Never used unRAID but I was wondering if unRAID would work on an existing setup that is running 8 1TB Black WD drives in RAID 1 resulting in 4 1TB drives visible  I am debating a dual boot setup to go with my Ubuntu 12.04.  I was hoping to purchase something like this adapter: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815201028apter[/url] and run unRAID on a Scandisk 16gb flash drive.  Can I run Plus on this setup?

I couldn't follow the link for some reason, but for a hardware RAID array to be seen as a member disk for an unraid array the adapter must provide the CPU power and logic, you can't use any flavor of software assisted RAID card. Any disks or hardware array members presented to unraid will be cleared of data and formatted when you assign them as unraid members. If you dual boot and access the drives with another OS, you will break the unraid parity protection, and when you start unraid, you will need to resync parity before you will be protected from a single drive failure.

 

I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish with a dual boot, but unraid isn't going to be happy sharing drives with another OS.

Never used unRAID but I was wondering if unRAID would work on an existing setup that is running 8 1TB Black WD drives in RAID 1 resulting in 4 1TB drives visible  I am debating a dual boot setup to go with my Ubuntu 12.04.  I was hoping to purchase something like this adapter: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815201028apter'>http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815201028apter[/url] and run unRAID on a Scandisk 16gb flash drive.  Can I run Plus on this setup?

Think you need to remove the "apter" on your link it would work better so should become this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815201028

Which take you to a USB header to dual USB-A plugs.

why bother dual booting?

 

unraid is a NAS. if you want to use it, it  needs to be UP.

unraid also is kind of replacement to hardware RAID, a better solution IMHO.

by installing it in your setup you kind of loosing the whole thing that make unraid work.

 

 

 

unRAID cannot access standard linux software raid volumes.

unRAID can see RAID volumes for an ARECA or 3WARE hardware raid controller card.

 

If these volumes are raid1 volumes that are not part of a parity protected array, you can share them if you use supportable filesystems.

 

You can mount these manually OUTSIDE of the unRAID array manually to unique mount points.

 

They will not be part of the shared/user filesystem.

It probably will not work the way you want unless you are only sharing a few volumes for cache or apps.

 

You cannot share any parity protected drives between the operating systems.

Once you write to a parity protected drive in the ubuntu os, you will invalidate the parity protection.  unRAID will not detect it until you do a parity build/gen or check.

 

It would be akin to mounting half of a raid1 volume in a different system and writing to it, then putting it back expecting the matched drive to be in sync.

 

Keep in mind, even a mount read-only does a write operation to the superblock to update some internal values.

 

Thank you for the inputs.  I am currently using Ubuntu with Samba but I was interested in learning unRAID as a NAS solution for my setup but I want to make sure I will not loose any information because these are work files.  The only alternative I can see is have two servers with mirrored data.  I do use my Ubuntu for cron jobs and scripting files for print.  So I may look into building a 1U with a spare 64gb SSD I have and move the files from the unRAID to the rip station.

do you mean loose information during rebuild or at all?

 

UnRaid is not a backup so your chances of loosing the information are almost the same as they are in your current solution.

with exception of the fact that if you currently have a real hardware Raid you are dependent on the raid card make/model and if it goes you might loose the whole array worth of data (providing no backup exists).

now with Unraid you are hardware and for most part software independent 

as the drives used a regular FS and can be read in any Linux distro directly in a pinch.

 

if I was in your situation I would just get a hold of some hardware and some new drives with the capacity enought to hold your all data you want to put there and build out the separate setup.

move my data to it and after all testing is done removed the raid setup added all drives to the unraid to expand the storage. since you have 8x1T drives in Raid -1 you need 4T unraid to start.

and should endup at least with 10T after the move