cache 'drive' suport for pci-e ssd? Crashplan solid? If not dual parity....

[hak]

Hi,

 

"pci ssd" searches hit only doctor15's recent posts and don't fit, sorry if the data is elsewhere.

 

I have a new old stock pci-e SSD card from fusion io and wondered if unRAID supported pci-e ssd cards as a disk volume for the cache 'disk' so i can use my 15 hotswap bays for spinning disks.

 

i use freenas for my business' 3rd tier disk and it's great for what it is.  i got an older openfiler box out of my basement a few years ago and replaced it with a synology using amex points and it's underpowered (1812+) and even with 8 drives the iops even sequential suck.  (not quite buffalo terastation bad, but when my freenas is running with dual 10G sfp+ and see ~14Gbps peaks as a backup nfs target, you long for at least 90MB/s at home).

 

Anyways i've got some server grade kit (dual hex core, 32GB ECC, pci-e to backplane/midplane jbod type sas hba, HGST sas 4TB enterprise drives, and a 100GB intel slc sas ssd if the fiosion IO card isn't supported) and will be trying an unRAID system. 

 

On the synology i use the glacier app, since the crashplan hook is a hack.  here for unRAID i see the crashplan icon, is it solid?  we have a family account so i'd look to use this for the backup target for the unRAID data.

 

Is mirroring between 2 unRAIDs supported?  meaning replicating data and most settings (not network settings) to another equal or larger unit on the far side of an IP link... rsync type over ssh?

 

i've been reading the dual parity posts, and i get backups vs. parity, but still as drives get more massive (> 6TB) the chances of hitting a bad block during a rebuild (setting aside the off chance of a real second failure during a rebuild) ton't seem to be impossible at all.  So put me down as someone who wants dual parity and would pay an add-on/upcharge for it, ie: double every price level on the pro side. (buying the pro license now since i'll have > 14 drives)  don't want/need it?  don't buy it.

 

if dual parity is a massive change in code, any thoughts of a raid-51 type setup?  (two special unRAID arrays mirrored) sure it sucks for usable vs. gross storage with a 50% dataloss, but for some it's worth the lack of outage/rebuild, regardless of off chassis backups to crashplan, etc.  and in other raid-51 setups, the read performance benefits thanks to the add'l array members helping in the read process, and more spindles for random IOs, so there is often some performance benefit on the read side.

 

Anyways, looking to dig into this.

[RobJ]

I have a new old stock pci-e SSD card from fusion io and wondered if unRAID supported pci-e ssd cards as a disk volume for the cache 'disk' so i can use my 15 hotswap bays for spinning disks.

 

Best thing to do is try it - download a copy of unRAID, prepare a flash boot drive, boot it and see if the drive appears in any drive drop down list.  Depending on how non-standard it is, temps may not show for it, but that would not be important.  If you are comfortable with reading syslogs, you can check that too, to see what the Linux kernel sees.  If you like, you can attach a copy of the syslog and someone will check it for you.

[hak]

ok makes sense.  i'm familiar with usb boot methods (how we do freenas) and syslog.

 

does the OS support syslog output?  i can point it to my splunk node for collection and review...

 

this fusion IO card was a gift, but we use and like the intel 3500/3700 class cards, if the fusion works, i'll try the intels.

 

 

[RobJ]

does the OS support syslog output?  i can point it to my splunk node for collection and review...

 

I've no experience myself with that, but others have done something, search Graylog here.  unRAID recently shifted to using rsyslogd, but I think they are all similar.