I have an identical array setup on a mediasonic probox.  I mirror my data so that I have a 1:1 backup.  I do not want parity, I would rather use all hard drive space available.

 

So, how can I set this up?  I have 3 drives attached.  1 always says parity and the other say (whatever size they are).

Also, I would like the drives pooled together so they appear as one drive.  When I browse to the network location for my shares it shows each drive as their own folder.

Thanks.

 

Just tried freeNAS, but I am loving the simplicity of unRAID so far.  I'm new to NAS systems.

Just don't assign a parity drive. Keep in mind the unlicensed version of Unraid is limited to 2 data drives, so if you haven't bought a license, you won't have a third data slot available.

oh.  I guess that is why the third drive is not coming up.

Ok, I figured it all out. 

 

I'm getting very slow write speeds tho.  freeNAS was getting 80MB/s, now with unRAID I'm getting 20MB/s.

WAIT A SECOND.  It says right there on the index page the free version supports 3 hard drives.  So the usb flash drive that the unRAID is on counts as 1? 

 

Ok, upon further reading, you only get 2 drives for data.  What BS.  Wish they made that more clear on the main page of their website and didn't have to go digging through the faqs.

 

screw this.  Going back to freeNAS.  Sorry for the frustration.

WAIT A SECOND.  It says right there on the index page the free version supports 3 hard drives.  So the usb flash drive that the unRAID is on counts as 1?

The USB driv is not counted.  You can have 2 data drives and 1 parity drive with the free version.  If you do not have a parity drive then you are limited to 2 data drives.

Ok, I figured it all out. 

 

I'm getting very slow write speeds tho.  freeNAS was getting 80MB/s, now with unRAID I'm getting 20MB/s.

 

I'm getting 120+MB/s write speed without parity..not sure what you get 20MB/s.

Hmm... is that ProBox just an enclosure and not a NAS?

 

Seems it only has USB 2.0 and eSATA. eSATA should be able to do better.

 

EDIT: Has USB 3.0 too.

Sorry about my frustrated outburst.  I was a little upset.

 

WOW, how on earth are you getting 145MB?  Is that the initial burst speed or something?  Isn't that technically impossible to reach those speeds through ethernet bandwidth?  Isn't a gigabit connection's max speed 128MB p/s?

 

Yes, that's my Probox.  It's just an enclosure, no network connection.  Transferring data back and forth to the Probox from the pc it's connected to (via eSATA), I usually get speeds around 85MB p/s.  I should mention that I'm using WD green drives for everything.

 

When I sent files from that Probox to the homemade pc running unRAID I only got about 25MB p/s.  That is through my gigabit network.

 

I noticed with freeNAS, it stripes the data across all drive so that could explain why I was getting 85MB p/s.  More drives are involved in writing the data.

If you are still using parity then that will slow down writes because the parity disk is also updated when writing to a parity-protected array.

 

To get all the drives in one pool you need to create a user share.

Your write speed makes it fairly clear that you've assigned one of the drives as parity.  If you do a "New Config" (on the Utils tab), and ONLY assign two data drives (NO parity drive), you'll get FAR better write speeds.

 

As for combining the drives into a single view.    Just create a User Share -- perhaps "MyBigDrive", and then you'll see it when you browse the network [\\Tower].    If you don't want to see the individual drives, just click on the drives on the Main Web GUI page and change "Export" to No (or "Hidden" if you want to be able to access them, but don't want to see them when browsing -- i.e. you want \\Tower\disk1  to access disk1).

 

By the way, if you want to use more than 2 data drives, you simply need to buy a license -- Plus supports up to 5 data drives; Pro supports up to 23.

 

Finally, you may want to reconsider not using a parity drive.  Fault tolerance is one of the main features of UnRAID.  You can have fault tolerance AND get good write speeds by using a cache drive -- if you cache-enable your shares, then new writes will go to the cache drive (at full speed) and will be moved to the protected array at a later time of your choosing (typically in the middle of the night when you're not using the system).

 

 

Sorry about my frustrated outburst.  I was a little upset.

 

WOW, how on earth are you getting 145MB?  Is that the initial burst speed or something?  Isn't that technically impossible to reach those speeds through ethernet bandwidth?  Isn't a

 

I'm using 10GbE networking.

ah, that explains it.  What kind of hardware is required for that setup?  Fiber optic I guess?