First-time Unraid setup on an all-flash system

[Guest]

I have finally pulled the trigger and ordered a LincStation N1 NAS, which will be my first proper NAS solution. It will also be my first time ever trying Unraid myself, and I would greatly appreciate the community's help with understanding a couple of things about configuring / running this NAS.

 

This will be an all-flash solution, as it has 4x NVMe slots and 2x SATA slots. I am looking to start with a small-ish NVMe for appdata and containers, and a larger SATA drive for bulk storage, introducing more drives as storage fills. All my mission-critical data is stored in two copies elsewhere, so I am not looking to run parity on this device.

 

The main (only?) use of the device will be that of a home media server, and possibly as an exchange / scratch disk for some video editing projects I assist my wife with.

 

Here are my four [totally newbie] questions:

 

01. I understand I need to run BTRFS if I want the capability of slowly expanding the pool of drives. Is this correct? Ideally, I want the entire storage pool to be displayed as a single share in Windows, and not have the number of logical drives equal to the number of physical drives on the system.

02. If the above is correct, I assume I can have NVMe and SATA on the same pool, correct? I am not bothered by lightning speeds - the network interface is 2.5Gbe, which is slower than a single SATA SSD drive anyway.

03. Could you please confirm that I can switch between RAID types (if I choose to go after some redundancy after all) as I add more disks?

04. Since all drives are SSDs, I won't really benefit from caching, as all data is instantly available. Is this correct?

 

Your input on the above, plus anything else you believe I need to be aware of, would be much appreciated.

Edited October 25, 2023 by ymeshulin

[keywal]

The concept of storage is undergoing a little facelift lately in unraid.

There are pools and there is the 'array'.

Pools are just pools in name and are not to be confused with ZFS pools.

 

The array itself consists of 1 or 2 parity disks and a selection of any drives you wish to add either in size and/or filesystem.

For size of disk added, the only restriction is that if parity is present, the drive you are adding needs to be smaller than parity. So you cant add a 10TB drive and only have an 8TB parity.

 

My advice to you is to not go without parity.

 

Regarding shares being visible as one. That can be done sure. But do you want 1 share to contain everything? Not good practice and unnecessary load on your network and systems if you try.

 

Also switching between raid types? Not sure this makes sense? This would only be poosible in pools as the array does not follow this. 

Again my advice but, no one buys a bunch of hard drives and already has a plan for adding the next bunch of drives 2 or 3 years later  Dont worry about this for now.

ZFS pools for example can be expanded but in a different fashion that wouldnt be worth worrying about now.

 

 

 

[Frank1940]

45 minutes ago, Sainted said:

02. If the above is correct, I assume I can have NVMe and SATA on the same pool, correct? I am not bothered by lightning speeds - the network interface is 2.5Gbe, which is slower than a single SATA SSD drive anyway.

 

Be aware that SSD manufacturers has taken some liberties in how they spec read-write speeds.  Large writes of data in particular!  (The use an small onboard cache to make the initial write speed very fast.  Once full, they can slow dramatically!)

 

One thing you have not told us is the planned usage of your Unraid server.  It was designed to be used with a write-once read-many philosophy.  The initial target use for the storage of media files where the final storage capacity needs could not be determined when the server was first being configured.  So the design philosophy also included the ability to easily increase the storage size.   Today this philosophy is still being server by the 'Array' storage setup.  (One of the big tradeoffs for the Array is the write speed...)

 

However, the target of Unraid has expended and includes a lot more capabilities.  To meet these needs, storage 'Pools' were added.  These have different objectives with their own unique advantages and disadvantages depending on the favor that you choose. 

[Guest]

I guess the core of my difficulty at this stage is understanding the difference between 'Array' and 'Pool'. What I am trying to achieve is get a drive in, start populating it, run out of space, add another drive and so on. Regardless of how many drives I have at any one point, I want one logical drive to appear in my Windows Explorer / Total Commander.

 

The use of the server will be just that - 'write once, read often', as a movie / music / book library dictates. Also, as per my original post, there might be some space allocated for collaboration on some video projects, as well as downloading large amounts of data for sorting later.

 

So, in a nutshell:

 

• Do I go for an array or a pool?
• Do I need cache drives? Regardless of the discrepancy between the manufacturer claims and real world, I never write more than 50GB of data sequentially, so any SSD from a reputable manufacturer will handle this.
• I don't want ZFS, as I despise the concept of adding new vDevs with 3 disks minimum and all that jazz. I want to expand my storage disk by disk, just the way turnkey NAS solutions allow to do.

Thanks in advance for all the input! Mightily appreciated.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Sainted

[Frank1940]

This is from the Manual which you can get to by clicking on the 'DOCS' tab at the top of this page or the 'manual' link on the right side of the Taskbar at the botton of the GUI page.

 

         https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/what-is-unraid/

 

It will get you started on understanding Unraid.  Other sections in the manual cover things is much more detail. 

[Frank1940]

Another thing, as I understand it, SSD's are not recommended for use in the Array because the Trim operation is verboten.   Many SSD's will slow down if Trim is not performed on a regular basis.  That is why I asked what you see your usage profile being...