December 11, 201114 yr After trying all free versions of software RAID and having none of them working, i think i may finally have to buy unRAID. I have 10 2TB WD20EARS drives, so i have to go pro. I see that unRAID has to be installed on a USB drive. And i really hate usb 2.0 because its such a bottleneck. It seem unRAID is pretty light and may not have much processing to do, but since im starting form scratch should i buy a USB 3.0 drive to future proof my installation? or does it not really matter?
December 11, 201114 yr AFAIK the only time USB is used is when loading unraid os from the flash drive into the ram, after that your flash drive just sits there. Using USB 3.0 specifically wont speed anything up except load time and even that only fractionally.
December 11, 201114 yr AFAIK the only time USB is used is when loading unraid os from the flash drive into the ram, after that your flash drive just sits there. Using USB 3.0 specifically wont speed anything up except load time and even that only fractionally. Exactly right. You will see faster boot times with USB 3.0, but that's it. If your server only has one USB 3.0 port, I would save it for data transfers and boot off USB 2.0. The speed of the flash drive matters far more than the speed of the port.
December 12, 201114 yr The boot speed of USB 2.0 is based on your bios, flash key and how it's formatted. As Raj mentions, the speed of the flash drive matters more then the speed of the port. I've noticed, A flash key formatted and accessed as floppy is painfully slow. In any case, you can boot unRAID's initial OS from many different ways if you know how. CD (if you can make an ISO linux bootable cd). PXE boot (I'm doing this now. lightning fast boot times). Hard drive (look into grub4dos). I plan to set my cache drive to allow booting after putting grub4dos onto the MBR since grub4dos can read reiserfs directly. Once unraid is booted,. the flash key's speed is much less important. Therefore I would not spend money on USB 3.0 unless I had another reason to use it. I.E. external backup media.
December 12, 201114 yr Author The boot speed of USB 2.0 is based on your bios, flash key and how it's formatted. As Raj mentions, the speed of the flash drive matters more then the speed of the port. I've noticed, A flash key formatted and accessed as floppy is painfully slow. In any case, you can boot unRAID's initial OS from many different ways if you know how. CD (if you can make an ISO linux bootable cd). PXE boot (I'm doing this now. lightning fast boot times). Hard drive (look into grub4dos). I plan to set my cache drive to allow booting after putting grub4dos onto the MBR since grub4dos can read reiserfs directly. Once unraid is booted,. the flash key's speed is much less important. Therefore I would not spend money on USB 3.0 unless I had another reason to use it. I.E. external backup media. Sounds good, thank you for all the useful info!
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