My Unraid configuration

[Robertxc]

Ok, so now that my array has been running smoothly for about a week I guess I'm in a position to put down my final setup and configuration...

 

I started off with the cheapest case I could find that would hold 10+ drives, and found one for £35 including power supply (assume $2 = £1). I then bought an Asus P5B-VM mobo and a dual core E2140 Pentium CPU, which cost about £80 in total. I already had 2GB of DDR2 800 RAM kicking about, so that fitted in nicely. Finally a PEAK III 1GB USB drive for the Unraid OS. Because my existing storage was full I had to buy a bunch of hard drives to get the array going, so along with the other components I bought three 750GB Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA drives for £110 each. Once it was all set up I realised that the included PSU was insufficient so I got a new one for £20.

 

My existing storage had grown without any real planning, and I was becoming concerned that when I suffered a hard drive failure it would cause me a lot of grief. This concern was compounded by a basic error I made some time ago when I configured my Synology DS207 Nas device as Raid0 (I know I know), which of course would have meant that if either one of the two hard drives in that failed I would have lost about 1.5 TB of data! As well as the Synology I also had a Netgear SC101 Nas thing, which I can honestly say is the worst, most pitiful component of any sort I have ever bought, so please don't ever ever buy one. both my Nas devices had 2 750GB drives each. Obviously I needed to start off my Unraid with thre drives so that I would be able to transfer the 1.5TB from the Synology somewhere before adding its drives to the Unraid (I hope that makes sense). so, today my Unraid has 6 750GB drives in it (1 parity + 5 data), with a spare 750GB drive for when I upgrade to a pro license later this week. Out of all that storage I now have less that 100GB free.

 

For me, Unraid has solved quite a perplexing problem. Most of my data is backed up CDs and DVDs. I first looked at Windows Home Server but ruled it out straight away because of its 2TB limit. I also looked at dynamic disks and suchlike on XP, as well as Win2003 server, but to be honest non of them realy suited me. I have to say that so far Unraid has fitted the bill perfectly! Currently I have about 500 DVDs and 17,000 MP3s on my array. All my DVDs have been backed up in DVD9 format because I can't really see the point in buying a movie and then watching a degraded copy of it (I know, DVDs are already compressed). I only use DVDFab for ripping DVDs and have found it to be pretty much 100% reliable so far (the only movie it couldn't back up, wierdly, was Scream3. Go figure). I can back up a movie in about 15 minutes so it's not too time intensive.

 

Now that I have my storage issues sort out I'm beginning to think about the implications of Bluray on my system. I have 6 kids at home (my wife and I are professional foster carers) and they all like to watch movies. I have 3 media centre PCs that all run the excellent Mediaportal software (see www.team-mediaportal.com with the 'My Movies' plugin. If you really want to excercise your nerd muscle you should try their brilliant TV server! What this means is that my storage gets pretty heavy use and it's quite common for three movies to be being watched at the same time. In fact, it's not uncommom for the same movie to be being watched simultaneously on two different TVs. Clearly, if I'm going to make the move to Bluray I need to give consideration to bandwidth. I think also that the cost of hard drives need t come down a bit further before it will be economical for me.

 

The only other point I would make to anyone reading this who is thinking of making the move to Unraid would be that a huge consideration for me when trying something relatively new (to me anyway) involving elements outside my sphere of knowledge - such as Linux etc., is the quality of help you get from the forum. I'm delighted to say that I've had nothing but good quality friendly support for the few problems I've had. It's particularly refreshing to get prompt helpful responses from the developer himself.