December 5, 20241 yr I got unRAID set up in a virtual machine today by pass-through'ing the harddisks directly to it. This works nicely. I formatted the four harddisks beforehand in proxmox, so there's nothing on them. When i selected them in the array in unraid (1 for parity, and 3 for disks), they've started syncing. It tells me this sync process is going to take 18 hours. Why is this? What is there to sync if there's nothing on them? Or is it just calculating its total size or something? Or have i configured something wrong maybe..
December 5, 20241 yr Author Also, something else i noticed - why does it say Total size: 8 TB ? When each of my four harddisks are 8 TB each.
December 5, 20241 yr Community Expert Unraid makes no assumptions about whether the disks are previously formatted outside Unraid and expects them to be partitioned and formatted from within Unraid. The Sync you mention is building the initial parity based on the current data drives. It takes something like 2T hours per TB of the largest parity drive. Parity works at the raw sector level (and is thus independent of the file system in use). The fact that you have no data does not mean that parity does not need calculating to get the initial start position.
December 5, 20241 yr Community Expert 1 minute ago, kriss0706 said: Also, something else i noticed - why does it say Total size: 8 TB ? When each of my four harddisks are 8 TB each. That is because that is the size of the largest parity drive, and therefore that is the amount of parity data to be built/checked.
December 5, 20241 yr Author 3 minutes ago, itimpi said: Unraid makes no assumptions about whether the disks are previously formatted outside Unraid and expects them to be partitioned and formatted from within Unraid. The Sync you mention is building the initial parity based on the current data drives. It takes something like 2T hours per TB of the largest parity drive. Parity works at the raw sector level (and is thus independent of the file system in use). The fact that you have no data does not mean that parity does not need calculating to get the initial start position. Ok that makes sense, thanks. 2 minutes ago, itimpi said: That is because that is the size of the largest parity drive, and therefore that is the amount of parity data to be built/checked. Does this mean that i can only have 8 TB of usable space? Because i was hoping i could get something like RAID 5, 24 TB of usable space with 1 drive of failure tolerance. EDIT: According to ChatGPT: Quote You have 3 data drives, each 8TB: Total usable storage = 8TB + 8TB + 8TB = 24TB Edited December 5, 20241 yr by kriss0706
December 5, 20241 yr Community Expert Solution 4 minutes ago, kriss0706 said: Does this mean that i can only have 8 TB of usable space? Because i was hoping i could get something like RAID 5, 24 TB of usable space with 1 drive of failure tolerance. No. 1 parity drive provides tolerance against any 1 data drive failing. The available space is the sum of the data drives (which do not need to all be the same size). You might find it useful to read about how parity works as described here in the online documentation accessible via the Manual link at the bottom of the Unraid GUI. In addition every forum page has a DOCS link at the top and a Documentation link at the bottom. The Unraid OS->Manual section covers most aspects of the current Unraid release.
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