Platform:

HP Proliant Microserver with on-board RAID 0/1

 

1x 1.5Tb drive, planned for parity

 

4x 500Gb drives, configured as 2 Logical Drives (raid-0)

Stripe1: 500Gb + 500Gb (planned as 1st data drive)

Stripe2: 500Gb + 500Gb (planned as 2nd data drive)

 

All merits/risks of Raid 0 aside; I'm only interested in UnRaid seeing the stripes as 2x 1Tb disks.

 

However, both 4.7 and 5b10 only see (all) the individual drives - no mention of stripes.

Is this by design, or have I missed on the the installation/configuration feature somewhere, somehow?

 

If the cause of it all is the missing low-level raid support driver as I would suspect, does anyone know if the driver exists and how would I install it under UnRAID?

 

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards, Mike

 

PS: Absolutely ecstatic with UnRaid 4.7 on another Microserver with 3x 2Tb drives - fast, reliable, pure multimedia storage bliss

After the 2-3 months of daily eth0 down/up headache with (latest available) FreeNAS 7.x.x, finally something that works!

unRAID will see HARDWARE-based RAID-0 stripes as a single disk. See this message thread posted just a few hours ago for more info -- http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=14362.msg135683#msg135683

Thanks for the quick reply Brit.

Regretfully, on this platform, it does not. That's why I suspected the missing low-level drivers... ("Fake Raid"?)

 

Hi Brit, noticed your post edit and checked that other thread. Doesn't help. I am limited to platform that I have.

 

Still running on assumption that UnRaid needs a low-level driver in order to recognise these HW stripes;

is there a way of slipping the additional hardware specific driver into the UnRaid?

Since your solution is a software-based raid0 you will not be able to run that exact setup on unRAID. unRAID replaces the default linux "md" driver which provides software-based raid0 with it's own driver that provides it's own parity scheme.

 

I'm not certain why you'd want to run them as raid-0 set unless you have individual file(s) that are larger than 0.5 TB each. Here is what is doable on unRAID with your setup:

 

1.5TB Parity drive

0.5TB Data Drive 1

0.5TB Data Drive 2

0.5TB Data Drive 3

0.5TB Data Drive 4

 

You will have 1 logical drive shown as "/mnt/user/" that includes all of files across all of the data drives.

You will have 4 logical drives shown as "/mnt/disk1/" through "/mnt/disk4/" that will only include the data on each respective drive.

 

 

Thanks Brit.

My reason for raid-0 is the inherent performance improvement of the hardware raid, but also making sure that UnRaid only sees a total of 3 drives so that I can use UnRaid Basic and still have the max drive space.

Regards, Mike

Wouldn't any performance gains be neglected due to the parity drive... at least with writes?

Wouldn't any performance gains be neglected due to the parity drive... at least with writes?

no.  Not unless you are writing to multiple data disks simultaneously.

Wouldn't any performance gains be neglected due to the parity drive... at least with writes?

 

Performance gains would be negated in writes because the parity drive comes into play.

The performance gains of RAID0 with Parity are small and for most people not worth it unless you are doing allot of simultaneous writes to multiple drives.

 

In the configuration proposed with the hardware of the Original Post, you cannot use RAID0 with the drives.

unRAID will only work with individual drives as most of the layered software required (fakeraid drivers) is not included.

Even  then it would not be of any benefit to use it as the fake raid may be at the same level as the MD driver, which is actually replaced in unRAID.

 

The only way to utilize multiple drives in RAID0 is with

1. Areca ARC-1200

2. 3WARE controllers

3. Silicon Image steelvine storage processors.

 

Issues come with each such as SMART access via the Unix interface and Spinup/spin down control.

Thanks WeeboTech, much appreciated.