So I'm moving from a Raid 5 array to unRaid.  I really liked the fact that Raid 5 makes it just one big disk and you can organize your file structure however you want.  That way you can use the maximum disk space and not have to worry about filling up one disk before all the others.  At first I didn't realize that unRaid acts more like a bunch of single disks with parity. So that got me thinking... I like other things more about unRaid, but I was wondering if there was a way to replicate the feel of a Raid 5 without causing a bunch of problems.

 

I already read the Split Level post http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Split_level

 

It seems to me that the only way to do that would be to set the Split Level very high and then keep all disks spun up at all times.  I realize that this is not the most elegant way to handle the problem, but doesn't Raid 5 keep the disks spun up all the time?  Doing so with unRaid would not necessarily mean earlier drive failure than if you were using Raid 5.

RAID5 is different in that it has distributed parity while unRAID has a dedicated parity drive.

 

 

you can setup unRAID quite easily to appear as a single volume.

 

set a user share called whatever you want and instead of accessing it using \\tower\disk1\user_share just access it using \\tower\user_share.

 

set the allocation method to most free and it will always write to the drive with the most free space.

set the split level to 99.

 

if you have 5 data disks, 1 parity disks and you copy 5,000 JPEG's to the server you will end up with them spread across all data disks.

Ok, that's what I thought.  It will show up as a single disk in Windows or whatever, but it won't necessarily function like a single disk.  Say I had a slideshow running on my HTPC.  In order to prevent issues with latency (pauses from drives spinning up) I would have to make sure the drives didn't spin down, right?

You can set spinup groups. Or use split level to keep associated files together.