Hey all, I am new to the forum and the world of unraid. I just want to say that I love it so far. I am wondering if its the right thing for me to get as a media server. I keep hearing things about true raid and whatnot and it being better and faster than unraid but no matter how much i read i cant quite understand why. All I want to do is be able to stream media to 3 different media centers in my house and not have 1 drive fail and all my data be gone. The server must be able to have apps on it such as sickbeard,sabnzbd,subsonic,etc. I want to be able to start off with maybe 2 drives and then expand as the money comes along. Does this sound like the right route that I should be going for using with xbmc or should I go with something like windows home server or freenas or anything different?

Any reply would be welcome.

I also would like to know about the speed of unraid with streaming to xbmc.

Can someone also point me to a post or something detailing the differences and pros and cons of unraid vs windows home server as a media server?

Traditional raid stripes the data across drives.  So when reading or writing a file more of it can be read or written simultaneously.  That is why it is faster.  unRAID does not stripe the data across drives - each drive has it's own file system and when you read the data you are reading from only one drive.  Writes are similar but writes are a multi step process involving 2 drives - the data drive and the parity drive.  It actually takes 4 operations to complete a write in unRAID - 2 reads and 2 writes.  That is why the write is much slower than the read and much slower than traditional raid.  The advantage that unRAID has over traditional raid is that even when you loose multiple data drives at a time you only loose the data on those drives.  In traditional raid if you loose more drives than you have parity to protect you loose everything.  If the drive is just dropped in traditional raid you might be able to employ recovery software to get it back in that situation but if the drives completely die you loose everything.  For me that was enough to choose unRAID over traditional raid.  I use to have media servers using hardware raid cards.  It was expensive and I lost EVERYTHING on multiple occasions because I couldn't afford the recovery software to get it back when I had multiple drives get dropped from the array at a time.

 

Another advantage is that unRAID allows drives to be spun down when not used and only the drive that needs to spin up to access the file you want gets spun up.  So the electrical use is smaller.  For me is is allot less since most of my drives are spun down most of the time.  I would estimate that they are spun down 95% of the time.  This saves on the electric bill.

To add some info about a competing product: free indiana.

I tried this on my test box(atom d525) with 4 gb ram and raidz (raid-5 version of nfs) on 4 x 1 tb drives.

This was somewhat slower than unraid with cache drive on the same machine which surprised me, but it is said to be cpu and memory hungry.  One major issue, will not shut down ok, so zfs pool was lost.

Gui is default unix gnome ? And there is a 3rd party web interface which looks ok.

Also got bunch of errors of driver issues, even after few reboots.

 

The zfs file system is very nice theoretically, but it has less flexibility unraid has. Drives need to be the same size, ever group of drives (vdev) needs 1, 2 or 3 parity drives. No vdev expansion possible.

 

And harder to learn (for me) than basic linux.