Hello everyone!

 

I consider myself as a skilled NAS user, starting with an old computer with Ubuntu to have some SMB shares and rsync clones, going to a Synology for 6 years (still works) and recently TrueNAS in a low energy consumption custom hardware (R1 Pro NAS - Ryzen 5500U/32GB RAM) for a year with several applications running, until the kubernetes SSD partition failed and the system config or the snapshot restore was not possible due to a "difference in the partition ID".

Before TrueNAS I almost went for unRaid, but got cold feet after I found out it runs from a USB stick. Now I'm trying to give it a shot, but I'm having some issues to understand if it will work for my needs.

My custom hardware has 2 SATA HDDs and 2 NVME SSDs slots and that's it, there's no more room for another disk. My first plan was to use both HDDs as file storage with one replicating the files to the other once a day, like I always did with my previous NAS. I don't want to have a parity disk or some advanced RAID. I'm okay with having a single hot disk with a cold backup. On the other hand, for the SSDs I would love to have RAID, specially to store the docker applications, their settings and some VMs (Windows and Linux).

I tried to do this setup with no luck at all. First it asks for a parity disk, then it's impossible to add the SSD as a regular disk unless I create a pool, but then the pool only works as a cache. I also want to be able to backup the USB stick and the SSD snapshots to the HDD and restore it in case I need it.

Can anybody help me to understand if it's possible to setup this with unRaid and, if yes, how? Thanks in advance.

Assign the two disks as array data devices, don't assign parity, and create a btrfs or zfs pool for the NVMe devices.

Thank you for the answer. Could you elaborate about the other questions? With btrfs pool, can I restore it on a different hardware in case of a disaster? Where the container and the settings will be stored? Can I backup it and recover in a different pool? What about backing up the USB stick, is there a need for it?

6 hours ago, fabiovb said:

can I restore it on a different hardware in case of a disaster?

It is a standard Linux file system so will be readable on any system that can handle a BTRFS file system.

 

6 hours ago, fabiovb said:

Where the container and the settings will be stored?

The container binaries and working data are stored wherever you tell Unraid to store them (the 'system' and 'appdata' shares being the default locations.   It is normally recommended that these are sore on a pool for performance reasons.   The USB drive also stores templates for docker containers you install via the Unraid Apps tab in case you need to edit their settings or reinstall the containers with their previous settings intact.

 

6 hours ago, fabiovb said:

What about backing up the USB stick, is there a need for it?

 

Definitely.   The USB stick stores all you Unraid specific settings in its 'config' folder and this would be required if you ever need to transfer to a new USB stick.  You want a backup made any time you make a significant configuration change. There are currently 3 standard ways available:

• By clicking on the Boot device on the Main tab and selecting the option to make a backup (which is then downloaded as a ZIP file).
• By using Unraid Connect to have automated backups made in the cloud on the Limetech servers.
• By using the "Backup/Restore Appdata" plugin which has an option to make a backup to a location of your choice when it runs to backup docker containers working data.