Just setup my first unraid box using the HP N40L and 3 1tb green drives, so far so good. Now after reading the wiki user manual I'm even more confused with user shares, High water, and split shares, and most-free. I read it and understand what it means, just not sure how to use it in my environment. Right now I'm using WHS2011 and drive pool, WHS2011 for some reason just doesn't like me and the system keeps having problems so I'm switching to something else, unraid hopefully.

 

My folders are setup like this:

My Pictures, Year, Event name, pictures.

My Music, Artist, Album, MP3s.

 

The only thing really important is the pictures and music folders. Not sure how to start setting up the shared folders and what settings. With the Parity drive I assume all the data is on the parity drive and the data drive? What If I don't need some folders backed up, do I create a share just for that folder and set it to a specific drive only?

 

 

 

 

 

just make sure you have 2 spare drives.

I would replace you parity with a 2 or 3 tb before you start adding stuff.

high water is ok.

if you really want to have a back up

set it up with a parity of 2 or 3tb then have double of what you want.

eg

3 x 2tb in the array & 3 of 3 x 2tb spares not in array when you what you replace disk 1 & 2 with spares let them rebuild individually just make sure you keep track of spare 1 & 2.

 

best with say 6 drives  have a spare cleared to replace your parity

 

With the Parity drive I assume all the data is on the parity drive and the data drive?

 

NO!  No data is stored on the parity drive.  All of the data is on the data drives.  The parity drive just holds a parity bit that's computed from all of the other drives to allow fault-tolerance ... so if any single drive fails the data can still be reconstructed.

 

 

What If I don't need some folders backed up, do I create a share just for that folder and set it to a specific drive only?

 

Apples & Oranges.    UnRAID is NOT a backup ... so NO data on your UnRAID array is backed up.    You need to store your backups somewhere else -- another system; some external drives; the cloud; etc.    My thoughts on backups are outlined here:  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31020.0

I used to use whs, your questions are coming from that experience, unraid is different.

 

With whs you needed to tell the ststem what needed to be extra safe, whs would then duplicate that data to another drive. That way a disk could fail but you still had the data on another disk.

 

Unraid works differently but tge end result is the same, even better. Without enabling the parity drive unraid is like your whs setup without any duplication; if a drive fails the data on that drive is lost.

With parity any disk can fail and you would not loose any data. That is the case for your complete array. So even if you have 20data drives full of data , that one parity drive will make sure that failure of one of those drives will not cause data loss.

 

You can see unraid is a lot more efficient than whs, if you wantes to have all your data safe against drive failure there you would have double data drives.

 

So: turn it on, forget it, and be safe. One thing to remember: your parity drive needs to be the biggest drive in your system, otherwise it will not work.

 

Parity only allows you to rebuild a single failed drive from the bits on other good drives plus the parity bits. The wiki has a good explanation of how parity works.

OP:

I assume you're setting up a new system with the free key.

To your original question about how to setup the shares:

Just use the standard settings. (High Water. Ignore the 'Include' and 'Exclude' settings. Ignore Split Level for now.)

All the complexity is to accommodate special situations. Tunes and pictures are easy.

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As others have pointed out, unRAID's parity drive provides error correction for ALL data on ALL the data drives.  You don't need to do anything extra. The parity drive can fix individual errors as well as rebuild an entire disk should it fail.  In order to do that magic, the parity drive needs to be as large as, or larger than any other disk. (that's why there was advice to use a larger drive. Its not a problem to upsize the parity drive later....but ask on the forums to get the process right.)

 

 

High Water just says, 'write the data to the harddrive until it's half full, then fill up the next disk half full, then save new files to the disk that has space'.  (That's an approximate definition. All your drives are the same size, so it's close enough. ) Other allocations are for very specific situations.

 

 

Include/Exclude are for situations where you want to restrict a share to specific physical drives. I'm sure there are many reasons to worry about this...I've only found one technical one, and one energy saving one. Technically, I restrict my Mac 'TimeMachine' to a single hard drive.  You can save energy when you want to use your unRAID for torrents, etc.  Then you may want to specify only a single drive to hold the files and caches. This would prevent all those little files from being scattered all over the other drives and requiring all the drives to be continually spun up.

 

 

Split Level can be ignored for now. While it can be used to ensure entire folders end up on the same disk, that's a level of complexity that you're not likely to need. Where it may become apparent down the road, is if you have a Media folder (think 'movie') with multiple 'files'. If the files are on different disks, you might get a 'pause' in playback as you wait for a disk to Spin Up and access the next file in the media. [if you look at a DVD, you'll see the movie itself is a whole series of 1Gig '.VOB' files--like reels of a movie. The DVD player software queues up the next file automatically, but if the DVD is on unRAID, you could have to wait for the new hard drive to spin up. That 'pause' can be annoying in the middle of the action sequence!]

In your case, if you want the songs for each music album to be on the same physical drive, then split level could be important.

If you do fancy timed shows of your photos and pictures, then you might want the pictures to be on the same split level to keep the timing accurate.

 

In my experience, this can all be safely ignored. 

 

 

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One tip:

When you want a better web interface, don't follow the WIKI instructions (whose discussion of 'SimpleFeatures' is out of date), try DYNAMIX. (find it in the forums.)

Also, when you want to setup your add-ins and plug ins (for things like a jukebox for your tunes, automatically maintaining their tags, PLEX, etc.) be sure to read the forums for the latest information...In particular watch for any changes to plug-in behavior for the new version 5.0 of unRAID.

 

Great info and lots of help, thanks guys. I think I will re-evaluate my backup strategy. I think I'll invest in a 2 or 3 tb drive for parity and then use my 4 1tb green drives for starters, my n40l will hold 5 drives so that should be good and I can replace the 1tb drives with 3tb as needed.

 

I also have another case that will hold up to 10 drives with an ECS 945GCT-M/1333 with a celeron 1.8ghz, 4gb ram, and a PROMISE FastTrak TX4310 PCI SATA II controller to support 8 drives total, but I think that hardware is too old.

 

One other question about unraid, If I decided to upgrade my hardware can I just swap all the drives and USB stick into another computer?

 

Thanks again for all the info.

One other question about unraid, If I decided to upgrade my hardware can I just swap all the drives and USB stick into another computer?

Yes.   

 

When you get to this step, its important that you know what's happening. You don't want to inadvertently assign a data drive to be parity and wipe out some data. Check the wiki and forums for detailed instructions. And if you aren't sure, 'ask.'

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For your longer range planning, if you'll eventually upgrade to a pro key with many more drives in your unRAID box, think about a cache drive. It speeds up 'writing' to the array. Its just another drive, but with a special purpose. When writing files to unRAID, if you have a cache drive, then the files are written first to the cache drive. This happens at the full rotational speed of the cache drive. Later, the files are automatically copied to the full array and deleted from the cache drive. The write to unRAID is slower, because both the data drive and the parity drive must be written.  Many folks use a smaller drive for the cache drive function (I have a 256Gig cache drive, with normal data drives of 3TB.) Other folks use a SSD which makes writes to the array blazing fast (no rotational speed constraints!).

As well as the speed increase for writing, there are a couple of other notes:

1. While files are on the cache drive they are not protected by the unRAID parity drive, until they are copied over to the regular array.

2. 'Shares' management and other cache management is automatic, running periodically to move files to the safety of the full array.

3. Many folks setup their cache drive to hold additional applications that are deliberately not backed up to the array. For example, I run PLEX from my cache drive to serve up movies. PLEX frequently runs in the background to update its databases. Rather than have its constant little file updates writing to the full array (which would entail many spin ups of the array data drives) I just leave all of PLEX on the cache, while my movies and media are safely tucked away on the full array.