October 17, 200718 yr I have been running unRAID basic for some time now, but before I upgrade there are a few things that are concerning me 1. I use MediaPortal for playback, and I have noticed that when I go into "My Videos" (which lists the share folders of my unRAID server) the drives spin up. I am concerned that if I have more drives will it cause all of them to spin up? 2. This actually has to do more with the question above. Sometimes, when I use windows explorer to navigate into folder using the user share, the drives also spins up. Does anyone know why? As you can see my main concern is that I only want the drive to spin up when I have selected to open a file. 3. I will be writing/accesing the drives almost every night, will this cause more failures for my hard drives since they will spin up and down more frequently? Right now I am comparing WHS and unRAID as potential solutions. The more I think about it unRAID makes more sense from the energy consumption standpoint, since I will only be accessing the server at night and most likely files from one or two drives. Can anyone offer their thoughts about these two solutions? Thanks in advance.
October 17, 200718 yr you cant compare WHS to unRAID. At first glance you can but the way the RAID works on WHS is massively inefficient and there is absolutely no guarantee with WHS you can pull drives and still use them. Dont use WHS... seriously just dont. As for drive spin up dont worry about it. Worst that will happen is 10 spin up a day per drive on average... thats nothing compared to the run time if they didnt spin down at all.
October 17, 200718 yr Author you cant compare WHS to unRAID. At first glance you can but the way the RAID works on WHS is massively inefficient and there is absolutely no guarantee with WHS you can pull drives and still use them. Dont use WHS... seriously just dont. I was only planning on using the folder duplication feature of WHS on very important stuff like photos, docs, music, etc. I would not apply this for the folers that store my movies. I figure I can always rip them again if I lose a drive. To me the most appealing features of WHS are the management console, access from the interent, and 3rd party plugins. As for drive spin up dont worry about it. Worst that will happen is 10 spin up a day per drive on average... thats nothing compared to the run time if they didnt spin down at all. Do all of them spin up when you access shares from explorer?
October 17, 200718 yr Author What version of Unraid are you using? Currently my server is down since I plan on making hardware changes either way I go, but I was using 4.0 before. I am tempted to put together a temporary server to test out the new features in 4.2.1. Can anyone comment on the stability of the writing to user shares feature added?
October 17, 200718 yr Do all of them spin up when you access shares from explorer? I don't use User Shares yet, so I don't know if there's a difference, but in general, unRAID only spins up drives that are directly accessed, and then only if what you need is not in its cache. unRAID has a cache of about 700 to 800 megabytes I think, but does not have Directory Caching yet, although its on the Requested Features list and Tom has said it is coming (I believe). It currently works well for me, so long as I do not move any very large files that would clear the cache. I use SageTV and it polls its video directories every 5 minutes looking for additions and changes. Once all of the directories are in the cache, the drives will remain asleep often for days. If I do move a few videos to an unRAID video drive, then at the next SageTV poll, all of the unRAID drives with video folders will need to be spun up and reread, once.
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