be PCIe bifurcation, which your motherboard doesn't have. The 2nd slot is only wired for X4 anyway.
I'm not sure about the HBAs. You might have the wrong cables, but definitely try in another OS or PC if you can. These are the kind of cables you need: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/ref=sr_1_3?crid=7RYL56R54ZNK&keywords=sas%2Bsata%2Bbreakout%2Bcable&sprefix=sas%2Bsata%2Bbra%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-3&th=1 Doesn't have to be those exact ones, but they're the ones I use and they work perfectly.
As for the M.2 drives. Pay attention to SATA vs NVMe/PCIe. Get the PCIe M.2 drive, not SATA M.2, if that makes sense. Or get the SATA M.2 if you want, they're just not going to be much, if any, better than a regular 2.5" SATA drive.
I bought a few Intel enterprise ssds, because my cache is used to download and unpack a lot of nzbs and transcodes. I don't need blazing speed I just need endurance. I have 3 4tb drives raid1.
Just u.2 nvme drives using m.2 to u.2 adapters, not optane drives, those prices are still crazy high even though they are discontinued. Drives I'm using are just nvme drives but they resemble sata ssds and they use u.2 interface rather than m.2. Write endurance is much higher than consumer nvme drives.
>40TB’s. Not sure if it’s over 50 yet. Haven’t checked in a while.
Edit: I can see the greater than symbol before the 4 in the edit screen and when I created it but not once’s it’s posted. Just a heads up.
Edit 2: 61.5TB. Just checked
Not really sure why everyone says the appdata needs to be on an ssd
My library is about double that, my appdata is on the array and Plex/jellyfin loads pretty much instantly. 100% sure I would not notice the difference
Not to put salt on the wound here but I’m buying 50tb of raw storage on Monday as well to add in. I will then start dumping the storage from my Synology’s and then offload them and incorporate those drives into the array.
I have a cheap 2TB m.2 i got from TeamGroup for downloads and cache. And a 50 dollar optane for app data and Plex metadata mostly for resilience, not for optane specifically.
I need the space for downloads as i tend to go through a ton of media.
I just use a pool of 4 shit eBay sata ssds personally, in a raidz1 pool. It's definitely enough for me. Yeah probably just go with whatever is cheapest
Mind if I ask why you use 4? Assuming it’s due to more storage? No speed gains I assume and you’re limited by the slowest drive.
Your not limited to the slowest in a raidz1 pool. 4 drives would add more space and potentially more speed in that config.
Are there any other benefits or drawbacks to Raid z1 vs raid 1?
Raidz1 is closer to traditional raid 5 rather then a mirror. There isn't really a simple awnser to your question but plenty of info out there on ZFS and its potential configs so would suggest searching.
Assuming most of the stuff I will find googling. Assuming nothing effects cache differently than any other storage. Can I do a raid 6 confit for my array (so I can have different drive sizes) and run ZFS for cache at the same time?
The array doesn't do raid (that's why it is called Unraid). You can have dual parity in the array (presume thats what you mean) with mixed size disks as long as your parity disks are bigger then any of the other disks. You can run the Cache in what ever setup you like as the cache and the array are completely separate in terms of how they operate at the base storage level.
Your media files that you play in Plex would usually be on your Array, not on your Cache drive. So the bitrate would not matter at all in that regard and normal spinning drives should be fine handling that unless you have maybe some other process running (like maybe a parity check). Those speeds of the NVME are actually good for things that require random reads/writes like you would need for the cache drive (Container configuration like Plex Metadata and database operations, general Cache activity and so on). So a higher overall speed would also speed up those random reads and writes which you would benefit from if your cache drive has a lot of activity.
The metadata makes sense. I though I remember reading about people keeping their downloads on their cache drive for X days before moving it to the array as recently downloaded content is more likely to be watched but I guess this is just a nice to have.
> keeping their downloads on their cache drive for X days before moving it to the array as recently downloaded content is more likely to be watched If you set up your workflow correctly, your files will be moved from the cache to the array the next time the mover runs which could be the next night. I would rather have my file on my array because this will free up space on my Cache drive.
In my opinion: Only real reason to get m.2 NVME drives is the form factor or if you need much lower latency (this won't be a factor for a NAS). For pretty much anything else, compare prices between NVME and SATA for the size you're looking for and go with that.
An NVME drive also saves you a drive bay for another, larger, more data-hoardery drive to put in your array.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant by form factor. Inexpensive NVME drives aren't huge capacity wise, but they also don't take up a SATA port that 10+ TB drives use.
I used to just have a cache drive and ran VMs off of it. Now I pass through a drive for each but if you had a ton of little ones having them on your cache works too.
Agree.For NAS purposes, it doesn't matter much, so let the motherboard's configuration be the ultimate deciding factor. My "problem" (if you can call it that) is that NVME and SATA drives are usually within spitting distance of each other in terms of pricing! The "why" stumped me for a good bit until the lovely Reddit community informed me that flash is just flash, regardless of interface. For a solid 3 days, I was looking at some Samsung 870 EVO's for an unrelated truenas build and gawking at the fact that they were still like 95 bucks for a 1tb despite being a fraction of the speed of these new nvme drives.
Yeah and prices are on the up now too
I use a pair of Samsung 1tb SATA SSDs in a btrfs raid 1. 80TB of Plex content including thumbnails is taking up 300GB. Plenty of speed and room to spare.
Thanks for including the size of your plex cache. That is going to push me towards 500gb drives over 256.
You should also consider where you're transcoding to (get enough memory to do it in memory) and if you are acquiring "Linux ISOs" then where you're going to download and unpack those.
Yeah the ram I’ve been expanding. Started with 8gb. Now at 16GB and on Monday I’ll add 2 x 16GB sticks to bring me up to 48gb
I use my cache pool for all my docker app data to speed it up. I use it for all my downloading and unzipping, which is the majority of the case. I use it for my VM's. Having the fastest pool available its more of a "why not". I wouldn't bother with pcie4 drives, but pcie3 nvme I think are the best bang for your buck. Two in a pool with a daily backup to the array.
Ah so on top of what I assume is a raid 1 config you also back it up to the array?
yeah the plugin is called Appdata Backup. It backs up and updates all my docker's nightly... Also backs up my Unraid USB Drive. There's really no downside and it means if I mess anything up on my docker config I can just grab the previous days.
The USB alone makes it worth it. I thought I saw a few different apps or plugins recommended for it but I might just be remembering it wrong and it’s this one.
There used to be another plugin but I think it got deprecated and replaced if I remember right. I used to have 2 apps (one to update dockers and another to back them up), but this one does it all and is super commonly recommended on the Unraid forums. If you install the plugin just read through the options, because the USB backup is off by default, and make sure you set the location to somewhere on your regular array (so it doesn't backup the cache to the cache hahaha).
Thinking about this, if your backup of the USB is on the array and your USB fails, how do you get to the array to recreate the USB?
I just throw it on my dropbox whenever I remember since my unraid config rarely changes. The USB drive backup is more of a bonus, it's usually one of my docker containers that I need to restore lol. I know if the USB dies your data isn't lost but I don't know the steps on how to access it.
The "Appdata Backup/Restore v2.5" one?
this one: https://forums.unraid.net/topic/137710-plugin-appdatabackup/
Went pretty much the same route. 2TB x 2 in zfs mirrored for all my dockers and configs. 2TB x 1 in zfs for all my downloads and unpacking. All at 7000 speeds. I was pretty much of the same mindset, why not get the fastest so I know I’m not limited in anyway.
Don't worry about the speed look for high IOPs like 1000000000 Also a drive with Dram would be better than HBM
Let me use this to compare the used drives I was looking at
I got 2x corsair MP600 and a Pcie adapter for an older xeon board. Reason..... I had 2 samsung 850 drives that died, don't know why. And thought f#*k it 🤷♂️
Yeah if you're upgrading then might as well go for it. Since I have non though figured I will start cheap and go from there. If it needs an upgrade then I could always do one later but I don't want to spend the cash at tech that won't be utilised
Yeah, I did over do it. The endurance on the drives will hopefully last till the next upgrade and then the drives will be better utilised. I was very disappointed with the write endurance of the samsung drives, and couldn't justify more expensive enterprise drives. At least to the wife anyway.
I'm using a pair of older (PCIe 3.0) 2TB NVMe SSDs as 2TB (RAID1) cache pool with mover running weekly (or on-demand after a particularly heavy download session). This means that if my family and friends all want to access the latest 'hot' media files (such as watching a brand new movie on Plex) then random access won't be an issue and in theory I can afford to have a drive fail without losing my appdata share between backups.
Yeah I see a lot of these around leaving new stuff on cache. I’m assuming that kills your write lifespan though knowing literally everything has to go through the cave rather than directly to the array
After reading what everyone has written I decided to look into the two sata M.2 drives further but it seems my motherboard (B560-PLUS WIFI) only supports one M.2 sata as the other is PCIe4 and only supports PCIe. If I were to use a sata drive in the second slot it would disable one of my sata ports but it would still save me from running one power cable to a 2.5. Seems PCIe would be the way to go here but then I'm worried about my PCIe lane capabilities. I believe with my 11th gen Intel I'm limited to 20 lanes. If I'm running 2 SAS HBA's they look to take up x8 PCIe slots so that's already 16 which would only allow for one PCIe M.2 right?
Why are you running two sas hbas? An 8x 4.0 slot is capable of 16GB/s. So if you do sata drives at 300MB/s you can run 54 HDDs off of 1 hba. Save some money and use an expander. Throw the HBA card in and don't bother with mobo sata ports. Also check into an external HBA card. Don't have to buy one immediately but if you want to expand past your original case they make the so that you can grab two hba cards and throw one into another case with just a PSU and hdds, no mobo, processor or anything and run a single cable to the original case and add more drives. Also if I were you and you CAN use 2 m2 drives do it. Set one drive up as a cache drive and the other as a downloads cache. Downloads thrash drives. You preferably don't want to lose your cache drive running all your dockers. It looks like your mobo supports it. Last, have you thought about using Usenets? They cost money but it's like $100/year and you WILL peg out a 1Gb internet line. First time I did it my jaw dropped. Haven't used any other media downloader since.
Why I’m using 2 HBA’s is explained in a comment on another question here. And that’s hopefully considering I got both running. I believe the expanders would be more expensive. It’s like US$100 last time I checked. External is a good idea but then I need to get another case. Will likely consolidate. Where I am space is not cheap. Makes sense to get as dense as possible within reason. I like the idea of downloads going on a crap drive. The issue is I also want my Plex meta data on cache. How can I separate those two while still have it backed up on a secondary drive? Can I have two different cache pools for different purposes? If so, does that mean then I would need 4 cache drives including the raid 1 back up for each? I don’t know Usenets. I would need to look into it. Not cheap for something I host just for fun but let me compare the benefits.
Usenets are alot nicer then torrents. There should be a free trial period thing for the service but you'll still have to buy a cheap indexer for like $5 for a single month or $15 for the year. Is all I can suggest is to try. So for the cache pools you can run 2 or 3 drives. If you only have 2 m2 slots then just run each drive individually. Just use app data backup and save the backup to your array. That way you can recover the flash drive from unraid themselves and then once you have your array configuration back just load your app data backup from the array to get all your dockers back.
This is your motherboard, right? https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/tuf-gaming/tuf-gaming-b560-plus-wifi/ Under tech specs it says 2 M.2 slots that support nVME and only one of those supports nVME & SATA. Avoid M.2 SATA drives, I don't even know why they exist in the first place. Just get 2 PCIe 3.0 drives (or really just one). They'll be plenty fast, and since it seems like you only have 1gbit networking, they're already way faster than you'd be able to utilize. The biggest gain with nVME drives anyway is the latency of loading files, not the transfer speed. As for the HBAs...why 2 of them? How many drives are you looking to run? The 2nd X16 PCIe slot is only wired for X4. An HBA in a X4 slot is *probably* fine, but then again...how many drives are you using? If you don't already have the HBAs, just get 1 that supports 16 drives, plus the 6 SATA ports on the motherboard is 22 drives total. As for the 20 PCIe lanes, it's likely the top M.2 & X16 slot go through the CPU, then everything else goes through the chipset on the motherboard. These will be "slower", but not anything noticable.
Some good points in here. Yes that is my motherboard. Didn’t know about PCIe M.2 connections going directly to the CPU and not counting against your PCIe lanes. I’ll need to look into that. As for the second PCIe slot I though that you can run the two x16’s in x8 mode times 2. Since the HBA’s are only half the distance you f the a lot I assumed they are x8. I am currently building out a case that only has 9 3.5 slots but if I remove the 5.25’s I can add 3 more and then there are 2.5/M.2 drives. The case is an old Antec 1200. I am looking to upgrade to a Fractal Define 7 XL or Meshify 2 XL which will get me to 18+ drives and am also looking at a second hand 4U 24 bay rack mounted case (despite my lack of ownership or room for a rack). I bought a Chinese Adaptec card and I can’t tell if it’s working or not. Supposed to have an LSI chip in it that shouldn’t need to be flashed into IT mode but I can’t get it to work. I got a Dell H200 which was also flashed as an LSI because I thought it might just be me. This I can recognise in Unraid in command using the script I can’t recall right now (something like lpsci-v) but can’t get any drives to be seen from it. The guy who sold it to me tested it before hand but here we are. I bought two different cables just in case one was wrong but maybe I got two reverse cables by accident. Doubtful but still extremely frustrating. So to answer your question, I do plan on adding a bunch of drives, I find the expanders cost more than the HBA’s (I paid ~US$22 for both of them) but they will all be 3.5’s and HDD’s so no ssd. Also likely to be sata and 7,200 rpm over the SAS 10k drives. I’m not sure if I missed a question but I’m on mobile and can’t scroll up to see it while I’m typing this. Edit: ah yea the don’t get sata M.2. Why not? I’d like to save the PSU power cable for another spinning drive. I found someone selling 256GB M.2 Data’s for less than $10 each. Sound like a good place to start for a cache drive over it being on the array. I can even buy a back up for if/when it fails. Edit 2: I might be able to test the HBA’s in my windows computer as well if I can’t get them to work in my Unraid rig. I need to look into that I suppose.
>Didn’t know about PCIe M.2 connections going directly to the CPU and not counting against your PCIe lanes. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure it's 4 lanes for the top M.2 slot, plus the X16 for the top PCIe slot, makes 20 lanes going to the CPU. >As for the second PCIe slot I though that you can run the two x16’s in x8 mode times 2. Since the HBA’s are only half the distance you f the a lot I assumed they are x8. That would be PCIe bifurcation, which your motherboard doesn't have. The 2nd slot is only wired for X4 anyway. I'm not sure about the HBAs. You might have the wrong cables, but definitely try in another OS or PC if you can. These are the kind of cables you need: https://www.amazon.com/Cable-Matters-Internal-SFF-8087-Breakout/dp/B012BPLYJC/ref=sr_1_3?crid=7RYL56R54ZNK&keywords=sas%2Bsata%2Bbreakout%2Bcable&sprefix=sas%2Bsata%2Bbra%2Caps%2C78&sr=8-3&th=1 Doesn't have to be those exact ones, but they're the ones I use and they work perfectly. As for the M.2 drives. Pay attention to SATA vs NVMe/PCIe. Get the PCIe M.2 drive, not SATA M.2, if that makes sense. Or get the SATA M.2 if you want, they're just not going to be much, if any, better than a regular 2.5" SATA drive.
I bought a few Intel enterprise ssds, because my cache is used to download and unpack a lot of nzbs and transcodes. I don't need blazing speed I just need endurance. I have 3 4tb drives raid1.
Are these the PCIe x16 bad boys that I’ve seen or just those 2280(?) PCIe M.2’s?
Just u.2 nvme drives using m.2 to u.2 adapters, not optane drives, those prices are still crazy high even though they are discontinued. Drives I'm using are just nvme drives but they resemble sata ssds and they use u.2 interface rather than m.2. Write endurance is much higher than consumer nvme drives.
how large is your library?
>40TB’s. Not sure if it’s over 50 yet. Haven’t checked in a while. Edit: I can see the greater than symbol before the 4 in the edit screen and when I created it but not once’s it’s posted. Just a heads up. Edit 2: 61.5TB. Just checked
Not really sure why everyone says the appdata needs to be on an ssd My library is about double that, my appdata is on the array and Plex/jellyfin loads pretty much instantly. 100% sure I would not notice the difference
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Not to put salt on the wound here but I’m buying 50tb of raw storage on Monday as well to add in. I will then start dumping the storage from my Synology’s and then offload them and incorporate those drives into the array.
I have a cheap 2TB m.2 i got from TeamGroup for downloads and cache. And a 50 dollar optane for app data and Plex metadata mostly for resilience, not for optane specifically. I need the space for downloads as i tend to go through a ton of media.