Questions on features before purchase

[xokia]

I currently use proxmox with Ubuntu installed in a LXC running plex media server. I have windows 11 installed in a VM.

 

I currently have my drives formatted to ext4.  Reason for this is I can remove the drives stick them in a USB bay and browse the drives using another windows machine (WSL installed on windows machine). I can easily recover my data by using a different machine.

 

I see only two different drive formats are supported with unraid. If something happens with your unraid machine how do you get the data off the drives? Say a motherboard goes bad.
What if the USB stick goes bad same question.

Data migration seems challenging since you are locked into a specific format. If I buy a new 20TB drive can I install unraid transfer my data via the USB method I mentioned above via Samba then add the drive back to unraid? Will unraid add the disk to the array? Non equal size is ok?

Unraid seems like a nice NAS OS but to me the data migration issue presents some serious challenges to think about. You are locked in unless you have many TBs of storage elsewhere.

[-MacGyver-]

6.11 array drives are XFS or BTRFS. 6.12 array drives are those and can also be ZFS. Any of these can be popped into a machine with Linux, or even a live CD/USB, and you can recover your data. For ZFS you would need to be sure to use a distro that has openzfs included.

 

There is no lockin with unRAID.

 

[Hoopster]

1 hour ago, xokia said:

I see only two different drive formats are supported with unraid. If something happens with your unraid machine how do you get the data off the drives? Say a motherboard goes bad.

Unraid supports XFS, BTRFS and ZFS.  Since each drive is formatted with its own filesystem and their is no data striping across drives, a drive can be mounted on a Linux OS outside of Unraid.

 

1 hour ago, xokia said:

What if the USB stick goes bad same question.

The USB stick contains only the license and array configuration information.  It has no impact on the data stored on the drives.  A bad USB stick can be replaced with another using a USB stick backup (should be done frequently) and the system keeps working without interruption. 

 

Drives added to an Unraid array must be formatted by Unraid.  Any data already on the drives will, of course, be lost in a format.  However, disks can be mounted using the Unassigned Devices plugin (includes support for many different formats including NTFS and ext4) and data transferred from them to the Unraid formatted disks in the array.

Edited September 9, 2023 by Hoopster

[xokia]

How is Samba on unraid? I am currently getting 250MB/ps over ethernet with samba running on ubuntu.

Edited September 9, 2023 by xokia

[Squid]

If you're writing to a cache-only or use cache yes pool then you will get line speeds no problems (ie: 250MB/s on a 2500mb/s connection)

 

[xokia]

45 minutes ago, Squid said:

If you're writing to a cache-only or use cache yes pool then you will get line speeds no problems (ie: 250MB/s on a 2500mb/s connection)

 

I'm currently not using a cache pool with proxmox. I get 220MB-250MB on 2.5Gbps connection. What should I expect to get with unraid non cached drive? I am using Exos enterprise drives.

 

Also anyone know how well iGPU pashthrough works on plex-server? I have an I9 13900 with the i915 GPU. It works extremely well at transcoding 4k so its something I would want to continue to use. I noticed the GPU drivers where available in the "app store" Do you have to load them this way or is it possible to load the linux drivers directly from intel manually?

 

Really just looking for gotcha or quirks I would find out only after installing and trying to get things to work. Proxmox is unstable on my system. Crashes anytime the cores go into deep power states after sitting idle for long periods of time. So looking for alternatives. Appreciate all the responses so far.

 

Something like the following

wget https://github.com/intel/intel-graphics-compiler/releases/download/igc-1.0.14062.11/intel-igc-core_1.0.14062.11_amd64.deb
wget https://github.com/intel/intel-graphics-compiler/releases/download/igc-1.0.14062.11/intel-igc-opencl_1.0.14062.11_amd64.deb
wget https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/download/23.22.26516.18/intel-level-zero-gpu-dbgsym_1.3.26516.18_amd64.ddeb
wget https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/download/23.22.26516.18/intel-level-zero-gpu_1.3.26516.18_amd64.deb
wget https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/download/23.22.26516.18/intel-opencl-icd-dbgsym_23.22.26516.18_amd64.ddeb
wget https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/download/23.22.26516.18/intel-opencl-icd_23.22.26516.18_amd64.deb
wget https://github.com/intel/compute-runtime/releases/download/23.22.26516.18/libigdgmm12_22.3.0_amd64.deb
dpkg -i *.deb

Edited September 10, 2023 by xokia

[Squid]

2 hours ago, xokia said:

I'm currently not using a cache pool with proxmox. I get 220MB-250MB on 2.5Gbps connection. What should I expect to get with unraid non cached drive? I am using Exos enterprise drives.

 

Unraid's array without a cache pool does not use striping, so write speeds are at best the native write speed of the drives involved on a parity protected array and the disk settings at Reconstruct Write.  When set to Read/Modify/Write, you can reasonably expect 1/2 the write speed of the drive.

 

Unraid has many many advantages over a traditional RAID system, but also some trade offs.  One of the trade offs is slower write speeds when not using a cache pool.

 

To be honest, I have never understood why anyone in any circumstance would choose a traditional RAID system where if you exceed the redundancy in disk failures you have lost 100% of everything vs Unraid where at worst you will only have lost a small portion.  As someone who in the past has lost the wife's baby pictures (and never hears the end of it), a true RAID system is not worth it for the extra throughput.

 

Use a cache pool for the best performance.

[xokia]

I am not using RAID just single drives formatted in ext4 the exos drives I am getting up to 250MB with 210MB sustained write speeds. I do have a slower drive that I am only getting 150MB its an older drive 2TB. I think the EXOS are rated for 287MB if that slowed down to 140MB  then that would be a no go for me. I'll need to think about it. Not against a cache pool. I have a 2TB NVME that is currently hosting proxmox that would not be needed with unraid. I also have a 2TB SSD that I use to host the plex database files. The other drives are 20TB exos drive and 20TB WD red pro drives. Do you need a separate cache drive for each disk? Would I be able to partition the SSD or NVME into multiple cache drives? 

If I buy another 20TB drive can I install and run without parity to try out unraid with plex/cached pool/ windows11 VM? Then after I transfer my files over turn one of the old 20TB drives into the parity drive after the fact? Also is parity required? I have a duplicate setup for a different house so the data is essentially backed up at a different location.

Edited September 10, 2023 by xokia

[Hoopster]

18 hours ago, xokia said:

If I buy another 20TB drive can I install and run without parity to try out unraid with plex/cached pool/ windows11 VM?

Yes

 

18 hours ago, xokia said:

Then after I transfer my files over turn one of the old 20TB drives into the parity drive after the fact?

Yes

 

18 hours ago, xokia said:

Also is parity required?

No

 

18 hours ago, xokia said:

Do you need a separate cache drive for each disk?

No.  However, if you want to go crazy you can configure a separate cache disk/pool per Unraid user share.  Of course, you can have just one cache disk/pool for the entire array if you wish (or no cache at all). 

[xokia]

Formatted my 2TB drive to BTFRS and am getting 233MB sustained write speeds over SMB. So that answers that.

 

I'm not used to the GUI way of doing things so the 30 day trial is really nice. Thank you for that!

 

I got plex setup and got the iGPU to HW transcode seems to work good. I notice something weird though that maybe I need to go ask in a plex section. If I direct play a video then it doesn't show up in the plex dash board as being played. If I choose a different resolution to force a HW transcode it shows up in the dashboard. Some weird quirkiness that did not occur in the standard linux release.

[xokia]

bummer.......do you folks offer support? Frustration level is through the roof with plex.

*edit*
Plex issue resolved by member in plex forum.

Issue was:
     1. Needed latest driver (Intel-GPU-TOP) which does not appear in driver directory.
     2. Had a corrupted test file.

Edited September 13, 2023 by xokia

[xokia]

Thanks for answering all the questions. I purchased a license. This forum has very helpful members.

Edited September 27, 2023 by xokia