tdallen

Hi - The step where you get rid of the old drive config and set a new one is called a New Config. You can do it at step 3, but you'd only be able to assign the cache drive. If you do it after the part in step 6, turn on the PC, you can both reassign the cache drive and assign the new data drive. You should also turn off auto starting the array before you get going. When you're ready to move ISOs back to the array drive, it will be a 2 step process. First you'll set Use Cache for ISOs to Yes. Then run mover, that will put the files back on the array drive. Then set Use Cache to No so that going forward no files will be placed on cache. By the way, I hope you are using CA backup to backup your Dockers to the array drive.

Hello and welcome. I think unRAID could meet your needs very easily but there will be differences in the way you set things up. unRAID supports 1 storage array with parity protection. It does not support separate drive pools like FreeNAS. If you chose to implement parity protection (everyone does), all data drives in the storage array will be protected by parity. You can have one or two parity drives. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/UnRAID_6/Overview#Network_Attached_Storage Once your array is built, you create user shares to store your data (in the link above, just keep reading). These are configurable and can span all drives, some drives, or be drive specific. You map a drive in Windows to a user share. FYI, I would not recommend trying to have any of the array drives in an external USB enclosure - array drives are better off in the NAS. You can mount and dismount an external USB drive for occasional use, though.

Which way did you go?

Unfortunately, a Coffee Lake CPU won't run on your motherboard - Coffee Lake uses the same CPU socket (1151) but requires a new chipset. Therefore, since your upgrade would be more involved I'd wait until you need it - and it sounds like it's running fine right now. There's always something better coming soon... I think you'll want to upgrade before you try to run Windows 10 in a VM unless you are planning for very light usage.

Hello and welcome. Preclear serves two purposes. It zeros out the drive and prepares it to be quickly added to the array, and performs a stress test of the drive to weed out infant mortality failures. In your case I don't think preclear adds much value - I'd just add the drives to the array and let unRaid take care of them. It will take a while - but probably less time than a preclear pass.

I think it's definitely worth considering. I've outfitted a bunch of folks with refurb'd Lenovo T420's coming off corporate leases. Very solid laptop, and the price/performance point of last gen hardware is actually very compelling, as you noticed with the refurb'd Dell above.

Can the sas9220-8i take an expander?

I have had decent luck with Dell’s as desktop PCs but some models have had proprietary components so I’d be careful what you are getting and what your options will be to replace or reuse components.

If you can't get pfsense to make the VPN connection (which would be ideal), a Google of router software for Windows does turn up some virtual router type of solutions. That's what I'd be looking into - router software to work within your Windows instance that will expose an internal network and use the VPN as its uplink.

Do you have sufficient available space on the remaining data drives to copy the contents of the failing data drive?

80GB would be rather small for a cache drive used for Dockers. I'd view 128GB as a more realistic minimum and 250GB is where most people start off. Obviously, it depends on what you do with it - you might need something bigger, or smaller. I've got a 20GB Docker file and find it's easy to accumulate stuff in appdata, though.

You are correct to wonder about that. In a default BTRFS RAID-1 setup, there are always two copies of your files on different devices. So that setup would effectively limit your use of the 1TB SSD. A better solution would be to use one of the SSDs as your cache drive and mount the other via Unassigned Devices .

It's definitely worth enabling if you want to use it. It's not worth enabling if you don't want to use it.

It's hard to offer advice. You seem to feel strongly that privoxy is doing something *really* important to help deluge and sab. But they're not even doing standard http traffic that would take advantage of a web proxy, they're doing API traffic to upload/download files. Privoxy is a helper application in this context and many people find it really convenient that's its bundled in with deluge and sab.

You're describing the "new standard" use case for unRAID with VMs, lots of people are doing exactly that. As @jebusfreek666 mentions, though, picking the right motherboard, CPU, and graphics options is important to running unRAID with hardware pass-through to a VM. You also need to be prepared to do some tinkering to get it all to work.

Hmm. What are you thinking privoxy is doing for you?

Because not everyone runs both of them. Mostly to give piggy back rides to other apps that don't have built in VPN but do have proxy capabilities. Yeah, sorry - that's not primarily what it's doing. It has very little to do with "protecting" sab or deluge. VPN does that. Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy, and in this case it's there to help other applications take advantage of the VPN that's built into the container. You can use privoxy without a VPN as well, and it does some nice filtering - but the primary value in this situation is to provide VPN piggy back rides. Entirely up to you, but all you need to do is turn privoxy off within Deluge to get things up and running. I'd suggest leaving privoxy enabled in Sab since you will probably run Sab all the time, and turn it off in Deluge which you may only run once in a while.

Yes, definitely. There is no point or need to enable privoxy in both. Privoxy lets non-VPN enabled applications "piggy-back" on a Docker with a VPN connection. There's no need to enable two Dockers to give VPN piggy back rides, and you're hitting port conflicts as you try to do it. One instance should be able to handle any browsers or fetchers you need. However, those applications need to allow a proxy setting. I don't know why? You've almost got this working. Just turn off privoxy in Deluge and leave it running in Sab (or vice versa). Then anyone who needs a secure proxy just asks for tower:8118.

Hello and welcome. unRAID would make it easier to stream music and videos, Plex is a popular solution. You can RDP into a VM. I don't think you're understanding unRAID's redundancy capabilities yet, though. unRAID isn't a traditional RAID implementation and it's not a hypervisor with various RAID strategies for OS images. It's an OS with its legacy as a NAS and recent evolution into a virtualization platform for Dockers and VMs. An unRAID server contains one (1) storage array. It can be protected by up to two parity drives. It is well suited to media storage. unRAID also implements a cache drive. This is the defacto application drive for Dockers and VMs. The cache "drive" can also be a pool of devices using BTRFS RAID/redundancy capabilities. Finally, unRAID allows the mounting of additional devices via the Unassigned Devices plugin (and many people use this to mount SSDs for a VM) but there is no redundancy provided within this capability. Wiki Reference: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/UnRAID_6/Overview#Network_Attached_Storage

An E3 Xeon is, for all intents and purposes, a Core i7 with support for ECC. There are other differences - clock speed, max turbo boost, etc. But in the final analysis it's still very similar to an i7. @nortsIn your case I'd just build with the i7, there's no advantage putting a Xeon on that board. While older, it should make a good starter platform for unRAID.

You can certainly mix and match drives in an unRAID array. Keep in mind, though, that in the event of a disk failure unRAID needs the parity drive *and all the other drives in the array* to reconstruct the failed drive. In other words, don't put failing disks or disks you don't have confidence in into the parity protected array. The 4 and 5TB drives you have should be more than fast enough to server HD content.

Well, you've actually got several more shares using cache - starting with L, W and X. That said, you have two SSDs, 128GB and 256GB. I am guessing you have them configured for BTRFS RAID-0, spanning with no redundancy? The devices look like they should have sufficient space but there's clearly an issue because the cache drive is reporting full and mover is unable to pull the Cache Prefer files back from the array. I'm thinking maybe something is up with BTRFS and hoping @johnnie.black will check in.

My experience so far with the USG is that it is an out of the box solution that will pretty much "just work" with minimal setup. It's not cheap, though, and really only makes sense if you plan to run several pieces of Unifi equipment. I'd go with their EdgeRouter if you just want a router, but I'm very happy so far with my USG/Switch-16/3-AP setup.

For Windows/SMB to unRAID I don't think I've ever hit a speed limit related to network protocols on a 1Gb network, though it's hard to say. I can hit full line speed with large files and Turbo Write directly to the parity protected array. Even with small files and no Turbo Write I don't usually drop all the way down to 50MB/s, again going directly to the array. Going to an SSD cache drive should be quite fast so I understand the OP's concern with 50-80MB/s from his Mac clients. Odd, but I traded in my Macs long ago so I don't have recent experience...

So long as you are writing to the SSD and not that old, slow HD then it seems like you've isolated the issue to Mac/OSX SMB and AFP. Unfortunately I can't help you there, but you might want to change your post title to reflect the Mac focus of your issue - there are folks here with Mac/unRAID experience.