Storage drives for Unraid.

[Redman]

Hello everyone,

firstly I’m sorry if my particular question has been asked before but I am building a media server first most but with others services, I have everything ready to go but the hard drives, I have almost 1,000 movies which are a mix of blue-rays 4K and UHD’s so will be needing by my estimation 10 drives that are 8tb each,  I’m thinking I will use 2 pools in raidz1 or raidz2 on zfs, my question is since unraid spins up and spins down drives should I not be getting drives that are nas for the storage drives but nas drives for the parody drives AND if I should be getting nas drives for the entirety of the server since unraid is software raid and not hardware raid do I need to use the likes of for instance WD red pro or would the likes of WD red plus be ok being that I would be using 10 and not 8, WD red plus states up to 8 connected drives but I’m thinking that’s for hardware nas.

any advise would be appreciated 🙂

[foo_fighter]

Have you considered larger capacity drives? 18TB seems like the sweet spot now. ~$150-160 for recertified drives with warranty. 

[Redman]

I have @foo_fighter, but thank you for the suggestion, my concern is that if I go with a raidz1 and have a 18tb drive failure the rebuild time on that would be substantially longer than a 6-8 tb drive, if another drive failed during this time it would result in data loss, also replacing a 6-8 tb drive now and then would be cheaper and quicker than replacing a 18tb drive now and then, this is why I’m going to go with 6-8 tb drives to a make up a total of 10 drives but split them into 2 vdevs that make up the one pool 😊

[foo_fighter]

To answer your other question, if you go with ZFS pools, then you won't be using "UnRaid," at least not the original concept with a parity disk(s) and only spinning up the drive being used. All of the disks in your ZFS pools will be spun up to access data.

 

It would seem like fewer disks in a RaidZ2 pool would be more fault tolerant(better MTTF overall) and address the 2 disk failure case. Also RAID isn't backup so if you lost the vdev, you would just restore from backup worst case. 

 

8TB drives might be cheaper per drive but 18TB would be cheaper in total since $/TB is better. Also electricity costs would be 2X with more drives plus added heat. Also running out of drive bays/controller could be an issue, for example for spares/swaps. 

 

Software RAID(ZFS) or UnRAID is actually more tolerant of non-NAS drives, but I would avoid S(shingled)MR drives for performance reasons.

 

NAS drives are rated for longer MTTF and continuous workloads(24x7x365).  

Edited November 25 by foo_fighter

[Redman]

@foo_fighter so would you recommend higher capacity drives in an unsaid array using zfs format and work towards having a mirrored setup or a backup within the cloud sort of thing?

 

[foo_fighter]

I favor generally what is the best $/TB in the current market with maybe a slight premium for larger capacity. 

Larger capacity drives have been shown to have similar reliability in terms of failure rates(back blaze studies) even though they are more complex with more platters and heads.

They also have the power/heat/port advantages. The smaller drives eventually become fairly useless, no one really wants low capacity drives anymore. 

 

Cloud backup for media seems like it would be expensive. The media itself is backup for the array. I guess you've got to compute the $/hr of your time to re-rip it in a worst case scenario.

 

I've got one system with 1 parity disk protecting the data(3 18TB drives) and another system that's a backup but with no parity protection that syncs nightly and shuts down. I'll probably add parity to the 2nd system at some point.

I'm not using ZFS pools, but I do use ZFS for the cache and 1 ZFS disk in the array. There are pros and cons to each approach but I wanted to avoid having all disks spinning to access data and ZFS wasn't well supported in unraid until relatively recently and expansion was a pain.

ZFS replication from the cache to the array is pretty handy. ZFS scrub is also nice but in my system I don't have the benefit of autohealing that a true zpool would have. 

The whole beauty of unraid is that you can easily add a data disk at anytime and also increase from 1 parity disk to 2 parity disks if your array grows. Not so much with zpool vdevs. 

 

 

If you build a backup system, that seems like a good 3-2-1 protocol with the original media as the 3rd source. 

 

 

Edited November 26 by foo_fighter

[ConnerVT]

Don't overlook access speed when comparing large vs small capacity drives.  Here is a benchmark from my backup server, which has several HGST Ultrastar 6TB drives and one Ultrastar 16TB drive.  Access times are significantly faster for the 16TB, as much as 2x faster when at the 6TB mark.

 

[Redman]

 

Thank you @ConnerVT & @foo_fighter for the further information, creating a second server to act as a backup may cost more in the initial stage but a better idea than cloud as the back up will be performed locally and things like internet outages or bandwidth won’t be as much of a concern if I set this up to take place after midnight, if the average rip takes up to 100gb of space on a 16tb drive that’s roughly 160 movies that would need to be re ripped and at 2-3 how’s to rip and compress I don’t fancy spending 2 weeks replacing lost data nor do I have the time so will look into this, I have been seeing a lot of feedback about people using reconditioned enterprise drives with around 16tb capacity, is this something you would recommend against?

they are significantly cheaper this way, I’m in Australia and reconditioned is roughly $200 apposed to new which is around $500-$600 each.

 

[Redman]

Also since I do not yet have the server build completed and I am intending on using the server as a media server I am leaning heavily towards an intel arc gpu due to AV1 and capabilities, I know there have been compatibility issues in the past with the kernel in unraid with these gpu’s but am seeing that unraid 7 has solved this and was thinking that I would start with unraid 7 and go from there to match the need, unless you have any recommendations for gpu’s that won’t break the bank, I am planning on trying to set the media server up with jelly fun and as much direct play as possible but need to be prepared for some transcoding as one of the kids may want to watch something using his Xbox

[_cjd_]

Why exactly are you looking at zfs at all here? For media sharing a vanilla unraid array seems a better answer.

[ConnerVT]

I have 11 manufacturer recertified HGST Utrastar drives split across 2 servers, plus 2 more in external USB cases which are used for backups (one stays connected to the server, then swapped with another I keep offsite).  I have not had an issue with any of them since I started buying them a few years ago.  The key is not to jump on the lowest price you find, but rather obtain them from the most reputable business.  Unfortunately I can't say what that place is in Australia.

 

As for GPU, it really depends on your needs.  If all you need the GPU for is to stream on or two simultaneous movies on tour home LAN, an ARC is way overkill.  It could be handled easily by an Intel iGPU.  I run AMD processors, so the NVidia Quadro T400/P400 is a good choice.  Same encoder/decoder as their RTX/GTX big brothers, but cost much less, use less power, and only requires a single slot.

[foo_fighter]

In the US, places like serverpartdeals or goharddrive offer their own 2-5 year post sales warranties for recertified drives. I'm not sure if there's something similar in Australia or if they would ship there for a reasonable price.

 

[Redman]

6 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

I have 11 manufacturer recertified HGST Utrastar drives split across 2 servers, plus 2 more in external USB cases which are used for backups (one stays connected to the server, then swapped with another I keep offsite).  I have not had an issue with any of them since I started buying them a few years ago.  The key is not to jump on the lowest price you find, but rather obtain them from the most reputable business.  Unfortunately I can't say what that place is in Australia.

 

As for GPU, it really depends on your needs.  If all you need the GPU for is to stream on or two simultaneous movies on tour home LAN, an ARC is way overkill.  It could be handled easily by an Intel iGPU.  I run AMD processors, so the NVidia Quadro T400/P400 is a good choice.  Same encoder/decoder as their RTX/GTX big brothers, but cost much less, use less power, and only requires a single slot.

 

[Redman]

@ConnerVT sorry tried to reply but it just did a quote 🤷🏼‍♂️

so the intel arc I am going to use is the intel arc a310, it to is a single slot card powered by the pcie but is $180 here I. Australia, the p400 & t400 range from $250-$300 so if the arc is overkill I guess I’m getting more bang for my buck 🤷🏼‍♂️

I ordered some HGST from goharddrive this morning, awesome deal, not a lot on postage, ordering from US and shipping to Australia is still cheaper than buying refurbished in Australia, crazy world 🤪