Unraid for HP Proliant DL60 Gen9

[Ivern]

Hello, I am new to Unraid and just looking for some guidance. I have a Home Plex Server with approx. 10 TB of Data being used on an External HDD, running on my Main PC. I work in IT and got a free HP Proliant DL60 Gen9 from work along with 2x 3TB HDD and 2x 500GB HDD. I want to be able to use this server hardware as the home for my Plex Server.

 

I've heard a little about Unraid but not very familiar with RAID in-general as I don't have experience with either in the field.

 

Does someone got some time to explain the difference between RAID and Unraid and also provide me with some Pros & Cons relating to my Plex Server and the hardware listed above?

 

If you have discord, a DM would be greatly appreciated. My discord is Cohdee#0001

 

Thanks a lot in advance,

 

Cohdee

[apandey]

8 hours ago, Ivern said:

Does someone got some time to explain the difference between RAID and Unraid and also provide me with some Pros & Cons relating to my Plex Server and the hardware listed above?

I'll try, though you should be able to look up terms like parity, RAID and JBOD on wider internet too

 

In a RAID setup, all disks are used together, and every piece of data is spread across the drives uniformly. There is some redundancy by adding parity data to real data, which is also spread across drives. If you lose more than allowed drives, it is hard to recover anything because data is spread across drives at a very low level. Individual drives don't have identify able data themselves. Also, most raid setups will only allow expansion by adding drives of identical size and any extra space on bigger drives may not be used. The benefit is that since multiple drives work together, you can get better  performance by spreading parallel IO across drives whenever possible

 

Unraid is not RAID, but rather JBOD, where a bunch of disks with independent filesystems and data files are accessed via a virtual filesystem (shfs) on top of them. In theory, if you lose a drive, you only lose data on that drive, and other drives can still be independently read. Also, you can mix drives of any size together. For redundancy, you can protect the bunch of data drives (array) by adding dedicated parity drives (1 or 2) which keep a value that can be used to recompute the data on (1 or 2) broken drives if they fail. All drives are not used together, usually reads are from a single drive where data is, and writes are to a single drive + parity drives(s). The only time all drives are used together is if a disk fails and has to be rebuilt (data from all remaining drives + parity drives is needed to reconstruct a failed drive, just like RAID). Given above, the performance of unraid array is limited to a single disk speeds, but you have more flexibility in mixing drives of different sizes 

 

As for your hardware, it all depends on whether all components have drivers in unraid. You can test by booting unraid OS from a usb to see if all your hardware components are detected. Also, unraid works with hard drives at low level, so needs direct access to them. If your server has a raid controller, you need to be able to run it in pass through mode to avoid any surprises