jj_uk

Following up on this, if the drives are connected to the on-board SATA ports on the motherboard, this means that the motherboards' RAID controller is between unRAID and the physical drive. In my case, that's an on-board Intel C612 RAID controller. Therefore, unRAID *doesn't* have HBA access to the disks; it has RAID 0 single disk mode access to the disk. Am I missing something? For the above reasons, would on-board SATA ports just be a bad idea? We'd need to use PCIe cards (such as the LSI/IBM M1050 flashed to SAS9211 IT mode) in order to allow unRAID direct access the disks (?)

Does UnRaid provide a way to stress test a new drive? I'd like to test each disk for, say, 24 hrs hard labor before using it for data. - I found 'preclear', buts it seems to be un-supported. Note, I've not yet installed UnRaid, i'm waiting for some disks to arrive in the post....

guys- you've all be very helpful. I'll continue building the new server and get the trial going! (I'm 99% sure this is the product for me!)

Thanks for your replies. Where do plugins come from? I cant find a link to plugins from the lime-tech homepage? With regards to SATA ports and RAID cards; If using the on-board SATA ports, there will be a raid controller between UnRaid and the physical disk. The motherboard raid controller will be in RAID-0 (single disk) mode. Does this not pose a problem to UnRaid as I believe the raid controller will write config info to the disk, preventing it from being placed in a different machine if the motherboard dies? the 2nd paragraph of the 1st post here explains it: https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/confused-about-that-lsi-card-join-the-crowd.11901/ Of-course this link is referring to ZFS, but surely this will remain true for UnRaid also? On-board raid controllers can also, in some cases, cache data, meaning that it's not really written to the disk when the OS thinks it has been. A power failure when the data is cache'd by the raid controller would cause data loss. So can UnRaid manage disks that are connected to a HBA controller? and is a HBA controller, for the reasons above, required? How does UnRaid ensure that the data has been written to the disk if using an on-board SATA port that has a raid controller between the disk and the port (or a SATA raid expansion card) ?

I'm looking to move from FreeNAS to UnRaid because my FreeNAS server is full and you can't just add another drive with zfs; I'd need to replace each drive, one by one with larger disks. The Server is running 6x 3T disks in RAID-Z2, giving 13T usable space. Replacing all disks is expensive and wasteful as i'd have no use for the old disks. I've never really 'clicked' with FreeNAS as it's just a bit above my paygrade, but here is what i'm using it for: Jails: - VPN Gateway (that other jails use to access the internet via OpenVPN) - Plex Media Server + a few other jails running various stuff - File server to a few windows PCs. Each user has there own storage area, the cannot access each-others storage (permissions), there is also a shared storage area that some, not all, users can access. I'll be changing the hardware too, my new hardware is: 2x Intel Xeon 2640 v3 with Intel VT-x/VT-d and AES instructions Asus z10pa-d8 motherboard 64G EEC ram A case that can hold up to 20 disks. Questions: The hardware requirements page on the Lime-tech website doesn't actually give full hardware requirements for an UnRaid server. Its missing number of disks and what type of RAID cards are required. It states only 1G of RAM is required (really?). The wiki gives approximate RAM required for VM, Dockers etc, but i'm interested in the amount of RAM that will be required per 1T disk, if there is even such a requirement, like there is in FreeNAS. FreeNAS requires 8G RAM + 1G per 1T of storage. How much RAM does UnRaid need, per 1T of storage? Do I need to use raid controller cards that have direct access to the disks e.g. a IBM M1015 card flashed to IT mode to allow UnRaid direct access to the HDDs, like I do if I were going to use FreeNAS on the new server, or can I use the on-board SATA ports that are controlled by the Intel C612 chipset (10 x SATA3 6Gb/s), or both the M1015 and the on-board SATA ports ? As far as I can see, the only reference to number of disks that can be used is on the pricing page. It states that up to 28 data disks can be protected by 2 parity disks. Is this really enough parity to allow 2 disks to fail at the same time? How many disks can be fully protected with only one parity disk? Is it possible to have 2 USB (boot) drives, mirrored? In my FreeNAS box, the USB keys tend to die after 12-18 months (Kingston drives). Can UnRaid monitor the SMART stats from the HDDs and send me an email if a disk is showing signs that it may fail, or if the drives' temperature exceeds a preset value, set by me? Does UnRaid have Cron? So I can run my own scripts every so often? I use these mainly to schedule backups to other servers and to check that the jails (docker in UnRaid) are all running correctly, etc. Can I install windows in a Virtual Desktop, then allow users to log in to and use windows, remotely, over a network? I guess i'll need some hardware device to allow a keyboard, mouse and monitor to be linked over Ethernet to the UnRaid box - can anyone recommend a product that deals with this? Does my server need a Graphics card for this, or is the graphics card built into the network box that the remote keyboard/mouse/monitor connects to? I'd like all my drives to be encrypted. Is this supported, and will it degrade performance? My server will be headless after the initial setup. Does UnRaid allow SSH to do maintenance, or is it WebGUI only?