March 30, 201511 yr Been reading through this forum for awhile now and finally posting. Hoping to receive some good feedback! I need some help configuring and making sure my setup will work. I am looking to place this as a set-up for a small business. Currently I have: Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition 8x3TB WD Red Drives setup in a storage space. This has some in parity/some mirrored/some simple. I find the write speeds terrible and ability to scale is poor. I cannot just "expand" the existing drives easily or shrink/expand a volume. 2x256GB SSD's for the OS and some hosted applications I want to run quickly. Acronis makes my backups for me at the disk level (some AD/Domain Controller/as well) which are then saved on to my backup disk (part of the above storage space). This backup portion is then also backed up off-site to Amazon storage and Crashplan backs up to their cloud. My time for recovery can be up up to 1 day if I need it. All of the essential systems are hosted off-site as well (Office 365, Azure) as backups I can bring up to give me time to recover. Hot-swappable drives and re-balancing is fine. All in all, this will work and hold me over for some time. I'm not as confident in Storage Spaces to protect my drives. I know I am safe as worst case (with downtime I am allocated); I can download my offsite backups and restore whichever I need. I'm always looking to the future though and I am interested in unRAID. It has most of the benefits I would be looking for in on-site fault tolerance. WS2012 is my front end. I need it for active directory/ domain controller/ etc. Right now I like that all of my drives appear locally mounted. This means I can use all of the native WS2012 features for sharing and security. My security groups integrate as well. How would this be achieved with unRAID? I have a single server right now. Would I need to move to 2 boxes then and connect them via...? some protocol? NFS I presume. Grasping at straws here as I'm a database/windows developer by day but trying to get more in to the storage side.
March 31, 201511 yr I think your mentioning of WS2012 scared everyone off! UnRAID will do SMB shares, which I believe is what Win Server uses. It is the old Windows network share protocol anyhow. You can answer your questions in short order though by downloading the free version and booting up a test system. I imagine any spare computer of recent vintage will be capable of running UnRAID, so with little to no investment in hardware you can test its capabilities.
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