Good evening,
currently, I'm building my first unRaid-Server and I want to share my thoughts and experiences.
Hardware:
- N54L HP Microserver, 4GB RAM, No-HDD, with DVD-RW, Model #708245-425
- 4 x 4TB ST4000DM000
- Bios-Mod for full speed at all 6 Sata-Ports
Further additions, already bought but not installed yet:
- Samsung 840 EVO 120GB as cache disk
- another 4TB ST4000DM000 as manual "hotspare"
- Raidsonic ICY BOX IB-172SK-Bas replacement for the DVD-RW drive
unRaid 5.0 is placed at a SanDisk 8GB stick plugged into the internal(!) motherboard usb slot of the N54L, no problems with booting or sharing. The bios settings have been changed according to the link above and, VERY IMPORTANT, disk caching has been enabled in the bios (only do that if you have some form of ups!). Changed the parity creation from 38MB/sec to 80MB/sec @ the test setup with 3 Samsung HD753LJ.
I already added unMenu, openssh and some other plugins, no big deal but worth mentioning as it was a simple click-and-click procedure and not what one might expect from a linux system :-)
I started the pre-clear-Script about 28 hours ago, for all four 4TB discs at once (4 telnet sessions) and here's the main reason for starting this thread:
- none of the 4 disks ever went above 35C
- the pre-read and the post-read speeds are ~140MB/sec per disc
- the N54L is still very silent (located ~50 cm to the right of my head at the moment)
The pre-clear script will be finished tomorrow and then I will do some benchmarking that will be published here, of course.
After 4xN40L with Windows 2012 and StarWind iSCSI as data pool for my two Dell servers running ESXi 5, this N54L is my first server running unRaid. The tests with the free license and my 3 Samsung HD753LJ were very successful and promising.
One question may be permitted:
Is there really no possibility to define a hotspare disk that jumps in automatically in case of a hard disk failure? Of course, this disk has to match the largest disk in the array, i.e. the parity disk. Any plugin, perhaps? We are talking about data, maybe valuable data and this data should be protected best effort.
cu
Volker