[6.9.2] Questions about how I'm using unRAID

[kftX]

First off, hello everyone!

 

I'm a new user of unRAID (going on a couple months) and I have a few questions about how I set-up unRAID. I'll be as concise as I possibly can in explaining my doubts so you guys can do your best to help clear them up 🙂

 

Context: me and my partner changed to an unRAID server for our personal/gaming machines a few months back for the sake of having a cleaner set-up and less clutter in our living room. We've been having a great time overall and tbh I'm super happy we made the change and tbh if you told me without prior knowledge that my gaming PC is a VM, I wouldn't be able to tell.

 

And yes, I am aware that any of these changes may force me to re-do the entire server and that's okay. I just want to do it right 😛

 

Anyhow, my doubts mostly revolve around adding vdisks and disk shares:

 

1. Each of us is using an SSD for OS/gaming and a larger HDD for keeping the rest of our data. But:
   • unRAID says the vDisk for my personal machine is 2.19(ish)TB in size. But my SSD is only 2TB large. Does this mean it'll eventually overflow into another SSD? Should I have done something different to stop it from doing so on set-up?
2. I have never really understood how to add a new HDD as a network share rather than adding it as a vdisk in VM settings, I just watched a SpaceInvaderOne video about it but I'm still not 100% clear on it. Is it really as simple as going to Shares - Add Share - Included Disk and then ticking the disk you want the share to be inside of?
3. Is there any reason why my external USB HDD is topping out at 9-10MB/s writes? This makes copying huge amounts of data a bit of a chore. For context, I am passing through the USB device itself rather than the USB ports on the mobo.
4. In which situations would you prefer/recommend using a vDisk over a Network Share?

 

And extra round for those who might know why this is happening:

 

• Sometimes (and at complete random) my own gaming VM will start chugging weirdly for a few seconds to a minute or two where the VM becomes completely unusable, mouse moves around slowly and such and then recovers and it's business as usual. It never happens while gaming which is the weirdest part, usually only during regular usage. This has never happened on my partner's VM.
  • I have a Ryzen 5950X and a 3060TI passed through to the VM, vBios dumped and in use.

 

Thank you so much for the patience in reading this! Hope you all have a great continuation of the week!

[itimpi]

If you are dedicating a complete SSD to each VM then I would not bother to use a vdisk at all - just pass the whole SSD through to the owning VM.  
 

It seems at the moment you have a vdisk file that is larger than the SSD on which it resides?   Vdisks are allocated as ‘sparse’ files at the Linux level which means the actual space used can be less than the physical space as space is only allocated as the guest OS writes to different parts of the vdisk.   This means that over time the vdisk file can gradually grow towards its maximum size.    When you run out of space on the physical drive holding the vdisk that VM will then fail although since the values are very close you may never reach this point).

 

to add a network share you do it inside the VM and navigate to the address of the UnRaid server where you will see all network shares that you have set up on the UnRaid server.  You want to use a network share any time you want files to be seen by more than one VM/PC/Mac as vdisks are dedicated to a VM.

 

no idea about your USB speeds.   The values you quote seem that it may be functioning as a USB1 type device.

 

 

[kftX]

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

It seems at the moment you have a vdisk file that is larger than the SSD on which it resides?   Vdisks are allocated as ‘sparse’ files at the Linux level which means the actual space used can be less than the physical space as space is only allocated as the guest OS writes to different parts of the vdisk.   This means that over time the vdisk file can gradually grow towards its maximum size.    When you run out of space on the physical drive holding the vdisk that VM will then fail although since the values are very close you may never reach this point).

 

Thank you very much for this explanation! That makes perfect sense.

 

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

If you are dedicating a complete SSD to each VM then I would not bother to use a vdisk at all - just pass the whole SSD through to the owning VM. 

 

Huh. I didn't know that was possible at all. How would I go about doing that? I'll look it up online ofc, but any pointers would be great!

 

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

You want to use a network share any time you want files to be seen by more than one VM/PC/Mac as vdisks are dedicated to a VM.

 

I see. So I could just turn my HDDs into network shares as well since all my games go into the SSD anyway and the HDDs are for data keeping.

 

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

to add a network share you do it inside the VM and navigate to the address of the UnRaid server where you will see all network shares that you have set up on the UnRaid server.

 

Sorry I wasn't super clear. I meant if what I mentioned were the steps to create a network share using a HDD inside unRAID, so I could do what you mention above.

 

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

no idea about your USB speeds.   The values you quote seem that it may be functioning as a USB1 type device.

 

Yeah same thing I thought. I know it's a cheaper enclosure, but it worked fine outside unRAID (write speeds wise) and it's a USB3 device connected to a USB3 Type-A port.

 

Thank you!

Edited September 29, 2021 by kftX
forgot to add the usb thing

[itimpi]

16 minutes ago, kftX said:

Sorry I wasn't super clear. I meant if what I mentioned were the steps to create a network share using a HDD inside unRAID, so I could do what you mention above.

You go to the shares tab to set up shares and then specify whether that particular share should be visible on the network, and what security you want applied for network access.

 

17 minutes ago, kftX said:

Huh. I didn't know that was possible at all. How would I go about doing that? I'll look it up online ofc, but any pointers would be great!

You just get the /dev/disk/by-id/? type name for the drive and set that up where you currently specify the vdisk filename in the VM settings.     You also make sure that at the Unassigned Devices level you set the “Passed through” setting so that UD will not try and mount it (which would interfere with the VM using it).