Installing Unraid on Dell Optiplex

Optiplexers. Today we're going to attempt an unraid install on an old 7th gen Optiplex, Dell Optiplex. It has an i5 processor in it and I've popped in a 500 gigabyte SATA SSD, Western Digital Blue and a Western Digital Blue NVMe 500 gigabyte drive. and the system came with 16 gigabytes of memory. So the point of this Unraid install is to point back to Asynology NAS to just use Unraid as an OS to run a Plex docker container on and as an easy venue to connect to Asynology NAS. So I've set up Astrology NAS shared folder called Media PD and I have some library sort folders here. So inside the movie library sort folder I have three different movie libraries with all public domain movies. And then in the TV sort folder I have public domain TV shows for a main TV. plex library and a plex kids tv library so that's the basis of the media we're going to use so you need to have a media share already set up with a user and password associated with it and i have that for my main plex library and you need to create a user just for the unraid install and you do that in control panel and you'll see I have one from my unraid NUC that I'm running and I just created a user for this test and if I go in and edit it the only permissions I've given it is to the media pd shared folder I created and it's got read and write access so it's pretty simple on the Synology side You create a user for your Unraid install, and you give that user permission to the media folder you're going to be using. So this is great if you already run Plex server on a Synology NAS. You can just keep that Plex server up and running, get your Unraid box installed, point to the same media, and create a second server. And while you're working on all that, your primary server stays up and running. So the Synology end is very simple and for today's test I'm going to be using the same password for both my network share and to log into Unraid Because this won't exist past this video by the time you you guys see it. This will be pulled down Okay, so that's on the Synology side. That's pretty easy on the Unraid side you've got 30 days to try it for free before you have to purchase it and i think it's 59 dollars to use unread up to five or six hard drives we're only using two drives we're going to set up a shared cache pool just for docker containers and basically you follow this getting started guide to create your bootable unread flash drive you want to use a quality flash drive they recommend not using sand disk drives i just grabbed a 16 gigabyte flash drive i had in my drawer it's got to be fat 32 formatted and most of you will use windows so go into windows download the the unraid installer and just get yourself installed and this would be the manual install method so you take the fat32 file system on the flash drive the volume label has to be unread all caps you go to the download page download a little file And if you're using Windows, you just run that file, point to your flash drive, and make your bootable flash drive, and you're all set. So then you go into the computer, and you change the... CMOS or the BIOS to boot from the flash drive let me see if I can pull that up now because I don't have a video capture device I can't do it on the actual device I'm using but through the help of Google Photos I took a few pictures so this is a little Optiplex. I put the NVMe in and let's see where am I I just screwed this up and then I popped my SATA SSD back over it and below the fan the two little tabs are removed right here you just squeeze those pop the fan over to the side it's still plugged in and you can access your memory So then in the BIOS I had the flash drive plugged in of course the boot one and I just selected it as the only boot device and you can use UEFI that's fine. Matter of fact the installer under Windows will ask you if you want to enable that and so you should choose yes. And then the default login is just root no password. and once you do that you're just logged in and then you can go to any other computer that you're comfortable using to work on this headless you don't have to work on it on the device so you can get that device set up any place out of the way and use your regular computer to set things up and access it which is where we are right now. So I checked my router settings to see what local IP address this system was using. And then basically, all you need to do is paste in this URL. I got carried away. so if I get rid of this and just hit home and then pasted this URL in I guess I didn't paste it too well So there's not a lot of scripting to my videos. I kind of wing it and I figure if I get stuck someplace, you're most likely to get stuck in similar areas. And if you watch me fumble through getting unstuck, it should give you the confidence you can do the same thing. Alright, so this is our setup screen. I need to pick a password and I'm just going to, again, use this testunraid1234 as my password. Not going to save it. So this is where you purchase a key, redeem an activation code, or start a trial. And what's very important is don't buy Unraid until you're sure you want to use it. Because you might test it out on a cheap flash drive. But I would recommend buying a quality Samsung small flash drive. I use a 32 gigabyte fit. They recommend not using anything larger than 32 gigabytes. And then just any brand name secondary flash drives. drive around the 128 gigabyte size range we'll use that as our one required storage array unraid won't start without without one storage device and it doesn't have to be a hard drive so i'm just going to click start trial and i'll have 30 days and you can see that i well before it disappeared it was 24 minutes ago where i um booted this up for the first time so I'm just going to install the plug-in and this interface is how you'll see everything update and nothing really has a big button that says done or finished you just kind of wait until the text tells you you're all set okay so let's go to the dashboard And you'll see that the CPU in this Dell is an i5-7500 at 3.4 gigahertz. it only has 16 gigabytes of RAM on my personal one I have it set up with 32 gigabytes and this allows me to transcode to RAM and the array stopped because there's nothing there's nothing set up yet So I do show both drives here with a temperature and this was the flash drive. So let's start by going to main and let's see if I can remember how to do this. Let's add a pool. We'll call it two slots. We'll make it two slots. We'll choose add and we'll assign each of the devices. Okay, so now we need to assign one disk and this general U disk, not my Kingston, will be my storage. Remember I said 128 gigabytes? I don't have a spare one, I just have a no-name flash drive. So we're going to see if a 16 gigabyte works for storage. And I think that's all we can try to start it. And success. Unraid has now started with these drives being active. So there's no file system here, so I think that's what we'll get into next. And let me see how I do that. Alright, so I'm trying not to stop the video. I'm just trying to think on my feet here. Okay, so I'm going to go back to dashboard and where it says cache here, click the little gear and let's see what we can do. all right you're going to stop the video and figure this out and I'll be back I found what we want to do so go back to the main tab drop down and we're told it's unmountable disk presence so I'm going to click this format choose yes and then click format And we'll wait for it to happen. Okay, so that finished. It used the BTRF file system for the cache and on the cache pool and our general storage device that's not going to be used is XFS. So that doesn't really matter. through that hurdle so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to install a few things so let's go to apps and I had a backtrack so when you first install something you're going to be prompted to install community applications it's already installed here So let's install a few things. Let's install CPU. No, that's not what I want. What do I want? I meant to type GPU while I was saying CPU. So we want the stats on the GPU. So we'll click install. And then we also want to install. Intel GPU top and unassigned devices. And we'll come back here later on to install the Plex container file. So because I'm not as patient as I might be normally, just go back to the installed apps and make sure everything's installed. So I'm missing the GPU one, so I'll do that again. No, I'm sorry, what am I missing? Yeah, I'm missing this. And it didn't install because I should have done the Intel GPU top first So I was out of order there. Sorry guys Alright, so now we have everything we need to go to the next step this this and that so let's go back to main And let's add our Synology share, which is already added because I had to edit things. So let me see if I can get rid of it. Okay, so I paused this video a couple times and I cut something out. So let's go to our scratch pad that I've got made up here. Here's my Synology Unraid password. Unraid user password and here's the username testunraid1234 So I'm going to add in my share From the Synology NAS and for some reason if I click the Windows one it just works better the Windows icon versus the Linux I'm going to search for the server And this will take a little bit I thought I could do this video one shot but it was about five months ago I set all this up for myself on a Intel NUC and I've forgotten too much of it so now that it found my server I'll click Next and now I will type in my username test I'm sorry username is unraid test Hit next, paste in my password which is simply test unraid 1234 i don't need to remember it we'll click next i'll load the shares and i'll go down and the only one i actually have access to is the media pd and i'll click done that's successful and now this is the step i missed and why i had to come back I need to mount this. Then go into settings and click auto mount and done. Then click on the hyperlink and if you see your libraries, your media on your NAS, you know you're successful. So now let's go into settings. Oh I don't think I can do this. If I do GPU stats I can't pick Intel yet until I create the docker container. Okay but it is a good reminder to change this to Fahrenheit right now. Then if I go back to dashboard, there's other places to, let me see, where am I looking? Is it main? Yeah, there's another setting someplace. I'm not going to dig for it, but if you're in the U.S., you can change the temperature of your drives to Fahrenheit also. I'm not going to dig for that setting. So let's go back to, oh no, let's stay here for a second. So I've got a scratch pad set up. This is important. I actually click in here. and copy this and put it on your own scratch pad so let's go into well I'm already here so put this on your scratch pad And then add your libraries with your forward slash your actual library name. So you'll see I've got TV dash libraries, movie dash libraries, and music. You'll want these on a scratch pad. already set up and also from the description of this video throw this on a scratch pad I'm sorry not this throw this on a scratch pad if you've got 32 gigabytes of RAM or more use the whole thing if you've only got 16 gigabytes or less only use this We'll need this info to set up our container. So I don't really need that. But this is what I need, and this is what we'll use to start Plex with. All right, so let's go back to Apps. Before we install the Plex container, let's also install a file manager. And then... Let's do our Plex container. Okay, the install takes us to the setup. and we're going to use the cheat sheet here so let's turn on advanced view and show more settings and in this line here if you have 32 gigs of RAM or more you can paste in this whole line if you only have 16 gigs just paste in this line this line This line enables hardware acceleration. This line and specifically this part uses 16 out of your total amount of 16 gigabytes of your total amount of RAM for RAM transcoding. So we're just not going to use that in this system because I only have 8 gigabytes. So we'll paste that in there. And now we need the path for our TV show library. Same for the movie. And we want to change the user to cash. to point this to our cache pool for the container. And then my stenology NAS, the PGID number is 100, and it may be that for many people, but you need to find that out. And the best place to do that is the Marius hosting website. He's got a lot of Docker guides for Synology NASes. Let's see if I can do a little search here. PUID. Well let's just jump into one of his tutorials. Because lots of times he'll tell how to get this. Okay, so this is his guide on how to create a scheduled task to get that information. So that's something you should probably run on your Synology NAS before you proceed. Like I said, mine is 100, so I'm set with that. Alright, so we have... our movie and the TV path, now we need to add a path for our music. I'm going to copy this and paste it into the container path and then let me just double check that I don't mess this up. I did. I want this in the host path and the name will be path colon space slash music and the container path will be just slash music and I think that's all we need let me hit add and let's build our container All right the command finished successfully. So we can click done. and let's click into docker and this is what we want to see we want to see a volume mapping for all three of the library types we're going to have now if you have a photo library or if you have an other video library you would stop the container Click the icon, go into edit, click advanced view, show more settings, and you would recreate, let's see, where are we? you would recreate this setup for your other video or your photo Plex folders on your Synology NAS I don't have any that set up so I'm not going to do that all right so we're back to docker we'll start the container I could start all I could click the icon and I could click start And as long as you see all your paths here, and you definitely want to make sure that the config is going to the cache. This is where everything's built. So the reason I installed the file manager was now I can go back to main, and I can click this icon. and then come into the app data folder and I can see the Plex folder and if I wanted to start fresh I could stop the container remove it and I can click this and I could click delete and get rid of that container completely and start fresh so I'm going to pause the video and I'll come back and we'll get into building well we'll do a few more settings here and then we'll get into installing our Plex libraries I'm sorry before we get into Plex let's do a couple things first let's um enable the GPU so hopefully you'll see this under dashboard under GPU and if you click the gear the top line unit ID you can click into it and see the IGPU of your processor mine is the HD graphics 630 because it's a seventh gen Intel i5 if it was an eighth gen it would be a UHD and if I hit apply and now if I go back to dashboard You'll see I have all this information that will be loaded if we're transcoding a stream through the iGPU, and we'll do that at the end of the video. And then also go to settings. Well, let's go back to main for a second. Let's fix these temps for our SSDs. Go into settings, and then display settings. And where are we here? Change Celsius to Fahrenheit. If you're in the U.S., hit Apply. Go back to Maine. And you'll see your temperatures of your drives in Fahrenheit now. All right, so we should be all set. We've got our Docker container running, and all the paths are mapped. So let me just start fresh and find my cheat sheet. So you're going to use this formula http:// the IP address of your new little Unraid server colon 32400 web. So I'm going to copy that, paste it into the URL. And we're at the HowPlex works screen. So I'm going to name this server UnRageSinoTask, or I could just. change it to whatever I want it picked up the name that was already used for unraid so I'll modify a little bit if I leave this checked I'm not going to have remote access and maybe we'll fix that at the end of the video my TP link router has UPNP turned off and I would have to manually port forward a port for this install which isn't hard to do and i have a port forwarding tutorial video so we'll quickly add a bunch of videos and we'll use the um i use the plex app on my nvd shield sitting right next to me to start some streams and i'll show you the hardware transcoding on it So let's add the movie libraries. I've got three to add. Browse for the media and now you will see movies, music, and tv shows off to the right as paths. All right so I'm going to add my main movie library that has these public domain videos. And before I click add, I'm going to go into the advanced section and I'm going to uncheck prefer artwork based, I'm sorry, I'm going to uncheck use local assets. And I want to have collections created automatically if I have two or more movies that are in a collection. So Plex is doing its thing, let's keep adding libraries. same thing browse for the media find the movie library in kids add advanced uncheck use local assets I want everything pulled from Plex because my naming conventions are great and the same collection number of two for automatic collections. Let's add the last movie library. We'll just call that Documentaries. only one movie in that again we'll adjust this uncheck use local assets fix our collection size now we're doing the tv show libraries this will be my main one you'll see i've got some episodes from three shows they're all public domain again And here, this is what I do. I use Filebot to name from TVDB and not TMDB for many reasons. So I'm going to change episode ordering to the TVDB. has some things that the movie database doesn't have. It's got an optional DVD ordering from the preferred or from the normal aired ordering. There's no DVD ordering at the movie database. and TVDB also creates virtual TV shows to get content in as a TV show that's not listed at the movie database. For example, Looney Tunes, old Disney animated shorts, Tom and Jerry cartoons from the 40s 50s and 60s, they weren't really a TV show but you can add all those shorts as a TV show. One that works for me is a virtual Ken Burns films listing. Otherwise I'd have to have all his documentaries as individual documentaries as they're listed at both TMDB and TVDB and instead I can list them under the virtual Ken Burns films and enter it that way. So I don't use TMDB for my series libraries at all. So make that change, uncheck use local assets. Let's add our kids TV show library. Browse to the TV show, TV show kids, advanced settings, episode ordering to the TVDB, and uncheck use local assets. And now we just have a movie or a music library left. Music main. and I don't have much but this is all public domain or free free music and I don't think there's anything you need to change under the advanced settings for a music library so let's do next and we're done so I am into my full Server setup with all my different servers. The Unraid Sino is selected. This is my main server. My friends and family are connected. This is the Unraid one I did on the 11th Gen Intel NUC. got my son and somebody else on that once I get all my collection set up over the winter I'll move everybody to it and I'll shut down the Synology NAS server on the DS 1522 and I still have the original Plex server spun up with nobody accessing it on the DS 1019 so There's no remote access on that. Let's see if we can get to that in a minute. But if I go to libraries, I can click in and everything was discovered perfectly fine. So let me start my shield up and I'm going to use the only 4k movie I have is this big buck bunny and I'm going to play that it will transcode it for you so you can see what's going on. Had to wake my shield up. Entering Plex now. Sliding down to more and going into the Unraid Sino server to move these. I'm muting the shield. and I'm going to play the 4k stream so you'll see up here this change under dashboard well I guess I guess I may not know what I have there let's go in and look through unraid I'm sorry, not into the container. Let's look here, back to the Synology NAS. All right, so I simply didn't select which one I wanted to start. So the 720p started automatically. So let me go back and play version. And I have two different 4K ones, both at 10 megabits per second, 10.5 and 10.8. So I started at 10.5. All right, so it's still detecting some intros. And it didn't play the one version, let's try the other. Okay, so that's going. Let's look at dashboard. Alright, so it's transcoding it. It's not playing it directly. Oh, I see, it's AV1. The IGPU in this 7th Gen Dell computer is not going to handle an AV1 transcode. But I wanted to force a transcode anyway to show you the dashboard. And all the transcoding is happening on the CPU and not the GPU. Because the iGPU can't handle this. So that wasn't a good choice to use. Let's use a regular video. Yeah, I don't have a public domain 4K H.265 or HEVC. video to use. So let me start this up. If we go back to the Unraid server, we're playing, the processor is being used a little bit, and nothing's going on with the GPU. So if we go back here and I transcode this video to 720p, you'll see that the transcode started. It's not playing yet. It's buffering. So now it's playing. If we go back to Unraid, oh we got something going on because my transcodes are going into the CPU and not the iGPU. So we don't have hardware accelerated transcoding going. Well, let me stop this video and figure out why, and I'll be back. Rookie mistake. Even though I've got the hardware acceleration all set in Unraid, I haven't enabled it on this server, which, again, is a rookie mistake. Well, only that I do. Well, I picked it specifically, and I need to click that. Use hardware acceleration when available. And then auto should still work. Okay, so let's go back to our dashboard. Implex is still working in the background detecting intros on the TV shows. So let me start with a 1080p H.265 video. Alright, so it started up direct playing and let me enable a transcode. Alright, it spun for a little bit and it started up on my end. Let's wait for the dashboard to... Oh, it already did. So now we're at 480p, and we see the HW for Hardware Transcode. And if we go to Unraid, we now see activity under the GPU section. So the processor is working because it's detecting intros in the background. And I can't stop that, but hopefully it won't run too long. So I may stop the video and come back and do another test. test just so you can see that this all settles down once the intros are done being detected. But the GPU is being used right now and Unraid will show that. Let's go back into Plex and let's try that big buck bunny again and see what will happen. Make sure I play the right version of it. and I'm going to try the 10.5 megabit per second 4k version and that's spinning on my end I don't really remember the media characteristics okay so this is a h.264 4k version and it's it's transcoding to 4k h.264 so it is playing if we go back to unraid it's using the GPU the IGPU and let's see how a force transcode to 720p does four megabits per second spinning on my shield dashboard is reflected the change but it hasn't started yet All right, so it's started. So just imagine how this might perform with an 11th gen Intel CPU. I love the Iris Xe graphics. All right, so it took a little bit, but it's playing. And if we go back to Unraid, we'll see the GPU is active doing the transcode. But it's buffering on my end. Let's play original quality and then back onto the stream and we'll try the other 4k version. This is the AV1 I believe. okay so that's being transcoded to h.264 also and it looks like the i'm going to stop the stream it looks like the processor gets peg 2 trying to do that one Alright, let's just check something from the TV show library. Alright, so this is an unread server pointing back to a Synology NAS on a very old, in my opinion, device. A 7th Gen Intel processor. I'd really go with something more modern, but it'll work. And at least it's better, it's a better iGPU than what's in my Synology DS1520. As long as you get the 8th gen, 9th or 10th gen processor and 11th gen will do. be a killer machine and let me let me pause this again and we'll see if we can get the remote access going for this so you don't have to reference that video for the final part of the video for the remote access I have a Linux utility Yeah, somebody said I didn't give the greatest advice for something. I have a Linux utility that allows me to display my phone screen on my computer screen. It won't work while I'm screen recording. So let's go into remote access and I'll have to end up blurring my public IP out of this section of the video. But I went into the settings of my TP-Link router to Deco X60 on my phone and I reserved this IP address and I manually forwarded this port. to 31 400. so all you have to do is check this let's change that to 31 400 and hit retry this should take about 60 to 90 seconds and lock and remote access. Okay so we're fully accessible outside the network and Plex is done scanning now and I just want to show something. Let's go back to my shield and i'll play the 4k version that is the um the default 720p that starts right up um i'll go to play version and we'll play the 4k one that we know is h.264 I just wanted to show that it really didn't change things too much when all the background tasks were complete that were on the CPU. So you'll see Plexus saying we're only using 20% of the CPU for this stream. It looks more intensive from the unread display and it is transcoding. but we know it's transcoding because it says so here and it says it's hardware so let's just force a 720p transcode 720p 4 megabits per second so it's buffering on my screen now it's buffering on the dashboard display So really we're going to have about the same performance even though those background tasks aren't running on the CPU. So this will make an adequate Plex server, a 7th gen processor with its iGPU, but you'd really want something more modern to... handle 4k the way you want to. Now, did this take a long time? It's playing now, now it just buffered a little bit, now it's playing. You really want something more modern to transcode 4k, but the whole idea is to not transcode 4k in the first place. And... It just is what it is what it is and this may not be the best test quality material because generally my 4k stuff direct streams but I didn't have any public domain stuff to find to use this this example so that's that's my little unraid install It works great off my NUC and I might as well go into that for a comparison before I end the video. The video is already long enough but let me just show you what an 11th gen processor does. I'm looking for my highest bitrated movie and I've shown this before all right so I just started it up and let's go to this so this is 104 megabits per second it's an H EVC which is h265 and it's direct playing so if I force a transcode Let's see, I clicked the wrong button. I'm into chapter selection and I don't want to be. My shield's being funny. Let's resume it again. Alright, let's convert it now to 720p, 4 megabits per second. spinning a little bit, started right up, and you'll just see what that Iris XE IGPU can do. It's just a fabulous IGPU. If I want to transcode it even lower, which, why would you want to do that, right? Well, let's go to 480p, 1.5 megabits per second. Okay, so it started up on my end, and now you see it switched to SD. So that 11th Gen processor is just fantastic. Alright, so I can end the video. Let me blur out my IP address, and I'll try to get all this on Facebook today. Thanks for watching this long, extended video. And I know I ramble. I know this wasn't smooth, but it's hard to script a video like this instead of just doing it. Thanks for watching.

So the point of this Unraid install is to point back to Asynology NAS to just use Unraid as an OS to run a Plex docker container on and as an easy venue to connect to Asynology NAS. So I've set up Astrology NAS shared folder called Media PD and I have some library sort folders here. So inside the movie library sort folder I have three different movie libraries with all public domain movies. And then in the TV sort folder I have public domain TV shows for a main TV. plex library and a plex kids tv library so that's the basis of the media we're going to use so you need to have a media share already set up with a user and password associated with it and i have that for my main plex library and you need to create a user just for the unraid install and you do that in control panel and you'll see I have one from my unraid NUC that I'm running and I just created a user for this test and if I go in and edit it the only permissions I've given it is to the media pd shared folder I created and it's got read and write access so it's pretty simple on the Synology side You create a user for your Unraid install, and you give that user permission to the media folder you're going to be using.

So this is great if you already run Plex server on a Synology NAS. You can just keep that Plex server up and running, get your Unraid box installed, point to the same media, and create a second server. And while you're working on all that, your primary server stays up and running. So the Synology end is very simple and for today's test I'm going to be using the same password for both my network share and to log into Unraid Because this won't exist past this video by the time you you guys see it. This will be pulled down Okay, so that's on the Synology side.

That's pretty easy on the Unraid side you've got 30 days to try it for free before you have to purchase it and i think it's 59 dollars to use unread up to five or six hard drives we're only using two drives we're going to set up a shared cache pool just for docker containers and basically you follow this getting started guide to create your bootable unread flash drive you want to use a quality flash drive they recommend not using sand disk drives i just grabbed a 16 gigabyte flash drive i had in my drawer it's got to be fat 32 formatted and most of you will use windows so go into windows download the the unraid installer and just get yourself installed and this would be the manual install method so you take the fat32 file system on the flash drive the volume label has to be unread all caps you go to the download page download a little file And if you're using Windows, you just run that file, point to your flash drive, and make your bootable flash drive, and you're all set. So then you go into the computer, and you change the... CMOS or the BIOS to boot from the flash drive let me see if I can pull that up now because I don't have a video capture device I can't do it on the actual device I'm using but through the help of Google Photos I took a few pictures so this is a little Optiplex. I put the NVMe in and let's see where am I I just screwed this up and then I popped my SATA SSD back over it and below the fan the two little tabs are removed right here you just squeeze those pop the fan over to the side it's still plugged in and you can access your memory So then in the BIOS I had the flash drive plugged in of course the boot one and I just selected it as the only boot device and you can use UEFI that's fine. Matter of fact the installer under Windows will ask you if you want to enable that and so you should choose yes.

And then the default login is just root no password. and once you do that you're just logged in and then you can go to any other computer that you're comfortable using to work on this headless you don't have to work on it on the device so you can get that device set up any place out of the way and use your regular computer to set things up and access it which is where we are right now. So I checked my router settings to see what local IP address this system was using. And then basically, all you need to do is paste in this URL.

I got carried away. so if I get rid of this and just hit home and then pasted this URL in I guess I didn't paste it too well So there's not a lot of scripting to my videos. I kind of wing it and I figure if I get stuck someplace, you're most likely to get stuck in similar areas.

And if you watch me fumble through getting unstuck, it should give you the confidence you can do the same thing. Alright, so this is our setup screen. I need to pick a password and I'm just going to, again, use this testunraid1234 as my password.

Not going to save it. So this is where you purchase a key, redeem an activation code, or start a trial. And what's very important is don't buy Unraid until you're sure you want to use it.

Because you might test it out on a cheap flash drive. But I would recommend buying a quality Samsung small flash drive. I use a 32 gigabyte fit. They recommend not using anything larger than 32 gigabytes. And then just any brand name secondary flash drives.

drive around the 128 gigabyte size range we'll use that as our one required storage array unraid won't start without without one storage device and it doesn't have to be a hard drive so i'm just going to click start trial and i'll have 30 days and you can see that i well before it disappeared it was 24 minutes ago where i um booted this up for the first time so I'm just going to install the plug-in and this interface is how you'll see everything update and nothing really has a big button that says done or finished you just kind of wait until the text tells you you're all set okay so let's go to the dashboard And you'll see that the CPU in this Dell is an i5-7500 at 3.4 gigahertz. it only has 16 gigabytes of RAM on my personal one I have it set up with 32 gigabytes and this allows me to transcode to RAM and the array stopped because there's nothing there's nothing set up yet So I do show both drives here with a temperature and this was the flash drive. So let's start by going to main and let's see if I can remember how to do this. Let's add a pool. We'll call it two slots.

We'll make it two slots. We'll choose add and we'll assign each of the devices. Okay, so now we need to assign one disk and this general U disk, not my Kingston, will be my storage. Remember I said 128 gigabytes?

I don't have a spare one, I just have a no-name flash drive. So we're going to see if a 16 gigabyte works for storage. And I think that's all we can try to start it. And success.

Unraid has now started with these drives being active. So there's no file system here, so I think that's what we'll get into next. And let me see how I do that. Alright, so I'm trying not to stop the video.

I'm just trying to think on my feet here. Okay, so I'm going to go back to dashboard and where it says cache here, click the little gear and let's see what we can do. all right you're going to stop the video and figure this out and I'll be back I found what we want to do so go back to the main tab drop down and we're told it's unmountable disk presence so I'm going to click this format choose yes and then click format And we'll wait for it to happen. Okay, so that finished. It used the BTRF file system for the cache and on the cache pool and our general storage device that's not going to be used is XFS.

So that doesn't really matter. through that hurdle so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to install a few things so let's go to apps and I had a backtrack so when you first install something you're going to be prompted to install community applications it's already installed here So let's install a few things. Let's install CPU. No, that's not what I want. What do I want?

I meant to type GPU while I was saying CPU. So we want the stats on the GPU. So we'll click install. And then we also want to install. Intel GPU top and unassigned devices.

And we'll come back here later on to install the Plex container file. So because I'm not as patient as I might be normally, just go back to the installed apps and make sure everything's installed. So I'm missing the GPU one, so I'll do that again. No, I'm sorry, what am I missing?

Yeah, I'm missing this. And it didn't install because I should have done the Intel GPU top first So I was out of order there. Sorry guys Alright, so now we have everything we need to go to the next step this this and that so let's go back to main And let's add our Synology share, which is already added because I had to edit things.

So let me see if I can get rid of it. Okay, so I paused this video a couple times and I cut something out. So let's go to our scratch pad that I've got made up here.

Here's my Synology Unraid password. Unraid user password and here's the username testunraid1234 So I'm going to add in my share From the Synology NAS and for some reason if I click the Windows one it just works better the Windows icon versus the Linux I'm going to search for the server And this will take a little bit I thought I could do this video one shot but it was about five months ago I set all this up for myself on a Intel NUC and I've forgotten too much of it so now that it found my server I'll click Next and now I will type in my username test I'm sorry username is unraid test Hit next, paste in my password which is simply test unraid 1234 i don't need to remember it we'll click next i'll load the shares and i'll go down and the only one i actually have access to is the media pd and i'll click done that's successful and now this is the step i missed and why i had to come back I need to mount this. Then go into settings and click auto mount and done. Then click on the hyperlink and if you see your libraries, your media on your NAS, you know you're successful. So now let's go into settings.

Oh I don't think I can do this. If I do GPU stats I can't pick Intel yet until I create the docker container. Okay but it is a good reminder to change this to Fahrenheit right now.

Then if I go back to dashboard, there's other places to, let me see, where am I looking? Is it main? Yeah, there's another setting someplace. I'm not going to dig for it, but if you're in the U.S., you can change the temperature of your drives to Fahrenheit also.

I'm not going to dig for that setting. So let's go back to, oh no, let's stay here for a second. So I've got a scratch pad set up. This is important.

I actually click in here. and copy this and put it on your own scratch pad so let's go into well I'm already here so put this on your scratch pad And then add your libraries with your forward slash your actual library name. So you'll see I've got TV dash libraries, movie dash libraries, and music. You'll want these on a scratch pad. already set up and also from the description of this video throw this on a scratch pad I'm sorry not this throw this on a scratch pad if you've got 32 gigabytes of RAM or more use the whole thing if you've only got 16 gigabytes or less only use this We'll need this info to set up our container.

So I don't really need that. But this is what I need, and this is what we'll use to start Plex with. All right, so let's go back to Apps. Before we install the Plex container, let's also install a file manager.

And then... Let's do our Plex container. Okay, the install takes us to the setup.

and we're going to use the cheat sheet here so let's turn on advanced view and show more settings and in this line here if you have 32 gigs of RAM or more you can paste in this whole line if you only have 16 gigs just paste in this line this line This line enables hardware acceleration. This line and specifically this part uses 16 out of your total amount of 16 gigabytes of your total amount of RAM for RAM transcoding. So we're just not going to use that in this system because I only have 8 gigabytes.

So we'll paste that in there. And now we need the path for our TV show library. Same for the movie.

And we want to change the user to cash. to point this to our cache pool for the container. And then my stenology NAS, the PGID number is 100, and it may be that for many people, but you need to find that out.

And the best place to do that is the Marius hosting website. He's got a lot of Docker guides for Synology NASes. Let's see if I can do a little search here.

PUID. Well let's just jump into one of his tutorials. Because lots of times he'll tell how to get this.

Okay, so this is his guide on how to create a scheduled task to get that information. So that's something you should probably run on your Synology NAS before you proceed. Like I said, mine is 100, so I'm set with that. Alright, so we have... our movie and the TV path, now we need to add a path for our music.

I'm going to copy this and paste it into the container path and then let me just double check that I don't mess this up. I did. I want this in the host path and the name will be path colon space slash music and the container path will be just slash music and I think that's all we need let me hit add and let's build our container All right the command finished successfully.

So we can click done. and let's click into docker and this is what we want to see we want to see a volume mapping for all three of the library types we're going to have now if you have a photo library or if you have an other video library you would stop the container Click the icon, go into edit, click advanced view, show more settings, and you would recreate, let's see, where are we? you would recreate this setup for your other video or your photo Plex folders on your Synology NAS I don't have any that set up so I'm not going to do that all right so we're back to docker we'll start the container I could start all I could click the icon and I could click start And as long as you see all your paths here, and you definitely want to make sure that the config is going to the cache. This is where everything's built. So the reason I installed the file manager was now I can go back to main, and I can click this icon.

and then come into the app data folder and I can see the Plex folder and if I wanted to start fresh I could stop the container remove it and I can click this and I could click delete and get rid of that container completely and start fresh so I'm going to pause the video and I'll come back and we'll get into building well we'll do a few more settings here and then we'll get into installing our Plex libraries I'm sorry before we get into Plex let's do a couple things first let's um enable the GPU so hopefully you'll see this under dashboard under GPU and if you click the gear the top line unit ID you can click into it and see the IGPU of your processor mine is the HD graphics 630 because it's a seventh gen Intel i5 if it was an eighth gen it would be a UHD and if I hit apply and now if I go back to dashboard You'll see I have all this information that will be loaded if we're transcoding a stream through the iGPU, and we'll do that at the end of the video. And then also go to settings. Well, let's go back to main for a second.

Let's fix these temps for our SSDs. Go into settings, and then display settings. And where are we here? Change Celsius to Fahrenheit. If you're in the U.S., hit Apply.

Go back to Maine. And you'll see your temperatures of your drives in Fahrenheit now. All right, so we should be all set.

We've got our Docker container running, and all the paths are mapped. So let me just start fresh and find my cheat sheet. So you're going to use this formula http:// the IP address of your new little Unraid server colon 32400 web. So I'm going to copy that, paste it into the URL.

And we're at the HowPlex works screen. So I'm going to name this server UnRageSinoTask, or I could just. change it to whatever I want it picked up the name that was already used for unraid so I'll modify a little bit if I leave this checked I'm not going to have remote access and maybe we'll fix that at the end of the video my TP link router has UPNP turned off and I would have to manually port forward a port for this install which isn't hard to do and i have a port forwarding tutorial video so we'll quickly add a bunch of videos and we'll use the um i use the plex app on my nvd shield sitting right next to me to start some streams and i'll show you the hardware transcoding on it So let's add the movie libraries.

I've got three to add. Browse for the media and now you will see movies, music, and tv shows off to the right as paths. All right so I'm going to add my main movie library that has these public domain videos.

And before I click add, I'm going to go into the advanced section and I'm going to uncheck prefer artwork based, I'm sorry, I'm going to uncheck use local assets. And I want to have collections created automatically if I have two or more movies that are in a collection. So Plex is doing its thing, let's keep adding libraries. same thing browse for the media find the movie library in kids add advanced uncheck use local assets I want everything pulled from Plex because my naming conventions are great and the same collection number of two for automatic collections.

Let's add the last movie library. We'll just call that Documentaries. only one movie in that again we'll adjust this uncheck use local assets fix our collection size now we're doing the tv show libraries this will be my main one you'll see i've got some episodes from three shows they're all public domain again And here, this is what I do. I use Filebot to name from TVDB and not TMDB for many reasons. So I'm going to change episode ordering to the TVDB.

has some things that the movie database doesn't have. It's got an optional DVD ordering from the preferred or from the normal aired ordering. There's no DVD ordering at the movie database.

and TVDB also creates virtual TV shows to get content in as a TV show that's not listed at the movie database. For example, Looney Tunes, old Disney animated shorts, Tom and Jerry cartoons from the 40s 50s and 60s, they weren't really a TV show but you can add all those shorts as a TV show. One that works for me is a virtual Ken Burns films listing.

Otherwise I'd have to have all his documentaries as individual documentaries as they're listed at both TMDB and TVDB and instead I can list them under the virtual Ken Burns films and enter it that way. So I don't use TMDB for my series libraries at all. So make that change, uncheck use local assets. Let's add our kids TV show library.

Browse to the TV show, TV show kids, advanced settings, episode ordering to the TVDB, and uncheck use local assets. And now we just have a movie or a music library left. Music main.

and I don't have much but this is all public domain or free free music and I don't think there's anything you need to change under the advanced settings for a music library so let's do next and we're done so I am into my full Server setup with all my different servers. The Unraid Sino is selected. This is my main server. My friends and family are connected.

This is the Unraid one I did on the 11th Gen Intel NUC. got my son and somebody else on that once I get all my collection set up over the winter I'll move everybody to it and I'll shut down the Synology NAS server on the DS 1522 and I still have the original Plex server spun up with nobody accessing it on the DS 1019 so There's no remote access on that. Let's see if we can get to that in a minute.

But if I go to libraries, I can click in and everything was discovered perfectly fine. So let me start my shield up and I'm going to use the only 4k movie I have is this big buck bunny and I'm going to play that it will transcode it for you so you can see what's going on. Had to wake my shield up.

Entering Plex now. Sliding down to more and going into the Unraid Sino server to move these. I'm muting the shield. and I'm going to play the 4k stream so you'll see up here this change under dashboard well I guess I guess I may not know what I have there let's go in and look through unraid I'm sorry, not into the container.

Let's look here, back to the Synology NAS. All right, so I simply didn't select which one I wanted to start. So the 720p started automatically. So let me go back and play version. And I have two different 4K ones, both at 10 megabits per second, 10.5 and 10.8.

So I started at 10.5. All right, so it's still detecting some intros. And it didn't play the one version, let's try the other. Okay, so that's going.

Let's look at dashboard. Alright, so it's transcoding it. It's not playing it directly.

Oh, I see, it's AV1. The IGPU in this 7th Gen Dell computer is not going to handle an AV1 transcode. But I wanted to force a transcode anyway to show you the dashboard. And all the transcoding is happening on the CPU and not the GPU.

Because the iGPU can't handle this. So that wasn't a good choice to use. Let's use a regular video. Yeah, I don't have a public domain 4K H.265 or HEVC.

video to use. So let me start this up. If we go back to the Unraid server, we're playing, the processor is being used a little bit, and nothing's going on with the GPU. So if we go back here and I transcode this video to 720p, you'll see that the transcode started. It's not playing yet.

It's buffering. So now it's playing. If we go back to Unraid, oh we got something going on because my transcodes are going into the CPU and not the iGPU. So we don't have hardware accelerated transcoding going.

Well, let me stop this video and figure out why, and I'll be back. Rookie mistake. Even though I've got the hardware acceleration all set in Unraid, I haven't enabled it on this server, which, again, is a rookie mistake.

Well, only that I do. Well, I picked it specifically, and I need to click that. Use hardware acceleration when available.

And then auto should still work. Okay, so let's go back to our dashboard. Implex is still working in the background detecting intros on the TV shows. So let me start with a 1080p H.265 video.

Alright, so it started up direct playing and let me enable a transcode. Alright, it spun for a little bit and it started up on my end. Let's wait for the dashboard to...

Oh, it already did. So now we're at 480p, and we see the HW for Hardware Transcode. And if we go to Unraid, we now see activity under the GPU section. So the processor is working because it's detecting intros in the background. And I can't stop that, but hopefully it won't run too long.

So I may stop the video and come back and do another test. test just so you can see that this all settles down once the intros are done being detected. But the GPU is being used right now and Unraid will show that. Let's go back into Plex and let's try that big buck bunny again and see what will happen. Make sure I play the right version of it.

and I'm going to try the 10.5 megabit per second 4k version and that's spinning on my end I don't really remember the media characteristics okay so this is a h.264 4k version and it's it's transcoding to 4k h.264 so it is playing if we go back to unraid it's using the GPU the IGPU and let's see how a force transcode to 720p does four megabits per second spinning on my shield dashboard is reflected the change but it hasn't started yet All right, so it's started. So just imagine how this might perform with an 11th gen Intel CPU. I love the Iris Xe graphics. All right, so it took a little bit, but it's playing. And if we go back to Unraid, we'll see the GPU is active doing the transcode.

But it's buffering on my end. Let's play original quality and then back onto the stream and we'll try the other 4k version. This is the AV1 I believe. okay so that's being transcoded to h.264 also and it looks like the i'm going to stop the stream it looks like the processor gets peg 2 trying to do that one Alright, let's just check something from the TV show library.

Alright, so this is an unread server pointing back to a Synology NAS on a very old, in my opinion, device. A 7th Gen Intel processor. I'd really go with something more modern, but it'll work. And at least it's better, it's a better iGPU than what's in my Synology DS1520.

As long as you get the 8th gen, 9th or 10th gen processor and 11th gen will do. be a killer machine and let me let me pause this again and we'll see if we can get the remote access going for this so you don't have to reference that video for the final part of the video for the remote access I have a Linux utility Yeah, somebody said I didn't give the greatest advice for something. I have a Linux utility that allows me to display my phone screen on my computer screen. It won't work while I'm screen recording. So let's go into remote access and I'll have to end up blurring my public IP out of this section of the video.

But I went into the settings of my TP-Link router to Deco X60 on my phone and I reserved this IP address and I manually forwarded this port. to 31 400. so all you have to do is check this let's change that to 31 400 and hit retry this should take about 60 to 90 seconds and lock and remote access. Okay so we're fully accessible outside the network and Plex is done scanning now and I just want to show something.

Let's go back to my shield and i'll play the 4k version that is the um the default 720p that starts right up um i'll go to play version and we'll play the 4k one that we know is h.264 I just wanted to show that it really didn't change things too much when all the background tasks were complete that were on the CPU. So you'll see Plexus saying we're only using 20% of the CPU for this stream. It looks more intensive from the unread display and it is transcoding.

but we know it's transcoding because it says so here and it says it's hardware so let's just force a 720p transcode 720p 4 megabits per second so it's buffering on my screen now it's buffering on the dashboard display So really we're going to have about the same performance even though those background tasks aren't running on the CPU. So this will make an adequate Plex server, a 7th gen processor with its iGPU, but you'd really want something more modern to... handle 4k the way you want to. Now, did this take a long time?

It's playing now, now it just buffered a little bit, now it's playing. You really want something more modern to transcode 4k, but the whole idea is to not transcode 4k in the first place. And...

It just is what it is what it is and this may not be the best test quality material because generally my 4k stuff direct streams but I didn't have any public domain stuff to find to use this this example so that's that's my little unraid install It works great off my NUC and I might as well go into that for a comparison before I end the video. The video is already long enough but let me just show you what an 11th gen processor does. I'm looking for my highest bitrated movie and I've shown this before all right so I just started it up and let's go to this so this is 104 megabits per second it's an H EVC which is h265 and it's direct playing so if I force a transcode Let's see, I clicked the wrong button.

I'm into chapter selection and I don't want to be. My shield's being funny. Let's resume it again. Alright, let's convert it now to 720p, 4 megabits per second.

spinning a little bit, started right up, and you'll just see what that Iris XE IGPU can do. It's just a fabulous IGPU. If I want to transcode it even lower, which, why would you want to do that, right?

Well, let's go to 480p, 1.5 megabits per second. Okay, so it started up on my end, and now you see it switched to SD. So that 11th Gen processor is just fantastic. Alright, so I can end the video. Let me blur out my IP address, and I'll try to get all this on Facebook today.

Thanks for watching this long, extended video. And I know I ramble. I know this wasn't smooth, but it's hard to script a video like this instead of just doing it.

Thanks for watching.

Transcript for:Installing Unraid on Dell Optiplex

Transcript for:
Installing Unraid on Dell Optiplex