Hello All,

I'm a college student and when I'm away at school I accumulate around 500GB of files each school year. When I come home for the summer I like to backup all the years files, but this usually requires buying a new external hard drive. The really aggravating thing about this beside the cost is the organization. I'd really just like one huge expandable external hard drive with all my files on it. If I set this system up would I have exactly that? Also, will I have to know which disk my files are on in order to navigate to them. One more question, If one drive fails, is it a 100% guarantee that the array can rebuild the lost data?

 

Just to reiterate the main questions:

1) (Hypothetically Speaking) Is this one huge expandable external hard drive?

2) Will I have to know which disk my files are on in order to navigate to them?

3) If one drive fails is it a 100% guarantee that the array can rebuild the lost data?

 

 

Thank you for your help!

-Justin

 

 

1) (Hypothetically Speaking) Is this one huge expandable external hard drive?

That's how it will appear to your client machines, yes.

 

2) Will I have to know which disk my files are on in order to navigate to them?

Not if you use User Shares, which span across multiple drives "under the covers" so you neither know nor need to know which physical drive a file is on.

 

3) If one drive fails is it a 100% guarantee that the array can rebuild the lost data?

Nothing is 100% guaranteed when you're talking about physical media, but unRAID comes pretty damned close.  If one drive fails, and everything else is 100% fine, then yes, it can recover everything.  The caveat is that if it encounters some sort of error on one of your other drives while it's rebuilding the failed one, then you may lose some data.

 

On the plus side, with unRAID the most you can lose is the data stored on one physical volume, and even that likelihood is low because the drives are all formatted with a standard file system and can each be mounted individually on any Linux machine should any further recovery operations be needed.  In contrast, with a "conventional" RAID, a failure of any sort during a rebuild operation usually results in catastrophic loss of the entire RAID.

 

No RAID can give a 100% guarantee, but unRAID is as close as you'll get without spending many times as much on RAIDs with double- and triple-redundancy.  Furthermore, running parity checks on a regular basis (I've scheduled one once a month) can further reduce the likelihood of a data error in the event of a failure.

Wow thank you so much! That's exactly what I wanted to know.

 

Do people use this for streaming movies over their networks?  I've heard about actual retail NAS boxes having considerable lag when streaming, but if I were to have a system running unRAID with like, 1GB RAM, 2.0 Ghz CPU, Average motherboard, wired network, with some new WD 1TB hard drives, could you imagine having any major movie problems?

 

Thanks again!

will work fine out of the box; and with certain user performance tweaks (dir caching, jumbo frames on gigabit network, etc), speeds can be very fast, able to support concurrent HD streams to a few devices

I stream from my now aging unRAID (with more RAM just as an fyi) via a crappy 100mbit switch 1080p to my XBMC htpc with no issues. If you go gigabit you will be more than fine and whilst Jumbo frames are great in concept its not a headache you need IMHO.

 

Cached dirs mod is vital IMHO as well

You guys rock, thanks so much