Now that I've got unRAID up & running I thought it would be interesting to run some benchmarks so I could determine what kind of speed to expect. I have purchased a gigabit switch and cat6a ethernet cables for wiring everything up so this as fast as I can get for now. The program I used to run these benchmarks is called 'CrystalDiskMark'. This is with two WD Red 3TB drives with one acting as a parity disk.
I don't think that's too bad considering I don't have a cache device set up yet. Still slower than my desktop mechanical drive for both sequential read and write speeds but I doubt I will notice the difference when it comes to real world usage - Hopefully anyway. Parity certainly had more of an impact on the speeds than I would have liked. My internal 1TB WD Blue mechanical drive clocked the below speeds. Much faster for sequential reads and writes but a hell of lot slower for the 4k metrics.
I'll probably revisit this in the future when I set up my cache device.
I decided it would be best to invest some more money into my microserver rather than trying to struggle through with the limited resources available in the server itself. I also needed some hard drives to full up the drive bays for my NAS.
What did I buy?
2 x 3TB WD Red NAS drives
1 x 2 Port SATA Controller
3 x Cat6a ethernet cables
2 x 8GB ECC DDR3 RAM
The NAS drives will obviously going into the bays available at the front of the server so I can set up my NAS. As I only have two drives at the moment this means the array will only have 3TB usable space due to the parity disk. Realistically that is all I need to start with as my media collection is only about that large at the moment. The SATA controller card I bought because the internal SATA connector only runs at SATA I speeds while this PCI card runs at SATA III. This will be used to connect up my cache devices if I ever get around to implementing that.
The requirements for running unRAID are pretty minimal compared to FreeNAS with unRAID only requiring about 1GB of RAM if you have the intention of running it as a pure NAS system. However once you start playing around with containers and virtualising machines you will understandably get tight on resources. With that in mind I decided it would be best to upgrade to 16GB RAM which is the most this machine will accept. This didn't come cheap at about €160 for the two stick set - ECC RAM is bloody expensive.
Lastly I decided to invest in some decent cat6a cables for connecting up my server and desktop to the network. I've been running on cat5e cables for quite a long time because in all honesty I just had no requirement for the additional benefits in cat6 cables. Now that I will be regularly transferring files to and from the NAS I felt the requirement for additional cable bandwidth.
