What is the best way to set up Unraid with three hard drives?

[rematch]

I am new to Unraid and have already read through many posts. Frankly, however, I am quite overwhelmed and do not want to make mistakes right at the beginning, hence the question.

 

Unraid runs on a Lenovo M720q server, on which unfortunately only two NVMe and one SSD (SATA) can be installed.

 

So the server has the following three hard drives:
- Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB, M.2 2280
- KIOXIA BG5 Client SSD 1TB, M.2 2230-S3
- SSD with 512 GB (Noname)

 

How should I best set up Unraid with the three hard drives (data, parity, cache)?

 

Using Unassigned Devices I included my Synology NAS (which has 4x 4TB HDD) as SMB share; but there I'm not sure yet how to use that. Can I use this storage? Otherwise, I would just run backups to the NAS, if possible (via CA Appdata Backup?). The NAS is backed up daily (to another location).

 

At this stage, I would rather run services on the server to make my life easier. I'm sure there will be relevant data, but it should be backed up by regular backups. So it would not be dramatic if, in the worst case, everything would be gone. But this is only further information.

 

Thank you very much.

Edited October 28, 2023 by rematch

[rematch]

/push

I would really appreciate some guidance so I can finally get started - thanks!

[JorgeB]

With those three devices I would assign an old flash drive as the single array device to fulfill that requirement then assign the 3 SSDs to two or three pools depending on your needs, e.g., you can create a redundant pool with both 1TB devices and another one for the 512GB device, or 3 separate pools.

[rematch]

I see, thank you.

 

Unfortunately, I don't have another old flash drive, only these three I mentioned.

 

How would you setup data, cache and parity with these?

Is Parity even needed, regarding the Synology Backup?

 

Could I go with, e.g.,:

- 1 TB NVMe for Data (KIOXIA)

- 1 TB NVMe for Cache (Samsung Pro)

- 512 GB SSD for Cache

 

I just don't understand what to assign to which hard disk.

[itimpi]

13 minutes ago, rematch said:

Unfortunately, I don't have another old flash drive, only these three I mentioned.

This is a pen drive of the type that you boot Unraid from - can be very small (only a a few GB) as you are not going to store anything on it, merely use it to satisfy the requirement (in the current Unraid release) that there must be at least one drive in the array.    This restriction is planned to e lifted in a future Unraid release but this is a way to get around it at the moment.

[rematch]

2 minutes ago, itimpi said:

This is a pen drive of the type that you boot Unraid from - can be very small (only a a few GB) as you are not going to store anything on it, merely use it to satisfy the requirement (in the current Unraid release) that there must be at least one drive in the array.    This restriction is planned to e lifted in a future Unraid release but this is a way to get around it at the moment.

Oh, you mean the typically USB drive. Ok, sure, I can do it, thanks for the hint.

 

But still, would this:

 

19 minutes ago, rematch said:

Could I go with, e.g.,:

- 1 TB NVMe for Data (KIOXIA)

- 1 TB NVMe for Cache (Samsung Pro)

- 512 GB SSD for Cache

 

... be ok to host data and cache? Or what is recommended?

[JorgeB]

1 hour ago, JorgeB said:

assign the 3 SSDs to two or three pools depending on your needs, e.g., you can create a redundant pool with both 1TB devices and another one for the 512GB device, or 3 separate pools.