Hello Unraid community , I've just installed unraid to test it on a old qnap where I'm try to understand the concept.

 

The device has 4 disks 2x3TB and 2x8TB. I would like to setup the 2x3TB disks with max speed and redundancy (it was a RAID 1) with the old QNAP OS config. Remainig 2x8TB as single disks without any redundancy or fault tolerance. Means 2 disks completely separated.

 

What's the best configuration to achieve this setup?

 

Many thanks

You could put the 2x3TB into a ZFS raidz1 pool for maximum speed and the 2x8TB drives into the main array without a parity drive.   The 2x8TB could alternatively be put into single device pools of their own.

 

Perhaps a bit more detail of your intended Use Case would help pin down the best option?

Hello, many thanks for the clarification, let me elaborate a bit.

This NAS is used to duplicate data from the primary one (again QNAP for the moment, new DIY is coming...), mainly used to host pictures, movies and music (Office files are on Azure).

I had a very bad experience last summer where a disk on my primary NAS fail and the rebuild process fail as well. Recent backup and a professional QNAP support fortunately mitigate the dataloss but, my backup strategy is changed, no more HW RAID for home lab, just duplicate the data across multiple disks. (explain the 2x8TB st alone) that can be attached everywhere and readed (it is true with Unraid?). An external disk rotation to be moved outside my home.

 

2X3TB should be used to host nfs volumes for my docker servers (and then duplicated twice on the 2x8TB) , reason why the performances are relevant.

I hope that this explain a bit better the requirements.

 

In the meantime I've purchased the first license.

Thanks again for the support.

If the 2 x 8TB drives are primarily for backup will you want to be able to remove either or both of them easily at any time?   If so then it might make sense to use the Unassigned Devices plugin to handle them.   That would give you more choices on the file system format for these drives which might be relevant if you want them to be easily read on non-Linux systems.

 

In terms of backing up from the 2x3TB to the 8TB drives you could do this via a script handled by the User Scripts plugin scheduled to run at whatever frequency you think is sensible.

OK, I follow your suggestion and here is the result (maybe) 🙂

 

 

The warning message on backups folders should be because no parity is available (it can be deactivated?) . The amount of the service free space is wrong as well as the warning because is on RAID 1. There is something wrong I did?

 

In the meantime let me check the unassigned device plugin but, in case of failure, important to me to be able to access to the data, maybe also from another unraid NAS. If it's possible, I'm fine with this.

 

Quote

That would give you more choices on the file system format for these drives which might be relevant if you want them to be easily read on non-Linux systems.

 

Note: Access from Linux system mounting the drive in caso of failure is possible with this config?

1 hour ago, ICVDOK said:

 

Note: Access from Linux system mounting the drive in caso of failure is possible with this config?

 

Yes as you can use any standard Linux file system with Unassigned Devices.    You can also use other file systems such as NTFS (for Windows) and HPFS (for Mac).

 

When the drives are part of the main array then the options become XFS, ZFS and BTRFS which are easily mountable in any Linux system but not so easily mounted on Windows/Mac systems.

1 hour ago, ICVDOK said:

The warning message on backups folders should be because no parity is available (it can be deactivated?) . The amount of the service free space is wrong as well as the warning because is on RAID 1. There is something wrong I did?

 

Each drive in the main array is an independent file system so they are not RAID1.  You could only have them as RAID1 if they were in a pool.

 

The warnings about backup1 and backup2 can NOT be deactivated (at least in current Unraid releases) as without parity drives in the main array are not protected.

 

 

 

Great, looks OK for my requirements. In the meantime I was able to activate LACP network bound, another little progress. Very last question, there is some kind of repica service to be able to get or pull files from QNAP?

 

 

Rsync would be the best choice probably but I don't know if it's available as native service.

 

Thanks for the suggestion, yesterday I did some checks. From UNRAID I was able to mount the QNAP using Unassigned Device plugin via NFS. It could be sufficient for data duplication.

I've also check the option suggested to access from QNAP to UNRAID via RSYNC but , I suspect, RSYNC on UNRAID isn't available out of the box (it's true?).

I've then installed a simply docker (axiom-data-science/rsync-server: A rsyncd/sshd server in Docker. You know, for moving files. (github.com)) with RSYNC server exposed and, finally I was able to connect to UNRAID via RSYNC from NAS.

 

Creted some replica jobs on QNAP and voilà (no scripting for the moment). Obviously there are still some improvements or fine tuning to do, but it works.

 

The performances are just sufficient (about 50Mbps) but considering the very old HW is OK.

 

Unless I miss something, I would prefer to have RSYNC as a native service on UNRAID. What's your view?