I’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade the home server and get working on building a new NAS.

Some history first.

My first home “server” was just a windows box I ran headless. I’d RDP in or map the drives from my other computer.  From there I built a freeNAS setup which worked well but I struggled with getting everything working correctly and ended up moving to Ubuntu 14.04.

This has served me well for the past couple years but I feel it’s time to upgrade the hardware and give something new a try!

I decided to go with unRAID this time.

I like unRAID for a few reasons. I dig how easily I can add volumes of any size to the array, and will have some peace of mind running a parity disk. My current server has ZERO redundancy.

I also dig unRAID’s capabilities for hosting VM and passing through hardware. I was inspired by this video where they run a gaming rig in a VM on unRAID. Since I also need to upgrade my audio production machine,  I figured this would be a fun experiment. I’m planning to approach this in a few phases.

Phase 1:

  • Assemble the hardware
  • Install unRAID and mount an array
  • Create user shares
  • Get PLEX running in a Docker Container

Phase 2:

  • Testing Windows 10 VM with FL Studio and NI Audio 2 USB Sound Card.

Phase 3

  • Install hardware upgrades
    • Double RAM
    • 2nd Video Card
    • Add another SSD to the cache pool
  • Fully transition to VM for production!

Here are the parts I’ve ordered!