October 21, 200817 yr hi, I'm looking to build a test system using the free version of unRAID but I can't find anything written about how many drives are supported by it. I can see the 9 drive plus version an the 15 drive pro version but no mention of how many disks are supported by the free one at all. I've been right through the website and forum and fax/wiki page but can't find anything to tell me this. why don't you just have a table listing the differences between each version of the software so it's easy for people to see what they are getting?
October 21, 200817 yr from memory its 4. it should be on the wiki if its not when you confirm can you add it please. if you want a table feel free to add that as well
October 21, 200817 yr Hi, This is what you are looking for: http://lime-technology.com/?page_id=36 Software For those building their own server, unRAID Server OS is available as a free download. Unregistered unRAID Server OS supports Basic functionality: * up to 3 hard drives * all features except User level security To support more hard drives and User level security, you must purchase a Registration Key: * unRAID Server Plus key - support up to 6 hard drives * unRAID Server Pro key - support up to 16 hard drives BR Søren
October 21, 200817 yr Author thanks for tat SørenBM, not sure how I missed it. I think I just went straight to the 'Server OS' page without going any further. would be interested to find out if it's 3 data drives + parity or 3 physical drives total inc. parity though. thx.
October 21, 200817 yr I think it is 3 total drives if you use parity. Otherwise it is only 2. Correct, it can handle 2 data drives plus one parity drive (for a total of three physical disks making up the protected array) Joe L.
October 21, 200817 yr Author cool, thx. and once i buy a licence I can add whatever drives I already have (subject to the licence limits) to the server that already have data on them without losing their contents or do they need to be formatted with a particular FS first and then have data copied to them? i have to say this is looking pretty impressive and almost exactly fits my needs for a bit or redundancy without spending a fortune.
October 21, 200817 yr cool, thx. and once i buy a licence I can add whatever drives I already have (subject to the licence limits) to the server that already have data on them without losing their contents or do they need to be formatted with a particular FS first and then have data copied to them? i have to say this is looking pretty impressive and almost exactly fits my needs for a bit or redundancy without spending a fortune. Most of the time you must migrate the date from your existing drives. The only exception would be if your existing data is on a disk with a reiserfs file-system on a single partition using the entire disk. In that case, the reiserfs will be detected and the data would be used as is. In all other cases, if a different file-system exists on the drive (NTFS, FAT, ext2, etc), or if no file-system exists, it will be first cleared (zeros written to every byte) and then formatted with a reiserfs file-system. It is possible to use Linux commands to mount an existing disk outside of the protected array and copy from disk to disk inside the server. Most users are not familiar with linux commands typed at the command prompt, so most copy their data from existing disks in their PCs over the LAN to the unRAID server, then migrate the physical disk once the data is safe. Joe L.
October 22, 200817 yr Author thanks for the info joe, appreciated. just one more question. if i put 1 disk in the array and move data to that single disk can i then start adding disks one at a time and then use one of the disks for parity once i have everything moved across or do I need to start with 1 data disk + 1 parity disk before i move any data to it? i'm trying to do this without spending too much cash up front.
October 22, 200817 yr You can have an "array" consisting of 1 data disk with no parity. You can then add a second data disk with no parity. You can continue to expand and can add parity at any time. Many users prefer to load their array WITHOUT parity because it is much faster. But obviously have the associated risks. I recommend copying as much data as you can before installing parity BUT keep the original disks as a backup. Only after the parity drive is in place would I start reusing the drives containing the backup data.
October 22, 200817 yr thanks for the info joe, appreciated. just one more question. if i put 1 disk in the array and move data to that single disk can i then start adding disks one at a time and then use one of the disks for parity once i have everything moved across or do I need to start with 1 data disk + 1 parity disk before i move any data to it? i'm trying to do this without spending too much cash up front. You can start with a single data drive, and no parity drive and then migrate your drives one at a time. It is actually faster initially loading your data without an assigned parity drive, so you should progress pretty quickly. You array will not be "protected" from failure until you finally assign a parity drive and parity is computed, but then, your data today is not protected with the disks mounted in your other PCs. As bjp999 said, once you migrate data you do not care to risk, install and assign a parity drive. The parity drive must be as big, or bigger than any of the others, so save your biggest disk for last. Once you are ready to add it as parity you can assign it, press "Start" and parity will be computed. For two data drives, this initial parity calc should be pretty quick. (less than a few hours) Joe L.
March 30, 200917 yr hi, I'm looking to build a test system using the free version of unRAID but I can't find anything written about how many drives are supported by it. I can see the 9 drive plus version an the 15 drive pro version but no mention of how many disks are supported by the free one at all. I've been right through the website and forum and fax/wiki page but can't find anything to tell me this. why don't you just have a table listing the differences between each version of the software so it's easy for people to see what they are getting? You were right. I (finally!) got around to answering/providing this: * What is the difference between the unRAID licenses? - a table comparing the features of the 3 unRAID licenses * How is unRAID licensed?
June 5, 200917 yr Newbie here, researching unRaid as a possible solution. Assume a configuration using a parity drive. It would appear that if just one drive fails, whether it is a data drive or the parity drive, you should be able to install a new drive and recover. But if you were to lose 2 drives and one of those was the parity drive, then you would be out of luck. If using a parity drive, it stands to reason that this drive would be subject to the most usage and it would be most likely to fail first (if all drives are equal). I was wondering if I could set up 2 (or 3 drives) on a hardware raid controller and make this appear as the parity drive. Assuming this could be done and I only use 2 drives on this hardware raid controller, would this parity drive appear as 1 or 2 drives to unRaid? With the limitation of 3 drives in the free version, would this configuration let me use 2 data drives? Thx.
June 5, 200917 yr Newbie here, researching unRaid as a possible solution. Assume a configuration using a parity drive. It would appear that if just one drive fails, whether it is a data drive or the parity drive, you should be able to install a new drive and recover. But if you were to lose 2 drives and one of those was the parity drive, then you would be out of luck. If using a parity drive, it stands to reason that this drive would be subject to the most usage and it would be most likely to fail first (if all drives are equal). I was wondering if I could set up 2 (or 3 drives) on a hardware raid controller and make this appear as the parity drive. Assuming this could be done and I only use 2 drives on this hardware raid controller, would this parity drive appear as 1 or 2 drives to unRaid? With the limitation of 3 drives in the free version, would this configuration let me use 2 data drives? Thx. This has been discussed previously. The parity drive is not the most used... in fact, as a media server, it might be the least used. Here are the statistics from my server since I last rebooted about 2 weeks ago. pariity reads=29,427 writes=30,039 disk1 reads=12,054 writes=30 disk2 reads=1,208 writes=6 disk3 reads=873 writes=6 disk4 reads=1,906 writes=6 disk5 reads=478 writes=6 disk6 reads=2,484 writes=6 disk7 reads=304 writes=6 disk8 reads=18,545 writes=3,848 disk10 reads=23,853 writes=6 disk11 reads=90,241 writes=28,982 I've watched a number of movies, saved a few new ISO images to disks 8 and 11... least used drive has been disk7. The "reads" mostly were us just browsing the list of movies to pick something to watch. Unless you are in the process of initially loading your server, the parity drive is idle most of the time and spun down. It is no more important, nor any less important than any other drive when it comes to being able to recover from a disk failure. If you have three drives and lose 2, and one was the parity drive, you will still be able to get to the data on the one data drive that did not fail. The objective is to not run in a degraded state and to replace a failed drive as soon as possible. Yes, you can use some hardware controllers built into motherboards and eSATA devices that will make multiple disks appear as one. However, they have their own limitations... Most cannot spin down the drives. Search the forum and you'll read about them. With 1T, 1.5T and 2TB drives available today... use the free version of unRAID to get an idea of how it works... there's plenty of space to experiment with... then purchase a license to upgrade and support its continued development when you need to expand... You will not regret it. Joe L.
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