ZION – 4U Unraid Storage Server

I am excited to reveal my latest 2020 custom server build – ZION. See my previous planning post for Zion here.

Built from the ground up to be a custom 15+ drive bay rack-mountable storage server and virtual machine host. Using AMD Ryzen Zen+ architecture and X370 chipset. Zion was designed to be powerful enough to run KVM virtual machines and Docker containers.

Zion runs Unraid Pro with SSD caching and dual parity. It has capacity for 25 drives total: 24 HDDs (16 HBA + 8 On-board Mobo) and 1 x M.2 SSD/NVMe slot.

Named after Zion from the The Matrix movies.

Zion is the last human city on the planet Earth after a cataclysmic nuclear war between mankind and sentient machines, which resulted in artificial lifeforms dominating the world.

https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Zion
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2020 Home Lab Upgrade (Unraid 4U)

It’s a new year, and that means it’s time for some home lab upgrades!

The last few upgrades I did were some hardware hacks to my old Thecus N5550’s to support 6 drives and Unraid. Before that I did a SSD upgrade on NAS3 for my VMware VM storage. And finally almost a two years ago exactly I installed a Synology DS1817+.

After using Unraid more and more in my home environment and understanding how it works I have become more confident in using it and can say I am pretty much on the Unraid kool-aid.

So my goal for 2020 is to make a large capacity storage server, and more or less retire most of my Thecus N5550’s that have served me so well.

So the planned 2020 additions are:

  • New 4U Unraid 15+ Drive Storage Server
  • Replace 4-Tier Shelf with a 5-Tier Shelf
  • 10Gbps Pre-Planning
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