Hi all,
I've come from IT a few years ago (Mostly workshop activities, home server setup and maintenance and fully Apple certified) and looking at running an Unraid box. Partially for the learning and fun and partially because, well, it'll be cheaper than buying a Qnap and i have plenty of random sized hard drives and HDD bays in my case.
I understand that as far as drives go, Unraid writes directly to a drive and if you had 5 drives and no parity drive and a drive failed, you still have 4 x drives worth of accessible data. My questions are:
1. I've read that you only need a parity drive, the size of your largest drive. So, what happens if i have 4 x 8TB drives, 3 x 6TB drives and 2 x 4TB drives with a single 8TB parity drive. How can that single 8TB parity drive hold enough info to rebuild any one of those drives? I'm assuming that the instructions of parity are not the same size as the data. So, assuming that to rebuild a 4GB movie, you do not need 4GB worth of parity information. But where do you draw the line? Where does a parity drive become too small for your array? (Or is this a case of some information is worse than none and i'm over thinking it?)
2. If i set a cache SSD of 60GB and transferred 40GB up front and then 50GB moments later, what happens? Does 60GB go to the cache and then the remainder get flicked directly to the array? (WIth the cache eventually moving to the array)
3. I tried setting up a Windows 10 VM. Now, i stuffed up and was running Unraid off of my GPU. I tried to passthrough the GPU to the VM and when i ran it, surprise surprise, the system crashed. (Didn't include a Vbios). I went into the BIOS and forced on board and tried again. The VM seemed to boot to a virtual BIOS? I selected a Windows 10 ISO in the setup panel etc. but not sure if it was my little mishap with the GPU (as in, a hardware VM issue causing BIOS) or perhaps a bad iso? I was running out of time last night so gave up on the idea for now, but keen to hear theories and things to try.
Was toying with the idea of NAS and gaming machine or NAS and HTPC, depending on gaming performance as to which machine gets unraid and the HDD's.
Thanks all!