Raid5

BobPhoenix - thanks I'll look into that.

Greetings, I am trying to enable S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on my PERC H710p controller. From the main tab I can select an individual disc and then change its "SMART controller type:" to megaraid. When I do this all I get is a spinner with the message "Please wait... retrieving S.M.A.R.T. information!" which never updates the screen. If I set the controller type to SCSI, then the only section on the screen with any data is the " identity" section. The attributes and capabilities sections are blank saying "Can not read attributes" or Can not read capabilities" None of the other controller types work at all, megaraid is the proper driver for this card. Through the magic of Googling, I was able to figure out that I can get smartctl to work if I run it with these parameters: smartctl -d megaraid,1 -a /dev/sdj Clearly it is possible via CLI, so is there some modification I can make that will allow the GUI to change the way it is doing the query so that my smart data is being reported by unraid? Thanks

Face palm!! Yes of course that is the case and I knew that but still I brain farted.. Sorry about that. That is correct, some of the newer ones do from what I have seen. As for getting another controller, in this case this is a 2U box and cable management is a pain if you try to use non-OEM configurations(very little wiggle room if you ever want to get the cover back on). Also the card is not a standard PCIe add in card as this is the 710 mini version that has its own socket on the motherboard (see attached). The new build of Unraid 6.3.0 RC5 has the right megaraid driver and does allow me to see the the drives as individual raid 0 disks so I can use this methodology to create a sudo-Jbod mode. I will just let Unraid make a pool of the 24 disks once set them all up as single raid 0 disks and use the largest for my parity. Time for some more experimentation. Thanks again for the feedback.

Greetings everyone, I am trying Unraid for the first time and right now I'm in the experimental phase of the build process. My question is this, in my system (Dell R720xd) I have PERC H710p. This controller does not allow for HBA mode/JBOD/NON-Raid disks, so I am left only with creating raid volumes and presenting them to Unraid. Given this controller's limitation (not sure if this limit is a curse or a blessing yet), I'm trying to figure out what is the best approach to configure my drives. I realize that a hardware RAID controller is generally better then software raid solution, so is it better to allow the RAID controller to do most of the disk/raid management by creating one large RAID 6 volume for example and then dedicate one free drive for Unraid parity or is it somehow better to create multiple RAID 0 volumes with an Unraid parity disk? Of course going to RAID 0 route means more disks to manage within the Unraid GUI, whereas a large raid volume makes it so I only have one drive to manage plus one parity disk. I'm looking at this from the perspective of performance, reliability, ease of recovery, pros and cons of each approach, etc. Being a complete N00b on the topic of Unraid I am not sure what issues/pitfalls may arise from each of the two approaches with regards to Unraid. It seems to me that the RAID 6 option is probably the better if not easier route, however going the RAID 0 route allows me to easily add and remove disks to the pool, where a raid volume is not expandable. With Unraid in the mix I'm not sure what other challenges this will arise later on. This system will be used as both a hypervisor as well as media server. Thanks