Hey Guys,

 

It looks like a great knowledgeable community here! I've just built my first UnRaid box and I have to say, UnRaid is awesome. I have a few questions though!

 

I want to be able to boot to Windows occasionally to play games. I have two 1TB HDs attached to the SATA interface, and one 160Gb HD attached to the ATA interface. I want to know if I can boot to Windows on the ATA drive, without messing up anything with UnRaid. I'm presuming Windows does not read ReiserFS, but I hope it won't do anything odd with the RAID setup.

 

I'm in the middle of copying my files to the server. I'm using Leopard on a MacBook. Files appear to copy at 1000base speeds, but every 10 seconds it stops for a few seconds, and then continues again. It's going to take around 20 hours to copy 700Gb of data. Is this normal, and if not then how can I fix it?

 

Also, is there any maintenance I need to do to the filesystem at all? I heard RAID 5 and similar setups have issues with corruption.

 

One more. When I add another hard drive, how will UnRaid assimilate it into the array? And when it does, how much space would I be left with if I have three 1TB hard drives in total?

 

Cheers

 

Andrew

I want to be able to boot to Windows occasionally to play games. I have two 1TB HDs attached to the SATA interface, and one 160Gb HD attached to the ATA interface. I want to know if I can boot to Windows on the ATA drive, without messing up anything with UnRaid. I'm presuming Windows does not read ReiserFS, but I hope it won't do anything odd with the RAID setup.

 

I think this may be possible if you take some care.  First, definitely do not add the hard drive with Windows (I'm assuming the 160Gb) to the unRAID array.  If you do, unRAID is going to want to format it.  I think the unRAID drives will typically be safe as long as you don't go into Administrative Tools-->Computer Management-->Disk Management and bring them into Windows.

 

As for choosing which OS to boot, I can think of two ways.  If you're lucky, you may be able to do this through the motherboard BIOS.  Set the USB flash drive to a higher priority than the 160Gb drive.  If the USB flash is present, then unRAID will boot, and if it's not then Windows will boot.  The ease of actually implementing this really depends on the motherboard.  On my Gigabyte, this wouldn't work well because even though my flash is 1st in boot priority, the motherboard seems to "forget" that there was ever a flash drive if I boot up without it (i.e., I have to go back in and re-assign it to the boot order).  If the BIOS trick doesn't work (or doesn't work efficiently), you could probably modify LILO to include your Windows partition.  This would give you the option each time you boot of whether to boot unRAID or Windows (similar to how there is the option for MEMTEST when you're booting).  I don't know how hard this would be because in addition to editing the LILO config file, you have to run the LILO command.  I don't know whether the changes would be temporarily or persistently saved on the flash.  If they are temporary, it could get much more complicated but would still probably be doable.

 

 

 

One more. When I add another hard drive, how will UnRaid assimilate it into the array?

Very easy.  Because each drive is a fully self-contained file system and since unRAID does not stripe data across drives, adding a new drive does absolutely nothing to the other data drives.  When it adds a drive, unRAID clears the contents of the new drive in such a way that parity remains valid.