ivanthomson

Clustering would be cool. Tying multiple servers together as a single array/pool.

I used to a WD guy. About 10 years ago WD made great drives. Especially the green and blue drives were work horses. WD raptor and velociraptor drives were awesome when they made them. All my raptor and velociraptor drives still work to this day (and are in my server happy as can be). Greens aren't even available anymore, but blues are still decent for your daily PCs (not so great for servers though). I used a lot of bare bones WD drives and a lot of shucked WD drives over a couple decades for various things. I've switched back to Seagate, after a about a 20 year time period of avoiding them. Way back in the day (1980s and 1990s) Seagate drives were very good, then they became very bad. Well, same story with WD... once a upon a time they were very good, now it seems their quality is dropping a lot. I still have old Seagate drives from the 1980s and 1990s (and other brands) that still work just fine (mainly old 10/20MB, etc drives for old computers); seems like modern drives are rubbish by comparison. Anyway, had a couple Toshibas that worked for awhile, then suddenly died, so my faith in those isn't so good at the moment. So, switched to Seagate Ironwolf and Ironwolf/Pro drives for now (especially when they are on sale). We shall see how that goes and hopefully Seagate has improved again. So, I'm fine with just about anything in a daily PC, but under 24/7 server conditions I do not trust WD anymore, I am iffy about Toshiba, and have slightly more faith in Seagate (at the moment but that might change). Basically, no one makes decent drives anymore, at least not like they used to. Hard drives have become synonymous with used cars. Some work, some don't work so well. Some are just total garbage. If I can get 4 or 5 years out of a drive without a bazillion errors popping up I guess that is the best we can hope for these days. Someone must be making a fortune recycling a mountain of not really that old of HHDs. We are in the era of the disposable throw away hard drive now... save the planet and all that. Oh, one thing I do now though... I avoid SMR drives like the plague now. For my server (and even my daily PCs for the most part) I only use CMR drives now (which kills buying most of the cheapest drives and pretty much kills shucking anymore). Aside from SMR just slowing down write times to a crawl, it seems (no data to back up my claims, just experience speaking) the SMR rewrites (moving blocks of data around to re-shingle blocks) appears to put a ton of extra wear and tear on the drives in the server environment. I won't put a SMR in my server, even if it is a free drive. I know I'll be killing my write speeds and having to replace that drive too soon and having to go through a drive replacement and data rebuilding session too soon. It's like having a drive that needs to micro defrag every time you write to it. I rather spend $15 to $50 extra to get a good solid CMR drive. As you get older and older you tend to gather a lot of magnetic bits (data)... and you just don't want to sit around having to copy drives... yes, I have a drive cloner, but, still. There are better things in life to do... so I try to stick with drives that have longevity and don't waste my time re-shingling. Now if WD would just give us a 4, 6, 8, and 10TB velociraptor of the same quality as the old 500gb and 1tb ones it would be on. Ok, I have ranted enough... thank you and may you forever find the best hard drives.

When I was installing Unraid for the first time I had the same issue using the USB tool. It wouldn't recognize any of my USB flash drives. But, once installed Unraid itself had no problem pulling the GUID from my SanDisk USB flash drive. I actually emailed tech support and they explained this to me. I ended up doing a manual install instead of using the boot creation tool thing. Manual install instructions; https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/getting-started/manual-install-method/ Worked perfect for me. Also, make sure SECURE BOOT is turned off (disabled) in the BIOS before doing a manual install. I hope this helps you.