Too Many Devices?

[FragaGeddon]

I have 6 Hard drives, plus the USB as the boot. Does Unraid include the USB as a device? I have just the 6 license key.

[FragaGeddon]

I do have just a 1 TB HD, but I'm thinking about replacing this with maybe a 2TB SSD and use that as the cache drive.

My Hard drives 4 x 4 TB drives, 1 x 3 TB Drive, and 1 x 1 TB Drive. I'm planning om using one of the 4 TB drives as a parity drive.

 

I had this set up and running before, but I'm new and was playing with the setup. I created shares to just the one hard drive, and not across them all. Like one HD was Movies, One HD was TV Shows, The other was Files and Backup. And I do have each separate HD backed up to an external HD. Will I get faster write/read times if I create a share across like all 4(5) HD's, while using a cache SSD?

Edited June 3, 2022 by FragaGeddon

[itimpi]

3 hours ago, FragaGeddon said:

I have 6 Hard drives, plus the USB as the boot. Does Unraid include the USB as a device? I have just the 6 license key.

The boot dtive does not count towards the licence limit.    However any other drive (e.g. a removable one you use for backups) that is plugged into the server at the point the array is started DOES count even if it is not being used by Unraid.

[itimpi]

3 hours ago, FragaGeddon said:

Will I get faster write/read times if I create a share across like all 4(5) HD's,

No - I would expect times to be unchanged.   Unraid does not exploit techniques such as ‘striping’ on the main array to improve performance.   Instead each drive in the main array is a self-contained file system that can (if necessary) be read when removed from the array.

 

3 hours ago, FragaGeddon said:

while using a cache SSD?

Using a cache drive speeds up the ‘perceived’ speeds for the file as cache pools do not have the same type of real time parity protection as the main array,    The ‘slow’ write to the main array is displaced to the ‘mover’ job that typically runs overnight to transfer files from a cache pool to the main array when the user is not using the system.

[FragaGeddon]

Thanks for the info. I ended up doing what I was doing before. Creating a share and using only one drive, instead of selecting like disk 1, disk 2, disk 3, etc.

And the too many devices error was I forgot that I was trying a different USB, that I was going to do a fresh install with. I didn't bother using a parity drive or a cache drive.

My files are backed up on external playbooks, so if one drive fails, I'll just replace it and put the files back on it.