Is Unraid a better choice than Truenas for my hardware and usage?

[Fencer]

6 hours ago, cybrnook said:

Just want to throw out that I use the 32GB FIT and haven't had any issues with it, might be worth circling back to once you get all your other issues sorted out:

yeah, I've heard that several people have used them. Is yours the usb 3.1 Plus version? 

 

[cybrnook]

13 hours ago, Fencer said:

yeah, I've heard that several people have used them. Is yours the usb 3.1 Plus version? 

 

That's right.

[Fencer]

Huh, just my luck. It'll make a nice music drive for my Prius anyway, lol. 

 

UPDATE:  Amazon has agreed to refund me for the 3 6TB Maxdigitaldata drives that have SMART errors (Rebranded Seagate Constellation drives) so I'm looking at purchasing 2 10Tb drives instead of 3 6tb ones. I can get 2 of the Seagate Exos x14 10Tb ones for about the same price. Thoughts on this? It'll only give me 4TB more space now but it'll allow me to add 10Tb drives going forward as I build this out over the next year or two. 

 

Side note, the reseller's label covers the breather hole on every one of these drives. I wonder if that had anything to do with the drive failures.

 

I finally created a pool with the working 4 drives to play around with and get a feel for Unraid while I get the bad drive and possibly unusable controller situation figured out. It's fun and should be interesting to figure out how I want to arrange these levels and things. 

[Fencer]

Next update, fun fun!! Turns out that Fit thumb drive stopped being read altogether and the replacement they sent is humming along nicely in the system now. Krusader is doing an awesome job of quickly moving my files from my external drives to the array (screwed up on the split level thing though, asked for assistance in the appropriate forum thread.)

Once they're all transferred and I have my first drive not at 90+% full I'll be adding in the parity and cache drives. So far it's looking good and I'm liking it better than my previous Freenas setup. I'll drop a line in here later as to progress. Hopefully I'll get to parity, etc. by Sunday!

[Fencer]

Ah, dumb user errors... Managed to accidentally move about 4TB of data off an external drive instead of copy off of it so now I'm stuck waiting for it to copy back. Yay me!!

Tomorrow's the day to set up the cache and parity drives. I'm guessing it'll take a day or two to do the parity on a 48TB array? 

My normal use is to add about 5-50 gigs of new data a week so my plan is to add new files to the Unraid server during daily use and once a week or two to back those folders up to the two main externals I have for them using Teracopy in Windows as I can set it to only copy new files and add the checksum verification to start with. I know there's a Linux-based tool (forgot the name at the moment) that will accomplish the same and when I have time I'll find and fiddle with that when I have time. I only plan to have the externals hooked up when I'm backing up new stuff, other than that they'll sit in a drawer. My shares are set up to where all the changes will be on 2 of them so that doesn't seem too cumbersome to deal with. Looking forward to having this thing fully functioning so I can give it a good test run before I purchase a license and learning how to set up a smooth media server for all the video, audio and comic book goodness sitting on it!

 

[MAM59]

5 hours ago, Fencer said:

tomorrow's the day to set up the cache and parity drives. I'm guessing it'll take a day or two to do the parity on a 48TB array? 

unlikely that it will take two days. Remember, Parity is the BIGGEST disk, so it takes the time to read all and write one drive. At the beginning, all drives are read and the calculated parity is written. But if it moves onward, smaller drives run out of blocks and begin to be ignored. But also the more you come to the inner tracks, writing will slow down more and more. So its hard to guess but once you got the idea for your setup, it will stay almost the same every time.

It hardly depends on the disk speeds for my 50Tb array it takes less than 18hrs (but not much less :-))) )

 

Also, its more thrilling at the beginning. You should re-check the array after a week or two again and if all is well, relax the time more and more. I'm doing a recheck every 3 months now once I was convinced that the drives are all ok.

 

The cache can be kicked be in and out at any time (before kicking in out, remember to run the Mover to free the cache and move the data to the real array!) It does not affect parity so it does not take additional times or actions. Remember that setting a share to "cache: yes" does not anything at the beginning. Only new files will be put onto the cache from then on.

(remember too, if you are still using the "normal" release version there is a glitch that a change in cache settings is ignored until the array is restarted. The current beta versions do not need this anymore)

 

.

 

Edited May 2, 2022 by MAM59

[itimpi]

1 hour ago, Fencer said:

I'm guessing it'll take a day or two to do the parity on a 48TB array?

It is actually the size of the largest parity drive that affects the time - not the total of the data drives.  Assume something like 2-3 hours per TB.

[Fencer]

4 hours ago, itimpi said:

It is actually the size of the largest parity drive that affects the time - not the total of the data drives.  Assume something like 2-3 hours per TB.

So 24-36 hours, sounds like about what I expected, cool. Then all that's left is to add in the cache drive and I should be set for now. Looking good!