Is unraid what I'm looking for?

[Tvsks]

Hi,

 

I recently acquired a Dell r720 and I'm a NAS noob. It has 12 bays. Ideally I'd like to fill it with 8tb drives and have a total available storage of around 70-80tb. So if I understand this right, that would mean 10 storage drives, 2 parity drives and then the OS on a thumb drive,  correct? 

 

Ideally I'd be starting out with 4 or 5 drives to get things going sooner and adding drives as I can afford them. 

 

So am I looking at this right and is unraid the way to go, or am I off base here?

[trurl]

59 minutes ago, Tvsks said:

10 storage drives, 2 parity drives and then the OS on a thumb drive,  correct? 

That would work, but you might want to consider having an SSD with that for docker/VM performance if you will use those.

[Tvsks]

Thanks!

[Ford Prefect]

On 11/12/2021 at 4:10 AM, Tvsks said:

I recently acquired a Dell r720 and I'm a NAS noob. It has 12 bays.

These servers come in different configurations.

Speficially of interest here is, what SAS/SATA controller option your r720 has inside.

You will need a HBA (IT-Mode firmware), not a Raid card....assuming that you have a dedicated card deployed that accommodates for more than 8 DIsks (SAS/SATA) ports.

AFAIR the standard options are:

PERC S110 (SW RAID)
PERC H310
PERC H710
PERC H710P

...which one does your r720 have?

 

Edit: see https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html

Edited November 14, 2021 by Ford Prefect