loady Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Hi Everyone, I am new here, so let me give you a little back ground on my setup. I currently have QNAP TS 439 Pro ll turbo NAS, i have it doing what i want but i am not well versed in linux, i have found the community forum with QNAP to be quite harsh to people who do not know it inside out which has put me off doing other things with it as i would have to ask what might be quite noobish questions to the well versed. I have it running SABnzb, Sickbeard, couch potato and also it stores all my photos and films etc, it has 4 x 2TB drives in it @ RAID5 level and it is ample space for my needs at this time as i only keep certain films for long term, i also have a small NAS to back up my photos and personal stuff as you can never be to sure. I couldnt resist purchasing this http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer, it was a steal at £149.99 (£100 cashback), what i want to know is if this would be a good candidate for my first unRAID experince with respect to the CPU and RAM capacity ?and will it do everything my QNAP does so far ?. Ill get on with a list of questions now.... 1) what would be the best way to go about setting this up ? it has four drive bays which i believe are not hotswappable and it also has a 5.25 drive bay which i have been told can also be used for another HDD giving a total of five, would it be a good idea to put in a small SSD to run unRAID or will it do just fine of a large thumb drive ? 2) Memory is so cheap now i could put 8GB on ram in it, would that be benifial or just overkill ? 3) My QNAP tells me if there is a HDD failure and i just pull out the dead and plug in the new, i like RAID5 but i like the sound of unRAIDs system where i can use different size drives etc and it will support one drive failure, if a drive did fail is it a risky procedure fixing it..is it as simple as turning off the server and putting in new HDD and waiting for it to rebuild or are there further steps i need to take ? 4) Does unRAID facilitate sending alerts via email or SMS to such failures and would i need additional equipment and would i be able to incorporate it into this box possibly losing the top bay ? 5) Can i have things like sickbeard, couch potato, PLEX, XBMC running on this and are they easily installed ? 6) I have a couple of spare 1TB HDD, would it be possible to start of with those and then somehow migrate my QNAP data over, nameley the important stuff and then when i have done that start pulling out the 2TB HDD's from the QNAP and install them into the unRAID system one by one, swapping out the 1TB ones ? 7) The qnap spins down the drives and other things to keep running costs low, can i do this with unRAID ? could i also set times to come on and switch of, i can with QNAP but it is limited to on or off, i cant set mutiple times, ie like turn on at 6.00am and switch of at 11.00pm, does unRAID support WOL ?? Sorry about the list of questions, there will be many more i am sure, please tell me ANYTHING else i should be aware of or need to know and think i will like and thanks for taking the time to read, i hope to have a lot of input into this forum in the forseeable future. Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 Hi Everyone, I am new here, so let me give you a little back ground on my setup. I currently have QNAP TS 439 Pro ll turbo NAS, i have it doing what i want but i am not well versed in linux, i have found the community forum with QNAP to be quite harsh to people who do not know it inside out which has put me off doing other things with it as i would have to ask what might be quite noobish questions to the well versed. I have it running SABnzb, Sickbeard, couch potato and also it stores all my photos and films etc, it has 4 x 2TB drives in it @ RAID5 level and it is ample space for my needs at this time as i only keep certain films for long term, i also have a small NAS to back up my photos and personal stuff as you can never be to sure. I couldnt resist purchasing this http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer, it was a steal at £149.99 (£100 cashback), what i want to know is if this would be a good candidate for my first unRAID experince with respect to the CPU and RAM capacity ?and will it do everything my QNAP does so far ?. Ill get on with a list of questions now.... 1) what would be the best way to go about setting this up ? it has four drive bays which i believe are not hotswappable and it also has a 5.25 drive bay which i have been told can also be used for another HDD giving a total of five, would it be a good idea to put in a small SSD to run unRAID or will it do just fine of a large thumb drive ? must run off thumb drive. 2) Memory is so cheap now i could put 8GB on ram in it, would that be benifial or just overkill ? WAY overkill. I have 2gb and that seems just fine. maybe go for 4gb since u want all the bells and whistles. 3) My QNAP tells me if there is a HDD failure and i just pull out the dead and plug in the new, i like RAID5 but i like the sound of unRAIDs system where i can use different size drives etc and it will support one drive failure, if a drive did fail is it a risky procedure fixing it..is it as simple as turning off the server and putting in new HDD and waiting for it to rebuild or are there further steps i need to take ? yes, shutdown, pull out, replace, turn on. 4) Does unRAID facilitate sending alerts via email or SMS to such failures and would i need additional equipment and would i be able to incorporate it into this box possibly losing the top bay ? email yes, SMS not that I am aware of (or thats easy). 5) Can i have things like sickbeard, couch potato, PLEX, XBMC running on this and are they easily installed ? yes. Plex requires 5.0beta, XBMC never seen it done myself, but many use XBMC clients pulling streams from unRAID. 6) I have a couple of spare 1TB HDD, would it be possible to start of with those and then somehow migrate my QNAP data over, nameley the important stuff and then when i have done that start pulling out the 2TB HDD's from the QNAP and install them into the unRAID system one by one, swapping out the 1TB ones ? yes. the parity drive must be the same or larger than anything in the group, FYI. 7) The qnap spins down the drives and other things to keep running costs low, can i do this with unRAID ? could i also set times to come on and switch of, i can with QNAP but it is limited to on or off, i cant set mutiple times, ie like turn on at 6.00am and switch of at 11.00pm, does unRAID support WOL ?? it spins downs drives after 'x' time. while scheduling isnt built in im sure this is something someone can do with some knowledge. but SABnzd should be downloading all night anyways. Sorry about the list of questions, there will be many more i am sure, please tell me ANYTHING else i should be aware of or need to know and think i will like and thanks for taking the time to read, i hope to have a lot of input into this forum in the forseeable future. since u have the server, a thumb drive, and spare HDD's try it out. The basic version (2 data disks and 1 parity), is free. Quote Link to comment
neilt0 Posted January 11, 2012 Share Posted January 11, 2012 what i want to know is if this would be a good candidate for my first unRAID experince with respect to the CPU and RAM capacity ?and will it do everything my QNAP does so far ?. Ill get on with a list of questions now.... Yes, and probably. See my sig for how I and others have used the N36L, which is a slightly slower version of your model. 1) what would be the best way to go about setting this up ? it has four drive bays which i believe are not hotswappable and it also has a 5.25 drive bay which i have been told can also be used for another HDD giving a total of five, would it be a good idea to put in a small SSD to run unRAID or will it do just fine of a large thumb drive ? An SSD would be a waste of money and probably not work. 2) Memory is so cheap now i could put 8GB on ram in it, would that be benifial or just overkill ? The standard 2GB is enough to run unRAID. If you want to run many add-ons, adding 2GB or 4GB will be a good idea. I have 5GB and run sickbeard, sabnzbd, cache_dirs and a bunch of other stuff. There's no harm in adding 8GB if you plan to use a lot of add-ons, and as you say, it's cheap. It'd give you plenty of RAM cache, which the system will use, which can help a little with performance/responsiveness. 3) My QNAP tells me if there is a HDD failure and i just pull out the dead and plug in the new, i like RAID5 but i like the sound of unRAIDs system where i can use different size drives etc and it will support one drive failure, if a drive did fail is it a risky procedure fixing it..is it as simple as turning off the server and putting in new HDD and waiting for it to rebuild or are there further steps i need to take ? There's not much more to it than that. 4) Does unRAID facilitate sending alerts via email or SMS to such failures and would i need additional equipment and would i be able to incorporate it into this box possibly losing the top bay ? Look at unMenu for this. What equipment? No, you won't need any for that. 5) Can i have things like sickbeard, couch potato, PLEX, XBMC running on this and are they easily installed ? Yes, see unMenu, or if you run v5.0 you may want to use the new installer thingies. 6) I have a couple of spare 1TB HDD, would it be possible to start of with those and then somehow migrate my QNAP data over, nameley the important stuff and then when i have done that start pulling out the 2TB HDD's from the QNAP and install them into the unRAID system one by one, swapping out the 1TB ones ? Yes. 7) The qnap spins down the drives and other things to keep running costs low, can i do this with unRAID ? could i also set times to come on and switch of, i can with QNAP but it is limited to on or off, i cant set mutiple times, ie like turn on at 6.00am and switch of at 11.00pm, does unRAID support WOL ?? Yes to spindown. The HP Microserver does not support SLEEP. It can hibernate, but I just leave it on all the time as the power consumption is very low. Sorry about the list of questions, there will be many more i am sure, please tell me ANYTHING else i should be aware of or need to know and think i will like and thanks for taking the time to read, i hope to have a lot of input into this forum in the forseeable future. Be aware that unRAID is not really for non-technical people. You'll get lots of help here, but you should read up on the topics I've listed above in the wiki and the forums here, as all the information is available, it just takes a bit of work and technical knowledge to find and implement. If you managed to install apps on your QNAP thingy, you'll probably be OK with unRAID. Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 12, 2012 Author Share Posted January 12, 2012 Hi Everyone, I am new here, so let me give you a little back ground on my setup. I currently have QNAP TS 439 Pro ll turbo NAS, i have it doing what i want but i am not well versed in linux, i have found the community forum with QNAP to be quite harsh to people who do not know it inside out which has put me off doing other things with it as i would have to ask what might be quite noobish questions to the well versed. I have it running SABnzb, Sickbeard, couch potato and also it stores all my photos and films etc, it has 4 x 2TB drives in it @ RAID5 level and it is ample space for my needs at this time as i only keep certain films for long term, i also have a small NAS to back up my photos and personal stuff as you can never be to sure. I couldnt resist purchasing this http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421 HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer, it was a steal at £149.99 (£100 cashback), what i want to know is if this would be a good candidate for my first unRAID experince with respect to the CPU and RAM capacity ?and will it do everything my QNAP does so far ?. Ill get on with a list of questions now.... 1) what would be the best way to go about setting this up ? it has four drive bays which i believe are not hotswappable and it also has a 5.25 drive bay which i have been told can also be used for another HDD giving a total of five, would it be a good idea to put in a small SSD to run unRAID or will it do just fine of a large thumb drive ? must run off thumb drive. 2) Memory is so cheap now i could put 8GB on ram in it, would that be benifial or just overkill ? WAY overkill. I have 2gb and that seems just fine. maybe go for 4gb since u want all the bells and whistles. 3) My QNAP tells me if there is a HDD failure and i just pull out the dead and plug in the new, i like RAID5 but i like the sound of unRAIDs system where i can use different size drives etc and it will support one drive failure, if a drive did fail is it a risky procedure fixing it..is it as simple as turning off the server and putting in new HDD and waiting for it to rebuild or are there further steps i need to take ? yes, shutdown, pull out, replace, turn on. 4) Does unRAID facilitate sending alerts via email or SMS to such failures and would i need additional equipment and would i be able to incorporate it into this box possibly losing the top bay ? email yes, SMS not that I am aware of (or thats easy). 5) Can i have things like sickbeard, couch potato, PLEX, XBMC running on this and are they easily installed ? yes. Plex requires 5.0beta, XBMC never seen it done myself, but many use XBMC clients pulling streams from unRAID. 6) I have a couple of spare 1TB HDD, would it be possible to start of with those and then somehow migrate my QNAP data over, nameley the important stuff and then when i have done that start pulling out the 2TB HDD's from the QNAP and install them into the unRAID system one by one, swapping out the 1TB ones ? yes. the parity drive must be the same or larger than anything in the group, FYI. 7) The qnap spins down the drives and other things to keep running costs low, can i do this with unRAID ? could i also set times to come on and switch of, i can with QNAP but it is limited to on or off, i cant set mutiple times, ie like turn on at 6.00am and switch of at 11.00pm, does unRAID support WOL ?? it spins downs drives after 'x' time. while scheduling isnt built in im sure this is something someone can do with some knowledge. but SABnzd should be downloading all night anyways. Sorry about the list of questions, there will be many more i am sure, please tell me ANYTHING else i should be aware of or need to know and think i will like and thanks for taking the time to read, i hope to have a lot of input into this forum in the forseeable future. since u have the server, a thumb drive, and spare HDD's try it out. The basic version (2 data disks and 1 parity), is free. ill lump up the money for the licence, how long is the licence for ? Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 12, 2012 Author Share Posted January 12, 2012 Thanks to both of you for giving me some good starting points, im not untechnical, i have managed to install QPKG and python on my QNAP so i cant be that bad, ill certainly look into all the areas you have mentioned, starting with your sig. Quote Link to comment
Lacehim Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I'm running a n40l with 4gb ram. I was under the impression that 4gb was unraids limit? Anyway I have 2x1tb drives for now and the 250gb + an old 120gb drive as a apps drive. 80w at boot, 40-50w with drives spun up and 40w with just the array spun down. Idle with all drives down its 35w. I've go sick beard, sabnzb, ps3ms and I've also installed air video as a trial too. CPU was at 150% according to the unmenu processes tab but the server was responsive and the iPad played a movie perfectly. I fumbled my way about but my tip is start with 4.7 install unmenu and install sickbeard, Sab, cp with that. The Conf file can be downloaded from the forum. I used snap to mount and share the apps drive and ran sb, Sab, ps3ms off that to save the flash. It can all be done but takes patience and learning a little Linux. Fun though. Precleared your drives before you start! Check the wiki for info. I used screen and did 4 drives at once! Quote Link to comment
mr-hexen Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 ill lump up the money for the licence, how long is the licence for ? liftime I believe (have not seen anything saying otherwise?) the key purchase page says nothing on duration. http://lime-technology.com/products/registration-keys Quote Link to comment
chip Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I'm running a n40l with 4gb ram. I was under the impression that 4gb was unraids limit? Anyway I have 2x1tb drives for now and the 250gb + an old 120gb drive as a apps drive. 80w at boot, 40-50w with drives spun up and 40w with just the array spun down. Idle with all drives down its 35w. On the 120gb for apps - how is this installed in the array? Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 12, 2012 Author Share Posted January 12, 2012 Yes, and probably. See my sig for how I and others have used the N36L, which is a slightly slower version of your model. I had a read around. Whats the 'cache' drive for and would i need one ?...also in this thread someone mentioned having certain things on a certain drive, so its not like raid5 where everything is just placed wherever or am i wrong, i like the idea of having all my films on certain drives so the other can all spin down but how would that work with a very large scope of increasing and decreasing volume..for instance my movie collection may go upto3TB but then after a cull it would reduce to 1TB...is that effecient ?? Quote Link to comment
neilt0 Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I had a read around. Whats the 'cache' drive for and would i need one ?...also in this thread someone mentioned having certain things on a certain drive, so its not like raid5 where everything is just placed wherever or am i wrong, i like the idea of having all my films on certain drives so the other can all spin down but how would that work with a very large scope of increasing and decreasing volume..for instance my movie collection may go upto3TB but then after a cull it would reduce to 1TB...is that effecient ?? Your quoting is backwards in your post. Cache drive: http://bit.ly/yW0UFe People (me) also use a cache drive as an "apps drive" -- it's where I store data downloaded/uploaded through Transmission and sabnzbd. I don't even use the mover script. The cache drive is faster and it means the parity drive is not spun up for writes. I have no idea what you're asking in the longer point. Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 12, 2012 Author Share Posted January 12, 2012 Sorry i was highlighting text and trying to quote it..it didnt work. i like the 'let me google that for you'..very funny . Please correct me if i am getting this wrong, i understand the idea of it in esscence, lets say i have SABnzb working with a sickbeard script to rename and move completed downloads to a specific share, the cache drive would be used to download the rars to and they would be unrared on the cache drive and then moved to the share ? if the latter is correct, i would have my setup to delete rars after they have completed succsessfully, would they be deleted directly from the cache or first be moved over to the share where they would then be deleted and would the same apply to rar sets that are unrepairable, normally SABnzb would have those in an 'incomplete folder' Quote Link to comment
neilt0 Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 You are confusing sabnzbd with the mover script. I have no idea why. Generally, you'd set up sabnzbd to unpack to the cache drive. You can have it unpack to wherever you want, though. The mover script has nothing to do with sabnzbd's housekeeping. Remember that part when I said "Be aware that unRAID is not really for non-technical people. You'll get lots of help here, but you should read up on the topics I've listed above in the wiki and the forums here, as all the information is available, it just takes a bit of work and technical knowledge to find and implement. If you managed to install apps on your QNAP thingy, you'll probably be OK with unRAID." Other people may offer more assistance (hand-holding), but I don't tend to do that. I will suggest you do your own research on the default SABnzbd install available for uNRAID and the cache drive and mover script. Quote Link to comment
aiden Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 I was under the impression that 4gb was unraids limit? Plenty of people here are running unRAID with 16GB of memory. The limitation you'll run into with RAM will be the hardware you use, not unRAID. Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 12, 2012 Author Share Posted January 12, 2012 You are confusing sabnzbd with the mover script. I have no idea why. Generally, you'd set up sabnzbd to unpack to the cache drive. You can have it unpack to wherever you want, though. The mover script has nothing to do with sabnzbd's housekeeping. Remember that part when I said "Be aware that unRAID is not really for non-technical people. You'll get lots of help here, but you should read up on the topics I've listed above in the wiki and the forums here, as all the information is available, it just takes a bit of work and technical knowledge to find and implement. If you managed to install apps on your QNAP thingy, you'll probably be OK with unRAID." Other people may offer more assistance (hand-holding), but I don't tend to do that. I will suggest you do your own research on the default SABnzbd install available for uNRAID and the cache drive and mover script. I dont need hand holding, im just trying to translate my SABnzb, sickbeard setup to unRAID with the use of a cache drive, as you said, i have managed to set these up on my QNAP as they had QPKG installs for them so i didnt have to compile anything myself, with you mentioning this mover script lead me to think that i can easily setup SAB and SB on unRAID as i have it on my QNAP but to use the cache drive i will have to do a 'little' more to utilise it and incorporate it into the setup...im all for reading, i just like to get a little foundation, after all, that will prolly be one of the last things i setup and as i go along i will learn more. ADDAGE: Having read http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1731.msg11937#msg11937 this thread, do i REALLY need a chache drive, would it benefit me and if i choose not to would i be missing something my QNAP did without me even knowing about it, i never setup a cache drive on the QNAP, afterall, it is what it is..i really only use the server to store my HD content and serve it over my wired CAT6 network, downloads are performed when i am asleep, im not an overly big downloader, more a binge downloader of about 100gb a month, the other day i dumped 100's of GB to my server from old DV tapes, it done it in real time and i probably wont do that again for a few years, my kids just use it to store thier homework and they have allocated shares...for my usage would i not be better served by adding the 6th drive as more storage ? i think the main problem i have right now is that with HDD prices as hiig as they are i dont want to buy more, i have 4 x 2TB in my QNAP, i wonder if i can wind that down to a different RAID level (after a little houskeeping) and pinch one of the drives out it as i currently only have 1 x1TB, 1 x 250GB and 2 x 320GB, thus slowly moving my data accross to the unraid setup and gradually taking more drives from the QNAP untill i have all 4 2TB in the unRAID. possible you think ? Quote Link to comment
Lacehim Posted January 12, 2012 Share Posted January 12, 2012 On the 120gb for apps - how is this installed in the array? I used S.N.A.P. under 4.7 you could use mount drive under unraid 5 beta. Quote Link to comment
chip Posted January 13, 2012 Share Posted January 13, 2012 This drive doesn't count toward anything if you are using the free version? Quote Link to comment
loady Posted January 14, 2012 Author Share Posted January 14, 2012 ill lump up the money for the licence, how long is the licence for ? Quote Link to comment
prtsmgr Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 This drive doesn't count toward anything if you are using the free version? Correct, you can use the free version and add a 4th drive for apps using snap or the drive mount plugin Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment
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