Recently, I discovered unRAID and was immediately sold by the prospect of it. However, sometimes things are too good to be true so that why I decided to create this topic.

 

How will I be using my NAS? I'll require access to it for not much more than a few hours a day, mostly for listening to music (FLAC files) and occasionally watching a movie (MKV files of ~10Mbps). The common use cases would be streaming music from the NAS to my PC or iPod Touch, or streaming movies to my PC or Xtreamer. Last but not least, support for network protocols like DLNA and Airplay would be very nice indeed.

 

The following hardware is available for usage in an unRAID setup:

 

- 4 WD external hard drives of 1TB, 2x 1.5TB and 2TB

- a Presario CQ60 laptop

- a XPS 410 (which I believe offers 6 SATA ports)

 

unRAID seems ideal in my case: suitable for moderate usage of the NAS (e.g. not too much writing), suitable for storing non-critical data (like in my case), support of different sized hard drives, the availability of useful plugins etc. All this while still offering data protection using a parity disk. (I believe I must use my 2TB disk for that.)

 

The only real obstacle I foresee is that I'll have to strip each hard drive of its case. unRAID does support external HDs using "SNAP" but then those will be excluded from the array.

 

What do you think? Would unRAID be the right choice for me?

If your disks are full then you might have to buy some disks to get started as the current ones will need to be formatted to use in an unraid array.

 

I think there are plugins for DLNA and Airplay  (Search forums, Servillo / AirVideo),  not sure about playing music on an iPod Touch?  Assume that uses airplay? I would read the threads and make sure you are comfortable with what they say.

 

At present,  you will need to use a Beta version of the software to get plugin support...  Maybe v5 will go release soon,  maybe not,  its been being worked on for quite some time now.

 

Popping the hard drives out of the cases shouldn't be a problem but be aware this will void any warranty on them and the disks inside will probably be OEM and have no warranty outside the cases.

 

If you have old hardware lying around then you can try the free version,  you wont get cache drive support but you can try the plugins and have a look at how unraid works.

 

EDIT : And the support on the forums is absolutely excellent,  for me its one of the strong points of using unRaid.

Thanks for your reply

 

What do you specifically think about my system? It has a E6420 dual-core 2.13Ghz processor and 4GB of RAM. Would that be sufficient to handle unRAID? I also found that it supports 6 SATA ports. That would make an ideal system to go with the plus license. I could use 5 hard drives with data and 1 for parity.

 

As I understand it, when adding a hard drive, only the added hard drive must be formatted. That means I only need to buy a 2TB hard drive to give me room to move the files around. In the future, I could add another 2TB hard drive and upgrade the existing hard drives to 2TB.

 

Would this work?

The safest course is to buy 2 drives. One for parity and a single data drive. The the existing drives can be copied to a protected array and then formatted and added to the array one at a time. This will result in a single leftover 1T drive.

Is the single data drive just to have a spare drive at all times? You implicitly mention it is 1TB. Any reason for that or could it be 2TB as well?

If you have a system already then I would boot it up using the free version and make sure the lan works, I think that is the most troublesome component.  If it has a disk in it... you can check the sata controller is detected too.

 

CPU and ram will be fine for serving files etc.... not sure how much grunt airplay needs?

 

He is suggesting buying 2x 2tb (One parity, one data)  then coping over 2TB from your externals,  put the empty external in unraid... copy more data... repeat.

 

not sure where the spare 1tb drive comes from?

NVM. I though you had 5 disks to start but I see you have only 4. There will be no extra disk. You'll end up with an additional 2T of capacity.