our new home server

This website is hosted on our family server. it runs unraid, an amazing linux OS. It allows you to assemble random hard drives you already own and pool them, like a raid, only flexible. You simply need each drive to be smaller than your parity drive, and you can have something like a couple dozen drives in your pool, and keep adding as you go. You can even make cache pools, and set up logic to move data between your drive array (HDDs) and cache (SSDs).

One of the best aspects of unraid is you can migrate your entire system to another machine, if (as in my case) your server has a meltdown.

Due to a zfs related kernel panic on my last machine (I don't even use zfs, but unraid apparently runs a zfs related subsystem regardless), my poor old lenovo laptop got every core maxed out at 100% until a transistor popped on the motherboard. I only figured out what happened once I set up my new server, saw the same behavior and traced it in the logs.

By the way, if you run unraid, and don't use zfs... just blacklist it system-wide:

cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-zfs.conf:

install zfs /bin/false
install spl /bin/false

Where was I? Well, since I happened to have a CPU and 16GB of ram from my old PC just laying around, I decided to put them to use and delve into the subject of Intel ARC cards.

I am very happy with this intel a380 GPU. Its not very good for gaming or running LLMs, but for media transcoding it is an absolute demon. And dirt cheap, I think I paid $140 bucks for it.

Restoring unraid was a breeze, as I always make nightly backups. But honestly, none of my data was damaged. It was simply a matter of building the new computer, clocking up my ram, enabling essentials for the A380 like Resizable BAR, and once I set up my external DAS, every drive was detected by unraid and the pools were brought online, just as I left them.

Anyway, I thought I should share my build:

my server build:

• Lian Li A3-mATX case
• Intel arc a380
• AMD Ryzen 2700x, which I had laying around.. maybe comparable to a 5700x
• 16GB DDR 4 3600 (again, had this already)
• 32TB of storage (my parity drive - wow I think I paid half this 2 years ago)
• Syba 4 3.5" USBC/eSATA enclosure

These are affiliate links, hope that's ok with you. I have no idea what I'm doing there, but I thought I might as well try it out.