Phillips2010

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Everything posted by Phillips2010

  1. Hello community. Today I have installed Unraid onto a 16GB USB and began a trial of Unraid OS using the latest stable version - 6.8.3. I have spent the last 4 hours trying to get 2 hard drives recognised by Unraid and have so far failed and quickly loosing trust in a system I am yet to use. I therefore turn to the community for guidance and to build this trust. The system is a SuperMicro CSE-846 with a X9DRi-F motherboard. It has an Adaptec 71605 1GB (SAS/SATA) RAID card installed connected to a backplane. I have configured this to HBA mode. I have installed a 14TB WD drive and a 12TB WD drive into the server. Both drives are recognised within the raid controller config screen. See screenshot. When booted into Unraid I cannot see the drives and on the one occasion this evening I managed to see a drive, it could not be selected in the dropdown to create an array. I downloaded the plugin unassigned devices and drives did not show here. I have plugged the drives into a Windows PC and it was instantly recognised by Windows. I used Windows to do a quick reformat of the drives but they still did not show in Unraid. Shutting down and starting up the system I eventually got Unraid to show the 14TB drive as a SCSI device but still could not mount it, assign it as parity or data drive. I restarted the system in the hope of also having the 12TB drive appear but in doing so lost both drives from view of Unraid and haven't been able to get them back. I don't know what help it is but, before I shut down and left the server for the night I took a copy of the system log. At this point it did not recognise the drives in Unraid. Text file attached. I have also attached screenshots showing drives not there. I hope someone can tell me what is going wrong. If all goes to plan this system will be holding 12 drives and in excess of 30TB data and while I have a backup of the data I'd prefer not to have to use it. Please let me know if you need more information to diagnose the problem. Ben. System Log.rtf
  2. Thank you for your reply. Great to hear from a fellow home user like myself. Thank you for giving your view on dockers and giving an alternative to TeamViewer. I will watch the videos this evening and educate myself what to do. As you said it is not a technical response but the words “it just works” made me smile.
  3. Hello forum, I have been contemplating switching to Unraid for a few years now and I am wondering if now is the time for me to take the jump and invest in an Unraid system. I have previously used Synology, Windows and Mac and for one reason or another I have felt the need to change. Before doing so I wanted to share why I am considering Unraid and what I hope to achieve so I can benefit from the knowledge of others before jumping in. CURRENT SET UP My current NAS set up is a 2014 Mac Mini with i5 and 4GB RAM. The OS can no longer be updated and the lack of RAM makes it painful to screen share into for administration. Connected to it is 4 x USB raid enclosures. Raid enclosure 1 - 4 x 6TB drives in Raid5 giving 18TB usable space (8.87TB currently free) - day to day files Raid enclosure 2 - 4 x 6TB drives in Raid5 giving 18TB usable space (3.92TB currently free) - long term storage Raid enclosure 3 - 4 x 4TB drives in Raid5 giving 12TB usable space (1.5TB currently free) - plex media library Raid enclosure 4 - 2 x 3TB drives in Raid0 giving 6TB usable space (3.26TB currently free) - TimeMachine backup It sits next to my desk in its own modified Ikea cabinet hiding a mess of cables (beautiful cable management) behind it. But this is fine because for the most part the mess is out of sight. The Mac Mini is a file server connected to my iMac through a thunderbolt cable and my MacBook through the local network. It also runs a plex media server accessible offsite for myself and my family to access a range of SD and HD content saved as .mp4 files. Plex is hit and miss on whether streams work when you have more than one person trying to watch something or when watched from certain devices. A friend gave me access to their plex media library and when I struggled to stream on my local network from my own set up, I can access theirs remotely without issue and despite tweaking settings I still have issues so putting this down to the Mac Mini. I am also conscious of the scalability of my current storage system to easily add capacity to each storage share without moving all the data off the drives to install new larger drives and transfer the data back. Unraid appears to tick the box of being able to pool all my drives and add new drives of varying capacities as required for the benefit of all storage shares. One of the things I love about my current set up is I have a Backblaze personal account and have every file backed up to the cloud through their service. Unraid running on Linux means I am unable to use Backblaze personal at $5/month, increasing cost to $5/TB/month making this not cost effective. I have looked at Crashplan for small business but their average upload speeds makes this not viable either. THE PLAN My plan is to buy a SuperMicro CSE-846 as my exclosure providing me with 24 hard drive bays. More bays than I need but will future proof me. I plan to buy this pre-configured with 2 x E5-2620v2 CPUs, 32GB RAM and HBA card. I plan to have a single 14TB parity drive with following drives for data: 1 x 12TB 6 x 6TB repurposed from my current set up I will add a single 14TB drive as a parity and 12TB drive for data. I will begin migrating data then add my 6TB drives as I free them of content from my current set up. I am also considering the addition of a 240GB SSD cache drive and a 240GB SSD for plex metadata and VM data. I will gift my 4TB drives to a friend for their own project. I plan to use the 2 left over 6TB drives as direct storage for my iMac with a view of moving some of the files currently stored on raid enclosure 1 to create DAS. Once data migration is completed I plan to move the Unraid box to my workplace where I am allowed to install it in their server rack. They have a fibre connection of 70Mb down and 20Mb up. This will mean the server benefits from redundant power supplies and the company firewall. My server can be placed on its own VLAN to segregate it from the office infrastructure. I also won’t have to worry about system noise levels as it will not be housed next to my desk. Day to day files and my large photos library will be on the DAS for easy access. I will also keep my TimeMachine backup onsite on its existing raid enclosure. I will set up port forwarding for Plex. I am uncertain the best way to migrate my existing database files and metadata to a Plex docker and therefore wonder if setting up Plex in a VM, while adding overhead will make the migration easier. I will install a VM on Unraid with TeamViewer or equivalent set up for me to remotely login to the Unraid system. I am considering the use of ftp to transfer files to Unraid and on the rare occasion I need to, remotely access the files on the system. I will predominately pushing data to Unraid. Backup solution will be an issue but if my most important, irreplaceable data is on the DAS, I can continue to protect this with Backblaze, mitigating some of the risk. QUESTIONS Please can I have your thoughts on whether this sounds like a good solution. Do you thing Plex should be in a docker or VM and do you have any guidance on how to migrate this from Mac OS? Do my system specs sounds powerful enough? Is my planned method, a safe and effective method for offsite file access? I understand Unraid is not intended to be a cloud storage device. Does anyone have recommendation on cloud backup solutions for large data sets? Is there anything I have missed? Is there a reason you would recommend I don’t switch to Unraid? Thank you for taking the time to read this and I look forward to the forums comments and recommendations. I