June 19, 201115 yr Hello! I'm considering setting up an unraid system in the near future, and after reading as much as I can find on the topic, I'm still a bit confused about how it will alter my current setup. I suppose I'm just not well enough versed in this particular field of computers. Allow me to describe what I have now and what I hope to achieve. Please let me know if I'm proceeding in the right direction. Currently I have 6 hard drives set up in mirrored RAID pairs all connected to my poor 5 year old MacBook Pro that's barely able to handle it. This computer is basically tasked with collecting the shows I want to watch and running Plex to allow me to view them. It's using Transmission and Automatic to do this. This system is quite fine for now, but it's not an ideal solution for expandability and efficiency. I would like to set up an unRAID box to replace the hard drives and possibly the MacBook Pro as well. (If it could serve as external storage for Time Machine, and my iPhoto and iTunes libraries too, that would be great.) Now, my questions, if you will: 1) Can the unRAID box take over the job of collecting and sorting the shows from Transmission and Automatic? 2) Will I still need my MacBook Pro to actually run Plex Media Sever and Plex itself? 3) If the answer is yes to the previous question, then I assume the unraid box will simply be connected to my macbook pro and be seen as a networked drive? Is that correct? How are the machines best connected exactly? Ethernet? I imagine a wifi connection isn't fast enough for streaming media and hourly backups of my main computer. 4) The one-drive-failure limitation is slightly troubling to me, as someone who is obsessed with backups. (I actually keep a copy of everything on the aforementioned 6 drives in another state for safekeeping, updated every few months.) But I believe I've read somewhere on these boards that a new version of the unraid software will allow for 2 drive failures. Is that correct? I'm terribly sorry for the newbie-type questions that have probably been addressed a million times before. I have tried researching it myself, but many of the explanations are a bit over my head to be honest. Actually, will I be capable of running and maintaining an unraid system adequately being completely unfamiliar with Linux? Hopefully the documentation here and in the wiki will be enough for me. Someone needs to put together an "Unraid for Dummies" book. Any help and guidance you can offer would be most appreciated. EDITED for clarification.
June 19, 201115 yr I'm not a Mac person but here's some info to tide you over until one shows up here. 1) I've never used Transmission, but apparently some people are running it on unRAID: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=8736 2) Same goes for Plex: http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Plex_for_UnRAID_FAQ 3) Yes. By default you'll be using SMB (Samba) shares. I believe there is AFP (Apple File Protocol) support now but I'm not up with the status on this. You can use TimeMachine to an SMB share though: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5180.msg47986#msg47986 4) As far as your backup strategy, is your "copy of everything" kept at home? If so, what if you have a fire? You've lost everything. For really important data I recommend an offsite backup like crashplan, which can be set up to run inside unRAID. As for the rest of your data (from Transmission), is it really that important/irreplaceable? Dual parity is on the roadmap, but no word on when this will be implemented: http://download.lime-technology.com/develop/infusions/aw_todo/task.php?id=23 Things are constantly changing so there's no book, but plenty of "wiki" information: http://www.lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Unofficial_Documentation Much of the additional functionality is being implemented by users in plugin format to make it easier for people not familiar with linux command line. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2595.0 The unRAID community is friendly and helpful so as long as you're willing to approach this with an open mind and a willingness to learn, you should be fine.
June 19, 201115 yr One point of clarification on the drive failure feature... In typical RAID setups, if you lose 2 drives at the same time you lost ALL your files. unRAID is not like typical raid setups (non-mirrored), you will not lose files on the unaffected data drives. It's a tradeoff of space and protection. In your setup of raid mirroring you use 6 drives but you only have 3 drives-worth of storage space. In unRAID with the same 6 drives you would have 5 drives-worth of storage space. With 5 data drives and 1 parity drive, should two drives fail you can have the following two situations: A) Parity Drive and Data Drive 1 fail at the same time: You lost files on data drive 1 but the files on data drives 2, 3, 4, and 5 are still perfectly fine. B) Data Drive 1 and 2 fail at the same time: You lost files on data drive 1 and data drive 2, but the files on data drives 3, 4, and 5 are still perfectly fine. unRAID by itself is NOT a backup solution. It protects against drive failures. You can however build in some measures of critical file backups by ensuring the really critical files are backed up on multiple drives. As you know, critical files should be backed up offline and offsite.
June 19, 201115 yr Author ConnectivIT: Thank you for your kind reply. 1 and 2) It looks like these programs running on unRAID may be more complex than I'm ready to tackle. It's still possible for me to use my old computer to handle these tasks and just place the files on the unRAID system? My Macbook Pro will see it as a regular hard drive? 3) I haven't a clue what a Samba share and AFP are, so clearly I have more research to do. I'm getting concerned about being able to manage this with success. There seems to be a lot of documentation, so I just need to sort through it hopefully. And yes, the community here is the main reason I want to build an unRAID box for myself to be honest. 4) I have one copy at home, and the other copy at my folks' home in another state. So yes, they are kept in different places. I'm hoping that if I can get this unRAID system going that I'll be able to clone each hard drive (except the parity drive) to another external drive and then move those drives to an off-site location, keeping the clones updated month-to-month. I assume that wouldn't be a difficult thing to achieve, yes? And no, it's not terribly important, but I've spent time building a little media library, and I would be sad to lose it. BRIT: Thank you for that. I think unRAID combined with my plan to keep everything cloned and stored in an offsite location should give me my best bang for the buck. Cheers!
June 19, 201115 yr I would suggest a gradual plan. 1. Build/install an unRAID server to relieve your immediate storage issues. 2. As you become more accustom to using your unRAID, begin moving over the other functions from your current servers, one at a time. As you get one process working, and are comfortable with it, move over another, etc. Most of it is not as intimidating as it may first appear. Many users here have contributed a lot to make the standard/most wanted functions as easy as a few button clicks. 3. Retire your current beleaguered server. That was my plan, and I am happy with it. Bruce
June 19, 201115 yr 1 and 2) It looks like these programs running on unRAID may be more complex than I'm ready to tackle. It's still possible for me to use my old computer to handle these tasks and just place the files on the unRAID system? My Macbook Pro will see it as a regular hard drive? Once you install the unMenu addon you can install the other things with a few clicks using its package manager: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5568.0
June 20, 201115 yr 1 and 2) It looks like these programs running on unRAID may be more complex than I'm ready to tackle. It's still possible for me to use my old computer to handle these tasks and just place the files on the unRAID system? My Macbook Pro will see it as a regular hard drive? Once you install the unMenu addon you can install the other things with a few clicks using its package manager: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5568.0 unMenu is amazing, I was stressed about trying to figure out how to use unraid as a printserver. With unMenu I literally was printing within 5 minutes.
June 20, 201115 yr Author Thank you all for the kind replies. Yes, I think I will follow that plan. I'll build the unRAID server and use it as basic storage at first until I feel comfortable expanding it out for other uses. Thanks for the links to the unRAID menu module. I will certainly make use of it. I appreciate using a "plug and play" type program whenever I can.
June 20, 201115 yr Author And that 5 minutes included compiling the driver from source code! Here's to hoping it never comes to that with me.
June 20, 201115 yr And that 5 minutes included compiling the driver from source code! Here's to hoping it never comes to that with me. If anything needs to be compiled unMenu does it for you automatically. All you have to do is click install.
June 20, 201115 yr And that 5 minutes included compiling the driver from source code! And grabbing a cup of coffee
June 20, 201115 yr I would suggest a gradual plan. 1. Build/install an unRAID server to relieve your immediate storage issues. 2. As you become more accustom to using your unRAID, begin moving over the other functions from your current servers, one at a time. As you get one process working, and are comfortable with it, move over another, etc. Most of it is not as intimidating as it may first appear. Many users here have contributed a lot to make the standard/most wanted functions as easy as a few button clicks. 3. Retire your current beleaguered server. That was my plan, and I am happy with it. Bruce I think this is great advice, I ran unRaid for a couple of years before switching to another platform (yes now I am back to unRaid) and only used it as a file server. Now that I am running it again (and have forgotten the little bit of linux I learned last time I ran it) it is back to running a file server and print server. I want to try SABnzbd, sickbeard and couchPotato, but have never even heard of these programs before a few days ago. So my plan is to run them on my windows box and first learn how to use them before having to get them installed on unRaid and learn to use them. This way I know how they work already when they get moved. My initial plan was to build my unRaid box and have it do EVERYTHING out of the gate. It took about an hour before I realized how bad of an idea that was (for me at least) Amazing community here and running a basic unRaid server is so simple its not even funny. John
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