Hi,

 

I am a brand new Unraid user. After previously losing almost 20 TB of media that I had digitized and collected along with family photos, videos, etc. due to a HDD failure, I began looking into solutions to help minimize the chances of me having to do this long manual rebuild. After doing some research (youtube videos, forums, reddit etc.) and discussing it with my brother who is much more technology/networking inclined than I am, ZFS seems to be the best long term solution to this issue. The primary use of this server is for Plex for movies, since it is also a way for me to share updated photos of me and my family to other family members across the country that use the server as well. 

 

After doing some more research it was suggested to use Unraid due to the new 6.12 version supporting ZFS natively and so I downloaded it last week and began tinkering around, watching setup videos, and trying to read the forums (since /r/unraid was down during my setup). While I currently have ~20 TB of media right now I still have a whole collection of media that I would like to digitize and continue to add to. My current media is stored on 2 16TB Seagate Exos HDDs, but I have another four 18 TB Seagate Exos HDDS, and two 20 TB WD Red Pro HHDs I would like to set up in my pool. I also have one 1 TB NVMe drive, a 58 GB NVMe and one 500GB Crucial SSD attached to my computer with other miscellaneous but small files and photos on it.

 

I have watched a lot of SpaceInvaderOne/Level1Techs videos on youtube, and some random people that I found through the search function, but in most of their videos to do the following, they’re either converting an existing array (I don’t even have one setup and started), using outdated and depreciated apps, or on a previous beta of the Unraid build. Like I said, I am a complete newbie when it comes to this, with no previous experience so I cannot extrapolate or use my previous experience with the build and wanted to double check what I think is correct.

 

Sorry for such a long background. My actual question follows.

 

To set up a ZFS pool I need to have an array started, for this I could basically just use my 500GB Crucial SSD and set it in there with basically just nothing on it. Then I would go to the “pool” section below and add/format the empty (2) 20 TB HDDS, and (4) 18 TB HDDS. At this time I would leave my (2) 16 TB HDDS with the media on it in the unassigned drives. Then, I would let all of this format and build itself, and then I could move the media from the (2) 16 TB drives onto this ZFS pool. This would basically get me up and running and allow myself to set up the Plex Application on Unraid to read from these files? 

 

Also, follow up questions, once I built this ZFS pool, I would not be able to add onto this first VDeV, and any other drive I add later down the road would be a second VDeV in the ZFS pool? 

 

I appreciate your time reading this post, apologies for its length, I’m just sure that if I’m struggling with this someone else out there is too. Thank you in advance for your help on this! I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, but I want to set it up correctly the first time so I look forward to your thoughts and critiques!

Why is ZFS the long term solution? What about ZFS will prevent you from losing data again, that a different file system won't?

Edited June 19, 20233 yr by whipdancer

18 minutes ago, whipdancer said:

Why is ZFS the long term solution? What about ZFS will prevent you from losing data again, that a different file system won't?

Yes! My first reply, I'm unsure if I should click quote or not (I did) so hopefully this reply is formatted right. 

Truthfully, right now I have no real digital backup, just manually adding things in again. I have about 10 TB downloaded to each of my HDDs. When I started this project 2 winters ago I just kind of thought it to be a fun project, that turned into something more. When I lost the original HDD that I had and just kept everything on I just had to add it manually back again. 

My understanding, which may be faulty (again I did research, but am only slightly technologically competent with a lot of googling), is that I could lose 1 or 2 drives in this pool and replace them and have them be rebuilt by the VDeV in the pool. Is this not correct? I was mirroring things for a while, but it literally cut my capacity in half which is why I looked for alternatives and heard a lot of hype and good qualities about ZFS. Most of the research I've done (which may be bias to pro ZFS) basically shows that there is a reason that so many people are moving towards it like Unraid. Would there be alternative options that you would suggest? 

 

Thank you whipdancer for taking the time to reply to me!

 

TLDR: I am basically afraid of having 1HDD fail on me, and having to go through and manually re-add everything back in. 

Edited June 19, 20233 yr by HiddenEmailRoad

ZFS, parity, none of these are a substitute for actual backups. Plenty of more common ways to lose data these won't help with, including user error.

 

You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. You get to decide what qualifies.

If you use the array in Unraid and use parity drive(s), you can lose a drive and still recover (or 2 if you have dual parity). ZFS plays no role in this functionality. I'll state it again. ZFS has nothing to do with this capability of Unraid.

 

More importantly, none of this is a substitute for regular backups separate from your NAS (and just to be clear, ZFS does not address this either -  no filesystem addresses this).

Edited June 19, 20233 yr by whipdancer

5 minutes ago, whipdancer said:

If you use the array in Unraid and use parity drive(s), you can lose a drive and still recover (or 2 if you have dual parity). ZFS plays no role in this functionality. I'll state it again. ZFS has nothing to do with this capability of Unraid.

 

More importantly, none of this is a substitute for regular backups separate from your NAS.

Thank you for clarifying this, so you would suggest that I use the regular array (with the two 20 TB drives) for this instead of using the pooling located below the Array section? Again, sorry to be repetitive, I must have misunderstood some of the videos and discussions I've read and watched on what is optimal.

 

9 minutes ago, trurl said:

ZFS, parity, none of these are a substitute for actual backups. Plenty of more common ways to lose data these won't help with, including user error.

 

You must always have another copy of anything important and irreplaceable. You get to decide what qualifies.

I have the physical media and everything still, along with photos backed up to multiple offsite cloud services. I basically physically have all the backups, just in a more manual sense of having to re-add it to the HDDs for my large Plex server. 

 

Like I've previously stated, thank you both for your time answering this. I'm trying to get everything up and running correctly the (second ) time for a long term solution so I can continue to add my backlog of data.