when i found unRAID i was looking for a NAS solution. I am fairly technical and my main goal is to have a place to store files that has some type of redundancy. I was looking into creating a NAS that was 3 1TB drive in a RAID 5. I have come into and older pc (Pentium 4) and i have the drives to put into it. I don't need to hot swap but i would like to be able to recover from a drive dying. I have 2 macs, 1 windows machine, phones and ipads that access the network. This would be mostly for file storage, video library, and backups from the laptops. It seems like the kinds of things unRAID can do, is it? Can it do this out of the box?

 

Thanks for the help.

unRAID can provide a reliable protected JBOD.

1 disk is the parity disk, each of the other disks is a member of the raid array and an individual filesystem.

When enabling usershares, you are provided with a consolidated view of all disks in a common directory structure.

 

I would suggest you start reading here for a better understanding.

http://lime-technology.com/technology/

 

With a single disk failure, you can recover and rebuild that disk from the other members of the array.

With multiple disk failures, instead of loosing every piece of your data, you'll only loose the disks that have failed.

The other disks will remain intact as separate file systems thus allowing access to the remaining data.

 

In my case, a flood rose high enough to encompass half my server.

The drives underwater were destroyed.

The drives above the water line survived and I was able to recover the remaining data from those spindles.

 

There are plenty of other cool features.  Try out the free version and see for yourself.

http://lime-technology.com/download/

unRAID generally runs well on older hardware, though I have not tried a Pentium 4.  The good news is that it's free to try for a 3 disk license - all you need is to figure out how to get your Pentium 4 to boot off a USB drive.  If it recognizes your HD controller and network card you should be good to give it a try.

I have gotten it to boot from the usb but i didn't have time to do all the setup yet. Hopefully tonight. right now i only have 2 drives. i thought i had 3 but i am going to have to get one. Might get 2 as one of the drives that i did have is only 500gb.

I have gotten it to boot from the usb but i didn't have time to do all the setup yet. Hopefully tonight. right now i only have 2 drives. i thought i had 3 but i am going to have to get one. Might get 2 as one of the drives that i did have is only 500gb.

Good to hear.  Keep in mind that as you buy drives that your parity drive needs to be as large as your biggest data drive.

Ah yes. thank you! That brings up another question. if i am buying drives should i wait and get a larger drive and use it as the parity drive? Hmmm... i guess there would really be no benefit to that.

 

There's a procedure to plug in a new, larger parity drive and move the former parity drive into a data drive position.  You can save yourself that effort if you buy the larger parity drive now - but it really isn't too bad.

 

It's advisable to pre-clear drives for unRAID use - that's worth reading up on before you get started.

Sweet. Thank  you for the tip. I will check that out.