UPDATE #1Have recently added a Quadro P2000 to my build for Plex transcoding. Found a great deal for it
So far i've put together a basic running build.. currently testing on UNRAID although I still have not committed to the disks I want to use.
Pulled from Dell T420
8 x 480GB SSD for storage and parity
1 X DC P3700 800GB for Caching
I want to use Ultrastars but not sure if I can benefit from their performance much given the nature of how UNRAID stores parity information which tend to favor storage capacity rather than performance. Although SSD Caching does seem to help as I'm able to do average 650-900MB transfer rates out of the box with no tuning yet.
10GBE Read and Write PerformanceUPDATE #2Wasn't too happy with UNRAID's performance considering it is a paid software but can't really fault it because it never claimed to be a good NAS. I think UNRAID shines more as a hypervisor than a NAS.
Anyhow, I took a different.. and cheaper route... I decided to go with Proxmox because it supports hardware passthrough which allows the VMs or containers to manage resources directly so that it will work as close to native performance
It took a bit more work and some sleepless nights but given the wealth of information available online nowadays I was able to install both FreeNAS and Plex
Server running on Centos.
Using Proxmox, I was able to assign physical disks to FreeNAS could it manage directly and I showered it with lots of ECC RAM. Unlike UNRAID, FreeNAS performs better if you give it more RAM. I get way better transfer speeds even without the benefit of NVME for caching
As for Plex on Centos with GPU passthrough, took a bit more work. First, all my media are on FreeNAS so I had to mount it via CIFS to CentOS and setup
some scripts for it to remount each time the VM is rebooted.
Also, I wanted the Quadro P2000 GPU to do all the heavy lifting ie encoding and decoding so I had get it to use FFMPEG othewise the CPU will still share with some of the heavy lifting.
The result is quite actually satisfying. I'm able to run 3 concurrent Plex streams each forcing the P2000 to transcode 4K to 1080P and my CPU utilization
is barely 20% considering I only assigned the CentOS VM 2 cores to play with.
Same goes for FreeNAS, by assigning it only 2 CPUs, I'm still able to get close to 10Gbe transfer speeds.
Quadro P2000 doing the heavy liftingFreeNAS file transfer performanceWhat's inside U-NAS case