I have never had an unRAID box so I cannot guarantee a perfectly accurate comparison. However,I think you’ll find making your own to be quite flexible, and therefore rewarding to get what you want, not what unRAID feels like selling you.
My 11th Gen is way overkill for home router, storage server, and even a dozen docker containers doing various things. Only time I see high CPU usage is when I’m running upgrades, or Home Assistant has a Python thread go wonky. 12th Gen will be even more overkill lol. Want to trade so I can upgrade my laptop?
I don’t know of any advantage to going TB → NVMe → PCI instead of directly from TB → PCI . Is there any particular reason you need to / through NVMe?
I think you’re right about not getting absolutely maximum connectivity / storage speeds out of that setup, but for general home use I find it plenty fast. TB/USB isn’t quite on the same level for stability as a direct physical PCI connection, so consider very robust / Copy on Write file systems such as btrfs or ZFS.
TB → NVMe → PCI because products that do Thunderbolt to PCI directly seem to mainly be either eGPU enclosures that have less than ideal power requirements (like, powered by ATX 24 pin), are more expensive, or too large to nicely hide away inside my 4U cases.
Unraid has not sold me anything, other than a license for the OS. Forgive me for not having read every post in this thread - what are you using for the NAS part of your build?
Okay I was thinking more of this TB to PCI adapter, which would work for more than just eGPUs, AFAIK.
ADT-LINK R43SG-TB3 PCIe 3.0 x16 PCI-e x16 to TB3 Extension Cable Laptop External Graphics Video Card Docking Station PCI-Express 16x Cables eGPU Adapter (25CM, R43SG-TB3) (25CM, R43SG-TB3) https://a.co/d/ft7UQUT
No idea how it would fit in your 4U though.
“NAS” function requirements at my home are pretty basic and so I went cheap for now in my setup. I have a single USB3.2 Gen 1 + UASP to 2x SATAIII toaster style drive cradle (with external 12V power adapter) that holds a pair of 3.5 inch drives. Btrfs in RAID1 + nightly snapshot and on-site and off-site mirror via btrbk over ssh. SSHFS for most of my devices on the LAN to get in, one special snowflake needs SMB though (puke).
Going from tb to pcie you’ll allways need to supply the 12v rail separately, though there are more and less convenient ways to achieve that. The TH3P4G3 actually requires a full 24 pin which kinda sucks but it does allow dasy-chaining. I recently impulse bough this one which can be powered off a barrel jack, like you get with external harddrives (or a pcie 8/6 pin or molex or usb-pd, it’s really versatile in that reguard) and works well for my “poor”-mans tb-10gbit ethernet adabter but it does not dasychain.
I have that one and it’s by far the bulkiest one I got and is kinda ghetto, there are better options available so I’d avoid it.
The TZT Graphics Card Dock looks great, powering via molex is exactly what I need. The plastic plate underneath might raise it up too much to allow me to secure the pci card inside the 4U case but perhaps it is removable. I too will be impulse buying this.
my main gripe with it is that they didn’t break out the other port on the chipset so you could dasychain other than that it’s pretty neat for stuff that aren’t gpus. For an actual egpu the TH3P4G3 is still a lot better and provides the laptop with power too even if it is just 65w.
If the tzt was able to pull 12v from the framework and have the tb connection over the wire it would be the absolute winner. I was able to run an 10gbit card (inte x540) powering it from the framework directly over 2 wires but the pcie ssd apparently used too much power for that to work.
One usb4 cable for data end one usb-c to c cable for power. The Second usb-c port on the board is not the second tb port of the chipset but a simple PD 12V in.
Edit: out of curiousity I put my usb-c meter between there and found it just feeds the board 5v, looks like my nic is happy with 5v instead of 12 but my ssd isn’t. Another mystery solved there.
RZ608 (Mediatek MT7921K) AP has been the primary AP in my home network for weeks now due to my issues with raspberry pis. I do have one other Engenius AP linking the two houses that I can also jump onto if I really need to, but that’s pretty rare.
There is still some small intermittent bug where packets aren’t routed correctly between two STA on the RZ608 AP sometimes. I can’t find a reproducible pattern for it, but it does seem more likely with longer uptimes of the hostapd AP process. Usually restarting the systemd service that controls the hostapd instance is all it takes to get packets flowing between STAs again. I’m running bleeding edge hostapd from git source, but don’t really have time to bisect to find a bad commit.
Using btrfs in data dup (equivalent to RAID1) across two physical HDDs in a cheap Fideco brand external “toaster” for my Network storage. Btrbk for nightly snapshots and transmit to the other house for “off-site backup”. Nice part of this setup is I can grab any one of the three HDDs in an emergency evac scenario and have 100% of my data with me. Working on converting the remainder of my Linux devices to btrfs to end the rsync silliness. Btrfsmaintenance for periodic scrubs, defrag, etc. Still hoping per extent encryption for btrfs lands sometime soon. There was some more talk about that last fall but I haven’t seen anything concrete about a target release for that.
Looking forward to an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 once the Mediatek cards are available (and at a reasonable price of course).
Writing a quick update as I am having more and more issues with various USB3 devices falling back to USB2 speeds (480M reported in lsusb -tv), or not coming up at boot, or dropping offline after being subject to heavy usage.
Symptoms are intermittent, hard as heck to find a pattern to reproduce, but consistent enough to be a daily to weekly problem. I usually run bleeding edge arch kernels (6.11.2 currently), but I did try dropping back to an lts kernel (6.6.42 IIRC) for a few boots to see if things got better. That did not seem to improve the situation. Neither has rotating what is plugged into what USB-C port, adding or subtracting powered hubs in the middle, etc. The mainboard I have in use is 11th gen i5 with 3.19 BIOS. I am a bit apprehensive about trying 3.20 with all the issues I have seen on the other thread…
Also, it looks like all available and soon to be released Wifi 7 chips will not be getting the ability to provide Multiple Link Operations as part of a hostapd AP any time soon. This means that I am strongly considering dropping the goal of having the FW mainboard turned router being my main wireless AP. Adding a proper but inexpensive wifi 7 router (tp-link be230 or be550, for example) to act as ethernet switch, AP, and NAS source is looking increasingly like the right next move. I would not want to make that my main router / firewall / etc due to a myriad of reasons. I do prefer to keep the number of devices in my network to an absolute minimum, though, so…
If anyone has any thoughts, ideas, troubleshooting steps to try, models to recommend, etc, I’m all ears. Thanks.
