I was wondering why the unraid team went the way they did with the way they seperate files on disks. When you look a normal raid, data is divided across the drives at the byte (block?) level which makes it possible to increase speed (raid0, raid5 read, etc) by reading from multiple drives at once. I know unraid's method has the advantage of only spinning up the disk that's needed which saves energy but why not give an option so that people that want a faster setup can do so by stripping the data across the drives?

I was wondering why the unraid team went the way they did with the way they seperate files on disks. When you look a normal raid, data is divided across the drives at the byte (block?) level which makes it possible to increase speed (raid0, raid5 read, etc) by reading from multiple drives at once. I know unraid's method has the advantage of only spinning up the disk that's needed which saves energy but why not give an option so that people that want a faster setup can do so by stripping the data across the drives?

easy, fastest speed possible was not the objective.  Objective was to allow use of different sized drives in the array of disks protected by parity, and ease of incremental growth over time. From what I remember reading, unRaid is equivalent to RAID4, but without striping of data.

 

If you want fastest speed when reading, unRaid is not the solution for you.

 

Joe L.

I was only trying to see why. Speed is just fine for my usage. So you're saying stripping was impossible while having the advantages you talked of? I guess the different sized drives and incremental growth are the culprits (They are much better features than speed imo)

So you're saying stripping was impossible while having the advantages you talked of?

Exactly.

I guess the different sized drives and incremental growth are the culprits (They are much better features than speed imo)

I too prefer those features over ultimate speed.

I guess the different sized drives and incremental growth are the culprits (They are much better features than speed imo)

Agreed, I love the ability to compartmentalize my data into spindles and if need be upgrade a single spindle without a backup/restore.

I like not loosing all of my data on a huge array if I have multiple drive failures.

Years ago I had a raid5 array with multiple drive failures cause me to loose all my data.

 

unRaid strikes a balance of best bang for the buck in regards to incremental growth.