AC-Gamer Posted April 6, 2021 Share Posted April 6, 2021 (edited) First time user of unraid so alot to learn but had a few questions I couldn't find the answers to yet so if anyone can help or point me in the right direction Id appreciate it. I have a 2 Dell r710's one with a 2.5 HHD's, 1tb each and the other with 3.5 HDD's, 2tb each. I'm using one for a plex server with 4, (12tb external hdd) and 1, (8tb external hdd) plugged into them with movies and want to expand them with another 8, (12tb hdd) but as it stands right now I have no redundancy for my setup. I originally planned to mount the drives in the r710s and use a raid 5 or 6 but found out after the fact they only support 2-3tb hdd depending on the raid controller. I also picked up a free md1000 but those also have a limit on space so left with using the servers as the processors and adding in external drives at this point. So my main question is if Unraid can and will support a bunch of external HDD in redundancy and if there is a far better route I should be taking with this. I am rather new with servers and delving into this side of things so trying to make heads or tales of other forums I've read up on is extremal difficult to even begin to understand. Edited April 6, 2021 by AC-Gamer add a picture Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted April 6, 2021 Share Posted April 6, 2021 How will these external drives be connected? USB connections are not reliable enough for the permanent connections required to keep the array in sync for redundancy. It is possible to have external drive cases that connect with SAS/SATA controllers in the main computer. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted April 6, 2021 Share Posted April 6, 2021 You can use the Unassigned Device Plugin to manage your devices, but that's getting kinda sketchy in my opinion to rely on USB for all that. Personally I'd get a case and drop in a LSI controller card and run it in IT Mode. unraid doesn't like RAID cards very much because they can cause problems. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=LSI+unraid&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_osacat=0&_odkw=LSI Quote Link to comment
AC-Gamer Posted April 6, 2021 Author Share Posted April 6, 2021 (edited) 58 minutes ago, kizer said: You can use the Unassigned Device Plugin to manage your devices, but that's getting kinda sketchy in my opinion to rely on USB for all that. Personally I'd get a case and drop in a LSI controller card and run it in IT Mode. unraid doesn't like RAID cards very much because they can cause problems. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=LSI+unraid&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_osacat=0&_odkw=LSI Looked into your suggestion of using the LSI Controller card and found a forum talking about what I need to do to flash and get it working. But once I replace my perc i6 with the LSI the server It should in theory be able to recognize hdd's of a size larger then 3tb correct? So my 12 tb would be able to just plug in and be used as single unraided drives till I install UNraid? (Update) After reading more, I see the LSI card will still have the same limitations on the HDD size of 2-3TB but I'm guessing you were suggesting them as a way to remove the hardware raid from being an issue. Edited April 6, 2021 by AC-Gamer Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted April 6, 2021 Share Posted April 6, 2021 Lots of people using LSI cards with large disks on Unraid. Where do you get the idea they won't support large disks? Quote Link to comment
AC-Gamer Posted April 7, 2021 Author Share Posted April 7, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, trurl said: Lots of people using LSI cards with large disks on Unraid. Where do you get the idea they won't support large disks? https://www.broadcom.com/support/knowledgebase/1211161451027/what-are-the-disk-drive-and-array-size-limitations-with-the-lsi- I could be reading this wrong, as I said up top so still new to all this but if LSI cards would work for a 12tb that would be amazing, any information on that would be very helpful. (update) Looks like your right it can recognize larger drives This forum post is a bit different then what I'm looking for as it doesn't talk about the dell r710, should there be anything I need to watch out for when picking a LSI card? Edited April 7, 2021 by AC-Gamer Quote Link to comment
Odom Posted April 10, 2021 Share Posted April 10, 2021 On 4/7/2021 at 2:07 AM, AC-Gamer said: This forum post is a bit different then what I'm looking for as it doesn't talk about the dell r710, should there be anything I need to watch out for when picking a LSI card? In my build I had purchased an LSI 9201-16i card. I can't explain the technical details, I also asked around in this forum and wanted a card that could hook up to 16 internal drives. At the time this was recommended, so I got it 😀 My unRaid server is running 10x WD 14TB drives. Their designation is WDC_WD140EDFZ-11A0VA0. These a re all shucked drives from the WD My Book 14TB external storage. I purchased these drives whenever they were on sale on Amazon. They all work just fine in my server, I have no issues. Quote Link to comment
AC-Gamer Posted December 9, 2021 Author Share Posted December 9, 2021 So I've finally decided to plop the money down on a better system then using the external hard drives and did as you guys suggested and bought a HBA non raid card for my dell r710, I even went further and purchased a NetApp DS4246 Disk Array Shelf, a LSI SAS 9200-8e-HP 8-Port, 6Gb/s DUAL PORT SAS+SATA to PCI Express HBA card and a 40G QSFP+ SFF-8436 to SFF-8088 Mini SAS Cable DDR For NetApp DS4243 DS4246 1~5 M cable to connect them all together only to open my server and find out that the raid card I have doesn't connect to my backplane, after all the reading I've been doing this would mean I need a reverse breakout cable and cards correct? I've hit so many roadblocks and made so many mistakes building this server I could really use a hand with this finale part, if any one could help or suggest the best card for this make up Id be eternally grateful, spending so much money and nothing to show for it but stress and at times less of a understanding then when I started is tough to deal with. links below for what I bought recently https://www.ebay.com/itm/224194226238?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&var=523122992742&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 https://www.ebay.com/itm/324570148307?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 https://www.ebay.com/itm/202404952486?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649 Dell 6gb Dual-external-port PCIe SAS Non-RAID HBA - 012DNW - Free shipping on 2+ Quote Link to comment
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