I realize that UNraid gives you the security of data being recovered from individual drives and being able to use odd sized drives by compromising performance by not striping the data in multiple drives correct?

 

My question is does this lack of performance effect both read and write or is read ability completely unaffected?

 

In other words, is reading data from this system the same as reading data from a single networked attacked hard drive or computer?

 

Thanks.

 

 

 

In other words, is reading data from this system the same as reading data from a single networked attacked hard drive or computer?

Thanks.

 

Exactly that. When reading from an unraid array drive you're just reading directly from the disk in question so should expect the same speeds you would see as you would reading that disk in any other scenario.

 

Parity is only involved during writes.

In other words, is reading data from this system the same as reading data from a single networked attacked hard drive or computer?

Thanks.

 

Exactly that. When reading from an unraid array drive you're just reading directly from the disk in question so should expect the same speeds you would see as you would reading that disk in any other scenario.

 

Parity is only involved during writes.

 

This is what I suspected and its actually good for me. I guess it will take a while to transfer the video files to the unRaid server but once they are there, it should be a fast reading for streaming to my various devices such as popcorn hours.

So in theory / the bigger picture you are losing read performance as opposed to if your disks were all striped - but you would really need either more than a gigabit nic in your server to feel that pain or have multiple clients hammering the array.

 

What unraid *can* do to help mitigate is that if the files / media you're streaming from multiple locations are on different disks - then, up to the limit of the network, you can leverage the throughput of multiple disks that way.

 

All a very long winded way of saying that for reads the network is probably as much of a limitation as the disks. Presuming you have a half decent drive / controller infrastructure.

 

You'll be fine I suspect, your usage is more than likely exactly what most people running unraid are doing and pretty much what it was designed for. Whilst the on paper disk i/o metrics of people running large striped arrays for their home media server always look great - the elephant in the room is that they usually end up serving it all out via a gig nic. All very nice and well being able to read locally on the server at 4/500 megabytes per second but it will get capped down to ~100 as soon it goes near the nic.