New Unraid user with a few questions

[PGC77]

Hi everyone,

 

New Unraid user here.

I'm a video editor and I normally work on a QNAP TVS-872XT NAS with 80 TB of storage and three Mac and Windows clients. All is connected over 10GbE. The main reasons I went with the QNAP was simplicity and speed. It worked great for over a year but a couple of days ago, the mainboard died and I had to RMA the unit. Due to several backups, no data was lost but I have to wait 15-30 days until the unit comes back from repair... quite annoying.

So I thought, why not trying Unraid. If everything goes well, this will be my new main Backup Server for all my video data.

 

I played around with it the last few days, watched all the Spaceinvader One tutorials and so far I'm really impressed with the simplicity and functionality of Unraid.

 

My Array currently contains 3 x 10 TB IronWolf disks and the cache pool is build with 2 x 1 TB Samsung 860 SSDs. I will add a few more 10 TB drives in the future. I have installed a QNAP 10 GbE NIC which also works well.

 

Now to my actual question:

I also have a bunch of old harddrives (500 GB / 1 TB / 2 TB / 4 TB) that I would like to use as an Archive drive for old projects and to store data that is not that important. I'm aware, that I could just add these drives to the main array but I guess this has a negative impact on read/write speeds or am I wrong? The 10 TB IronWolf disks are quite fast but I guess when I mix them with old drives, it decreases the performance of the Array. Please correct me, if I am wrong.

 

I have learned, that I can't have two independent Arrays in Unraid. So I thought about running an additional Unraid Installation as a VM on the main Unraid Sever and create my Archive drive on the VM Unraid Server. Would that be possible and does that make sense?

 

 

[itimpi]

The 6.9.0 release (currently at rc2 status) introduces support for multiple pools (instead of just the single cache pool supported in 6.8.3) so that might be a way to utilise the spare drives?

[ljm42]

8 hours ago, PGC77 said:

I thought about running an additional Unraid Installation as a VM on the main Unraid Sever and create my Archive drive on the VM Unraid Server. Would that be possible

 

Yes it is possible to run Unraid as a guest on an Unraid host:
  https://forums.unraid.net/topic/60106-guide-how-to-install-an-unraid-vm-on-an-unraid-host/

 

however, this is technically not supported.

 

I think itimpi's suggestion is the better way to go.

[PGC77]

Thanks @ljm42 and @itimpi.

I will give it a try.