I am considering switching to Unraid from my current setup. I am currently running Windows Server, with Drivebender as my JBOD management software. Drivebender is no longer developing their software and my version of Windows is old, so it needs to be replaced.

 

I have done some research into Unraid, but I am still unsure if it can do what I am looking for. 

From what I have read Unraid uses a parity drive for drive failure recovery. I actually prefer the way Drivebender handled drive failure. Instead of a parity drive drive bender would duplicate files on multiple drives. This would not only allow those files to be recovered because they existed on multiple drives, but it also allowed multiple drives to be used while reading to increase performance. In my case this was helpful because I was using slower 5400 rpm drives to help reduce costs. Is this something Unraid can do?

In addition Drivebender would allow me to select which directories I wanted duplicated. That way if I didn't care about certain files I save space by not duplicating them. I have over 5 TB of ripped movies that if worst comes to worst I could always re rip

Next question. How does unraid work with online backup services. I currently use an online service to backup my file online as a second backup location incase something really bad happens and the server is a complete loss.

Thanks in advance for answering the questions.

Never herd of drivebender...
https://www.division-m.com/drivebender/
Form what I can tell they are still maintaining...

 

As your windows your format is most likely ntfs... unraid will not be able to maintain your data when bring in the drives as they need linux formatted for use. the Unassigned disk plugin will read ntfs to copy data off and into a array/pool disk setup...
 

Depends on how you setup your disk and pool device. Unraid is Linux you will need to convert the disk you have to a Linux file system. 
xfs for disk #, btrfs for pool device. Unraid recent started support for zfs. I recommend using zfs disk in a raid 5 like array.

see in unraid docs:

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/

With Beta 7 hitting release candidate. I would recommend ditching the array and going ZFS:

the inner working of drivebender are similar to how unraids party works. this can be accomplished with user scripts and rsync commands. Usually in a raid setup all content on the disk drive are synced to each disk in a mirror type array. to increase speed we stripe the data putting part of the file on one disk and another part on the other disk. To get both we look at raid 4,5,6. I prefer a raid 5 type instance to have "parity" meaning the data is read form 2 disk and stored on 1 in a 3 disk setup this way if a drive failure I have "redundancy" and maintain my data and uptime to bring down the server and replace a disk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels
 

unraid was revolutionary as it uses mdadm and software Linux raid like mechanics across a weird arrangement of disk sizes. Usually with raid all disk need to be the same capacity.

While possible, I'm not aware of a multi array disk setup where you can choose x directly to be across disk. This would be a cron job at x time to copy the contents of xyz folder on one disk to the other.

I would highly recommend a zfs raidz1 setup min of 3 disk same capacity lose 1 keep all data on the disk.

Reveiw:

 

 

 

In terms of online backup services that dependent on docker servers. There are quite a few in the forum that have used dockers and user script to sync data to a proton webdav drive system or box/Google Drive. that would be a separate forum post. Most likely the rclone plugin.

 

Thank you for the very detailed response and all the link and videos. I will spend some time reading and watching them.

I am not too worried about transferring the files/converting the drives, I already have a plan for that.

I really don't want to use RAID because of the upfront cost and hassle of buying and maintaining drives of the same size, hence my interest in unraid. However, it sounds like unraid cannot do what I want without a significant amount of custom scripting and cron jobs. 

It is good to know there are options for online backup.