tdallen

Love the new theme, thank you!

Interesting card, but since it's made for QNAP enclosures you may have trouble with unRAID having the appropriate drivers. I don't have any direct experience, though.

If you just want to start by burning in the new hardware, you could use an unRAID 30-day Trial License for the purpose.

I started off my unRAID server with High Watermark and all disks included in all shares. It's a good setting for a new user to start with, and remains a good setting for users who just like to use their server rather than tinker with it. That said, I came to three conclusions. One, I actively manage my server - disks aren't going to fill up without my knowing. Two, I didn't like having files in a share scattered unnecessarily across multiple disks. Three, while having equal amounts of data smoothly spread across all disks seems appealing, it's actually a pain to manage. So, at the recommendation of some folks here like @SSD I switched over to having shares "include" only the disks I want the data on, and all shares are set to "Fill" each disk (with a nice big minimum free space). I also use the diskmv/consld8 utilities to move data from one set of disks to another when infrequently needed. Warning, this is a more advanced approach that requires you to actively manage your server - one disk could fill up while you have space available on others. But I prefer it so far.

No. There are a couple of ways you can arrange to move them. But, simply adding/rearranging the disks in the share settings doesn't automatically cause files to be moved.

If you create a "Media" share (well, any share), and you don't use a solution like cachedirs, then when you access the Media share the only way unRAID will have to determine the contents is to spin up all the drives associated with that share. Unused drives will spin back down after the standard delay. My personal preference is setup more granular shares - TV Shows, Movies, etc. And I target certain drives to be associated with each share. That minimizes the number of drives that need to spin up when a share is accessed.

Personal Preference - I feel like a Media folder is too general and prefer Movies, TV Shows, etc. Why would I want to spin up all the disks where TV Shows are located when I want to watch a movie? Downloads will generally be on your cache drive, not the array.

Torrenting can do bad things to your router, depending on what you are running. It may be necessary to restrict the number of active torrents, connections, bandwidth, etc. OpenVPN consumes a decent amount of CPU on my older system - 40% at times.

Something like: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833156258 You have a wired Ethernet connection from your computer to this device, and then it connects via wireless into your home network. Since all unRAID sees is the connection out via the wired Ethernet connection, it's happy. Read all the bad reviews, I don't recommend this approach - but it exists.

Well you could go the gaming adapter route, but Wifi is spotty, inconsistent, subject to interference and obstruction, etc. - basically not suitable for attaching a server to a network. My recommendation is to move your server to a place where it can be hard wired. I'd go Ethernet over powerline or MoCA before attempting Wifi for a server. Actually I'd drill holes for Ethernet before any of those, but you get what I mean.

Not directly. You could potentially use a gaming type adaptor - Ethernet from your server to the wifi device. Why wouldn't you want your VMs to share the Ethernet connection, though?

Thanks, this is a great review and detailed set of mods! Aside from room for an mATX motherboard, is there anything else you preferred about the CS380 over the DS380? The drive cage mod to allow a fan to be mounted on the bottom seems annoying, but important.

I'm quite interested in your opinion of and mods on the CS380!

Haswell and newer Intel CPUs contain support for the AVX2 instruction set. The unRAID dual parity calculations leverage this for faster performance, but your 2010 i7 should be able to handle dual parity without issue. The AVX2 instruction set probably benefits low end processors the most since they have less raw horsepower to work with.

With a 28 drive array, I would guess that there is a high likelihood that you would wind up having multiple disks from the same manufacturer, of the same size, purchased around the same time, from the same manufacturing lots. It's undesirable but seems inevitable in an array that large - and the corresponding slightly higher risk of multiple simultaneous failure is all I'd need to rationalize dual parity. It's probably been mentioned but is worth repeating - neither parity nor dual parity is going to save your bacon when a drive fails. Parity (single or dual) plus the fact that the rest of your array is healthy and capable of contributing to a rebuild is what saves your bacon. Dual parity buys you a little extra safety buffer, but you still need to stay vigilant about drive health.