unRAID drive monitoring vs. Drobo etc

[crowdx42]

Hi all

so I currently have all my data backed up to my PC and my unRAID server. For the drives in my PC I want to move them to something which will monitor their health more than the normal windows PC does. My first thought is to build a 2nd unRAID server but I wonder what unRAID actually monitors on a drive, from what I see it monitors for failed reads and writes but does it check for existing data getting corrupted?  Is there a solution that does this?

How does unRAID compare in what it monitors vs. turnkey solutions like Drobo or Synology NAS solutions?

My main concern at the moment is data integrity and not app support.

Patrick

 

[Traxxus]

Unraid doesn't do much in the way of this, which is really my only complaint about it after all this time. The things you would think are integrated with a NAS are not, such as notifications on errors, smart attribute checking, temperature monitoring (well it monitors and displays it but doesn't do anything about it, like shutdown on overheat), UPS support (to shutdown when UPS signals low power), etc. You still need to go to command line just to run and generate smart reports, and manually disable spindown. Unraid pretty much just provides fault tolerance with the parity drive. A drive could completely fail and drop out of the array and you would never know unless you went to check on it, unless you install the notifications plugin.

 

Plugins fix a lot of this, but plugins can cause issues themselves, though the people who make them are pretty good about working together to make sure there are no conflicts. 

 

That said, v6 is supposed to fix a lot of this, but I don't know how far they are going to go with smart monitoring. Sure smart isn't all that either, but it's really our only option to know when a drive is failing, and major attributes should be checked and displayed prominently/send notifications when the values increase. jonp has posted about it in the roadmap for 6.1. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=34417.msg320184#msg320184 Full tracking from initial to last report for 6.2 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=34421.0

Notifications in 6.0 http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=34407.msg0#new

 

I've been using Unraid for ~5 years now, it's worked great as a set it and forget it appliance sitting in the spare bedroom. Good community, lot of good folks here, lot of good information, and at the time I just wanted a bit of peace of mind/protection against inevitable hard drive failures, besides just sticking a bunch of drives in my main PC, like you. Also nice to be able to add drives at any time, any size, no losing all your data if you lose a couple drives, etc. If you want more than that, well it depends on whether you are willing to wait and see if they fulfill their vision.

 

MyMain in unmenu does some smart attribute monitoring, so does Dynamix, so install one of those if you are going to try Unraid. 

 

Edit: I was thinking you were a new user thinking about using Unraid, not a current user. Well most of my post still stands so leaving it as is.