Questions before starting with unraid

[harakiri42]

Hello,

 

being new in the nas thing and comming from a different nas solution and looking for an alternative since i have several SMR drives and just had to learn that SMR drives and ZFS have some downfall regarding fragmentation.

 

So i have an i5 6th gen, 16gb system, with 5x 6tb hdd's (SMR) and one 500gb SSD, i would like to have only 1 parity drive.

 

its a basic nas usecase, providing a smb share to windows and using plex.

 

i assume unraid can easily provide these basic services, but the question would be:

 

- has unraid issues with SMR drives like showing as faulted the because of the filesystem fragmentation thing in zfs and which filesystem would suite best, btrfs or xfs?

- can unraid be installed on the ssd or will unraid really only be used from a usb drive?

- when using plex and smb can it work together or have i to play beforehead, since i just want to dumb data to the nas via windows / smb and then point plex to a folder

[JorgeB]

4 hours ago, harakiri42 said:

has unraid issues with SMR drives like showing as faulted the because of the filesystem fragmentation thing in zfs and which filesystem would suite best, btrfs or xfs?

You can safely use then in the array with any filesystem, of course they will be slower than CMR drives.

 

4 hours ago, harakiri42 said:

can unraid be installed on the ssd or will unraid really only be used from a usb drive?

Flash drive.

 

Don't really understand the last question but I never used Plex.

[trurl]

Unraid is installed into RAM from the archives on flash at each boot and it runs in RAM. Flash also contains your configuration (settings from the webUI).