December 12, 201312 yr But if I was to remove one of the 8GB sticks I have causing my RAM to run in single channel mode would the performance suffer in any noticeable way? Not in any noticable way. You would see a decrease in performance of about 10% in synthetic benchmarks, but no noticable difference in real-life performance.
December 12, 201312 yr If you plan to run it solely as a file server (stock unRaid install with no plugins), yes. ECC isn't overkill, but 16GB certainly is. Vanilla unRaid will happily do it's job with 1GB RAM. But if I was to remove one of the 8GB sticks I have causing my RAM to run in single channel mode would the performance suffer in any noticeable way? I would hang onto the memory modules. I have a feeling the 64 bit unRIAD will find a good use for that extra memory. (Perhaps, a ram buffer for disk writes which will take write speeds to network speed until the buffer is filled up.)
December 12, 201312 yr Thanks again for all your replies. I don't think i'm going to virtualize because I really have no need to run any other VM's on this server. I want it to be dedicated to storage which is exactly why I just built a brand new VM box that still has plenty of room for future VMs. Gonna give the 30 day trial a go this weekend! There is no 30 day trial. The basic license is 100% free,but has some limitations.
December 12, 201312 yr Gonna give the 30 day trial a go this weekend!Unless you have some sort of special deal worked out with Tom, there is no such animal. The basic 3 drive version of unraid is free, no trial period needed. The plus and pro are licensed only, no trial period available that I'm aware of. Ninja'd twice in the same thread.
December 12, 201312 yr Author My mistake on the trial period. I could just install the free version using 3 of my drives and then upgrade to a full license after I give it my own "trial" run though correct? Also I think I will indeed hold onto my RAM. I don't really see much value in selling it off when you never know what I might want it for down the line.
December 12, 201312 yr My mistake on the trial period. I could just install the free version using 3 of my drives and then upgrade to a full license after I give it my own "trial" run though correct?Yep. Get it up and running on the USB stick that you plan to use for the long haul, and after you decide it's working for you and you want a license, you input the GUID from from the USB stick into the limetech registration site.
December 12, 201312 yr Author My mistake on the trial period. I could just install the free version using 3 of my drives and then upgrade to a full license after I give it my own "trial" run though correct?Yep. Get it up and running on the USB stick that you plan to use for the long haul, and after you decide it's working for you and you want a license, you input the GUID from from the USB stick into the limetech registration site. Cool. Now the Plus version supports 7 drives it says. Does that mean 7 drives total including cache and parity?
December 12, 201312 yr Pasted from Tom in another thread. Basic - supports 3 array drives - supports Public and Secure security mode Plus - supports 6 array drives - supports cache drive (for 7 total drives supported) - supports Public, Secure, Private security mode Pro - supports 24 total drives - supports cache drive - supports Public, Secure, Private -or- Active Directory Now the Plus version supports 7 drives it says. Does that mean 7 drives total including cache and parity? Based on what Tom said, yes.
December 12, 201312 yr Author Pasted from Tom in another thread. Basic - supports 3 array drives - supports Public and Secure security mode Plus - supports 6 array drives - supports cache drive (for 7 total drives supported) - supports Public, Secure, Private security mode Pro - supports 24 total drives - supports cache drive - supports Public, Secure, Private -or- Active Directory Now the Plus version supports 7 drives it says. Does that mean 7 drives total including cache and parity? Based on what Tom said, yes. Thanks for that info!
December 12, 201312 yr Author If I have say 6 * 3TB WD Reds in my array (1 as parity) and a drive goes bad. All I need to replace it with is another 3TB drive? The reason I ask is that I have a NAS that I'm selling that has 2 * 3TB Hitachi drives in them that I could use as spares if it's possible to do so. The difference is that the WD Reds are 5,400RPM and the Hitachis are 7,200 RPM.
December 12, 201312 yr As long as the drive you put in is as large as or larger then the original drive the model and manufacturer makes no difference. NOTE the drive you add has to be less then or equal to your parity drive as well. So old drive <= new drive <= parity drive.
December 12, 201312 yr Author As long as the drive you put in is as large as or larger then the original drive the model and manufacturer makes no difference. NOTE the drive you add has to be less then or equal to your parity drive as well. So old drive <= new drive <= parity drive. That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. Read speeds are limited by the speed of the drive being accessed correct? Therefore 112Mb/s (theoretically) is as good a speed as I'll ever see being that's the limit of the WD Reds.
December 12, 201312 yr As long as the drive you put in is as large as or larger then the original drive the model and manufacturer makes no difference. NOTE the drive you add has to be less then or equal to your parity drive as well. So old drive <= new drive <= parity drive. That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. Read speeds are limited by the speed of the drive being accessed correct? Therefore 112Mb/s (theoretically) is as good a speed as I'll ever see being that's the limit of the WD Reds. Correct. There are some spinners out there that can do up to 180+ MB/s, and in a case like that the GB Ethernet becomes the bottleneck, so the max you would see is 125MB/s.
December 12, 201312 yr A quick google says the Reds do close to 150MB/s sustained transfers, so the GB Ethernet will be the limiting factor, as with most modern drives. The maximum throughput you can expect to see on a read is 125MB/s (theoretical).
December 12, 201312 yr As long as the drive you put in is as large as or larger then the original drive the model and manufacturer makes no difference. NOTE the drive you add has to be less then or equal to your parity drive as well. So old drive <= new drive <= parity drive. That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. Read speeds are limited by the speed of the drive being accessed correct? Therefore 112Mb/s (theoretically) is as good a speed as I'll ever see being that's the limit of the WD Reds. The WD Reds have 1TB platters so on the outside cylinders you can get speeds greater then that. My preclears start at 130-150MB/s and end 60-90MB/s when pre-reading so probably average about the 90-100MB/s range overall. If your Hitachi drives have smaller platters (800GB comes to mind as a possible size) you might find the Red's (5400) are faster than your Hitachi's (7200). Where the higher RPM has the an edge is in access times so that would help with larger numbers of smaller files. Small numbers of very large files would benefit more from larger platters. Or so I've read from others with more knowledge then I have.
December 12, 201312 yr Author Interesting, thanks for that info guys. I'm just trying to piece things together and squeeze ever bit of performance out of my server as I can. I have all the hardware necessary for LACP so my network shouldn't be the bottleneck.
December 12, 201312 yr Somebody posted his trials with link aggregation. As far as I remember the increase in speed was not significant. In another thread I read that link aggregation is most effective on multiple connections. Means, you will benefit only if you access the server from different clients.
December 12, 201312 yr Somebody posted his trials with link aggregation. As far as I remember the increase in speed was not significant. In another thread I read that link aggregation is most effective on multiple connections. Means, you will benefit only if you access the server from different clients. Exactly. If you were to have link aggregation enabled and doing simultaneous transfers from 2 different clients you would see ~125MB/s on each transfer, but you would NOT see ~250MB/s on a single transfer. unRaid does not perform load balancing on aggregated Ethernet connections.
December 12, 201312 yr Author Somebody posted his trials with link aggregation. As far as I remember the increase in speed was not significant. In another thread I read that link aggregation is most effective on multiple connections. Means, you will benefit only if you access the server from different clients. Exactly. If you were to have link aggregation enabled and doing simultaneous transfers from 2 different clients you would see ~125MB/s on each transfer, but you would NOT see ~250MB/s on a single transfer. Yea that I understand. However I have my media server VM that will be accessing my UnRAID server and streaming video to 5-12 clients at a time. Then I have my Torrent VM that I'd be moving files from and to my UnRAID server every night. The majority of the time I do manual transfers there is a lot of streaming going on so I would think in those situations it could pay off. Not like I'm spending extra money for it since I already have all the necessary components.
December 12, 201312 yr Yes, it should pay off assuming these VM's are not all sharing the same host NIC.
December 12, 201312 yr Author Yes, it should pay off assuming these VM's are not all sharing the same host NIC. Yea both VM's have 2 dedicated NICs passed through to them.
December 13, 201312 yr As long as the drive you put in is as large as or larger then the original drive the model and manufacturer makes no difference. NOTE the drive you add has to be less then or equal to your parity drive as well. So old drive <= new drive <= parity drive. That's what I thought, thanks for confirming. Read speeds are limited by the speed of the drive being accessed correct? Therefore 112Mb/s (theoretically) is as good a speed as I'll ever see being that's the limit of the WD Reds. i'd like to add one thing to this, since you're a new user it might not be clear to you. You cannot replace a 3TB data drive with a 4TB data drive unless you upgrade (or already have) parity to 4TB as well.
December 15, 201312 yr Author Ok I got UnRAID installed and running but I have a quick question. I figured I might as well just use this thread instead of making a new one. I've gotten my Server Plus registration file but how do I access the flash directory on the server from my Windows 7 Pro machine? If I got to "Network" I see my server and it asks for login information if I click on it. However when I put the username and password in that I created on the UnRAID server it just brings me to a blank window with no shares/directories listed. What am I missing?
December 15, 201312 yr Use your browser and go to //tower. Setup shares there by click on the "flash" link on the main page and make sure it's shared.
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