I've been wanting to setup a home server to place my media on. I've never used any type of raid so I'm new to this and haven't really focused on it in awhile. When I first heard of unraid I was told you could just have one folder that spans across every drive such as a "media" folder. I've also heard you need to make multiple folders. So I'm a little confused on this.

 

If it's a folder spanning across all drives, what happens when a drive fails? I know you have the parity to re build it but would the files on it just be un accessible until the parity rebuilds it? I was wondering as well would it be possible to have a backup parity drive? From my understanding if the parity fails all the other drives are able to rebuild it? Just don't want to loose any media is all.

To answer your questions:

 

In unRaid you can have "user shares" which appear to you as one folder even though the data could be stored across multiple drives. So yes you can have a Media user share which spans as many drives as you like and to an end user it will look like one huge folder.

 

If one drive fails, then unRaid 'simulates' the data on that drive until you replace and rebuild it, so the files WILL be accessible whilst the rebuild is in progress.  This is only for one drive though... lose two and you are in trouble!

 

If the parity drive fails, then all of your data drives are still fine.  You just replace your parity drive and rebuild it.

 

For the time that you do not have a parity drive then your data drives are unprotected.  You would be unlucky to lose a data drive during that period, but is is possible of course.  All down to how fast you can replace the parity drive after failure.

I've been wanting to setup a home server to place my media on. I've never used any type of raid so I'm new to this and haven't really focused on it in awhile. When I first heard of unraid I was told you could just have one folder that spans across every drive such as a "media" folder. I've also heard you need to make multiple folders. So I'm a little confused on this.

 

Unraid is easy to setup in both ways, you have unraid just share your drives, or you can create shares that are split over all your drives (or a specific few), this last way is what most people are using, it makes that whenever your storage runs out you can just throw in another drive and there will be space on all your shares again.

 

If it's a folder spanning across all drives, what happens when a drive fails? I know you have the parity to re build it but would the files on it just be un accessible until the parity rebuilds it? I was wondering as well would it be possible to have a backup parity drive? From my understanding if the parity fails all the other drives are able to rebuild it? Just don't want to loose any media is all.

 

If a drive failes your biggest risk is that you do not notice it :-)  you can basically have one drive totally fail and  everything will still be accessible, then you throw in a new drive and unraid will automatically will make sure that the data is written back to the new drive. Really easy process.

 

Risk begins whenever one drive has failed, parity can will make sure that loss of one drive is not an issue, whenever you loose 2 drives though the data on both those drives is gone. Good thing is that in that case all other drives are still ok. A lot of commercial RAID configuration will have ALL data lost in such a case (even the data on the drives that still are ok)

unRAID has user shares. A user share appears as a single network share, called things such as Media or TV Shows or Movies. You can turn this function on or off.

 

You tell unRAID which disks to use for which user shares. On the server, each disk which is part of the user share will have a top level directory with the same name as the user share. unRAID basically combines the contents of each directory with the same name on the different disks and presents it as a single network share. So, you could have 10 disks and each disk might have the directories "Movies", "TV_Shows" and "Music". On the network, your PC will see 3 network locations called "Movies", "TV_Shows" and "Music" and those locations will hold all the data on the 10 disks in the server.

 

As a flip side of this. If you created a new directory on a disk called "Data" then it would then appear as a new user share. Remember, unRAID takes the top level directories on all the disks and builds the user shares. So, make a new top level directory and it becomes a new user share.