16 February 2021

Twitch Streaming and Podcasting with Unraid

Oliver Al-Nabhani and his wife Alicia Peña Alcaraz are Madrid-based Engineers who host a podcast and Twitch streams using Unraid.

Setup

Oliver Al-Nabhani and his wife Alicia Peña Alcaraz are Madrid-based Engineers that have a podcast and Twitch channel in Spanish that talk about science and technology. They recently stumbled upon Unraid as a home-based NAS solution and have very enthusiastically started talking about and recommending the OS to their audience of mainly Software Engineers, Developers, Mechanical Engineers, and Designers.

One of the recent projects they have been working on is a revamp of both the hardware and network for their home streaming setup. After searching and trying out various options, they found Unraid.

Some months ago, my wife and I (we stream together every day) decided to update our setup to make our streamings as varied as possible. We use several cameras, mics, screens, to take advantage of the possibilities that platforms like Twitch can offer to teach about Science and Technology. It's not our job, we are both Engineers, but we love to talk about tech. -Oliver Al-Nabhani.

Since they stream from their Living Room and are both Engineers, they decided to make their hardware as powerful as possible while also maintaining the aesthetic design of their home. With this in mind, they began by designing a PC that can be disguised as furniture. The construction of the casing was made with precision metal machining and custom woodwork done with CNC machines.

After completing the "furniture", the next step was to improve their home network.

We added some switches, a good wifi access point, and CAT7 ethernet cables that we crimped on-camera streaming. This was very, very difficult and remains part of a meme of our channel even today. Everything was installed inside furniture, with a custom cooling system controlled by Arduinos. - Oliver

Net Cooling

The last thing to complete was their NAS.

"We have a QNAP machine that we use in a mix of data storage, virtual machines to, for example, control our Twitch Bot, and come Dockers for things like 3D printing or home automation. But, we really don't like QTS nor the machine itself." -Oliver

After not being happy with their QNAP machine, they discovered Unraid and loaded a trial on their previous PC: an Intel Nuc Hades Canyon. 

PC Internals

"We have been extremely happy with Unraid to round out our custom home set up. We talked about it some days ago on a stream, and there was a lot of interest!" -Oliver

They are now explaining things like Docker containers, HyperV and VMs to their audience. They also did a nice breakdown and recommendation of Unraid on a recent podcast:

Here's Their Full Hardware:

NAS/VM with UNRAID:

Intel NUC Hades Canyon

  • i7-8890, 32GB RAM DDR4 HyperX, AMD RX Radeon Vega M GH

Disk assignation:

  • 250 GB NMVe Samsung 970 Evo for Dockers
  • 500 GB m2 SSD WD Blue for VMs
  • 4TB Lacie HDD for general data
  • 6TB WD RED PRO Parity Drive
     

Cache Drive:

  • 500GN OCZ SSD SATA for HDD

Oliver's PC:

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, 64 GB RAM 3200 GSkill, Nvidia 3090

  • 1TB Samsung 980 PRO, 1TB WD Blue, 4x500GB Samsung 960 SATA
  • 10G, Wifi 6, Thunderbolt 3

Alicia's PC:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB RAM 3200 Corsair Vengeance, Nvidia 1080 Ti

  • 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus, Wifi 6

Network:

UniFI US-8-60W (8Eth POE 60W), UniFi Switch Flex Mini, Ubiquiti UAP-AC-PRO, CAT7, and CAT6 cables depending on needs.

Do you use Unraid...

for podcasting or Twitch streaming? Tell us about your setup in the Unraid forums!

Let's hear about it!