hi

 

I am very interested in the unraid and i like the feature of grow your hard drive as you need them

 

i have few questions i am starting with only 3 drives one is 320 and 2 x 500gbs

 

if i use the free version for now will i be able to upgrade at later on the pro or the other paid versions?

 

also i understand that the biggest drive will be the parity drive now if i later decided to upgrade my 500 to 1TB how can i replace my parity drive?

do i lose any data?

 

Can someone point me to read about the drive used for cache? and how do this one help?

 

thanks

hi

 

I am very interested in the unraid and i like the feature of grow your hard drive as you need them

 

i have few questions i am starting with only 3 drives one is 320 and 2 x 500gbs

 

if i use the free version for now will i be able to upgrade at later on the pro or the other paid versions?

Yes, just purchase the version you like, then lime-tech will mail you a .key file that you can copy to your existing flash drive.  Then, just reboot and you will be able to add the additional drives to the protected array.  Nothing else changes, all your data stays where it was, you can just add more drives to the array.

also i understand that the biggest drive will be the parity drive now if i later decided to upgrade my 500 to 1TB how can i replace my parity drive?

Yes, just stop the array, replace the old drive with the bigger drive, then re-start the array.  It will re-calculate parity on the larger drive.

do i lose any data?

Nope... all the data stays as it was

Can someone point me to read about the drive used for cache? and how do this one help?

 

thanks

It is only available on the "Pro" version.  It works by allowing full speed "writes" to it, and later its contents are moved to the protected array in the middle of the night.  It only helps on writes to the array.  The drawback is contents written to it are unprotected until moved to the protected array.  Many of us never use it.. It is only needed if you are writing to the array where speed is required, as in live real-time-recording of movies, etc.    Its contents are unioned with the other data drives so it looks as if the files are in their eventual locations in the user-shares. 

 

It is described here http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2149.msg15814#msg15814

and here

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=1731.msg11937#msg11937

 

Personally, I've never had the need for speed in writing... so I've never configured a cache drive.    When I rip a DVD ISO it is plenty fast enough for me when writing to the array.  The protection of the data is more important than the speed.  Your needs may vary.

 

Lots of your other questions might be answered in the wiki. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Wiki

Joe L.

thank you for your reply

 

but is it easy to change the parity drive with a bigger one? i am going to start with 500 now and later upgrade to 1tb

 

or just add the 1tb as a new drive and since its the bigger will it become automatically the parity drive and the small parity that was used will be a data drive?

 

i am also checking the hardware section most of these boards at newegg are discontinued

 

how do i look for a new motherboard to work with unraid?

 

thanks again

thank you for your reply

 

but is it easy to change the parity drive with a bigger one? i am going to start with 500 now and later upgrade to 1tb

 

or just add the 1tb as a new drive and since its the bigger will it become automatically the parity drive and the small parity that was used will be a data drive?

 

i am also checking the hardware section most of these boards at newegg are discontinued

 

how do i look for a new motherboard to work with unraid?

 

thanks again

on unRAID, no drive "automatically" becomes assigned at any time.  All device assignments are done on the "Devices" page when the array is stopped.  You do the assignment.  Or, when replacing a drive, if a new disk is detected on the port where a smaller disk was previously, the array will ask you to confirm you are upgrading before starting.

 

It is as simple as assigning the new larger drive as the parity drive (if it is on a different port), and then returning to the main page and pressing "Start", or, checking the "I'm sure" checkbox under the "Start" button if it detects the new drive 1TB on the old disk controller port where the 500Gig was, and then pressing "Start"

 

Most current motherboards will work with unRAID.   If it boots from USB, and has a supported 1Gigabit networking chipset, and a PCI-e bus, and some number of SATA ports built in, odds are good it will work.  Many years ago, support for booting from USB drives was not as common. 

 

If you can, stay away from MB with PCI bus only... but even those will work.  Look through the "hardware" forum for recent successes with various MB.

 

Joe L.

thank you so much

 

i think i know where to start now

Everyone uses their unRAID server differently.  I have a very different perspective on the cache drive feature.

 

Write performance to unRAID is not steller due to the overhead of maintaining parity.  As a point of comparison, copying an 8 Gig file to the protected array would take about 9.5 mins, while copying it to a cache disk about 3 mins (these speeds will vary based on mb, drives, ethernet card, and other factors).  Making it even worse, performance to the protected array is wildly erratic (surge than slow than surge than slow).  Depending on what you are copying from, this can further slow down the net throughput.

 

I hate to tie up my workstation - so almost never write big files directely to the protected array.  I write them to the cache and manually copy them to the array.  This completely frees up my workstation for other purposes, and allows unRAID to complete the copies in its own sweet time.  Others use the cache disk in conjunction with user shares - I do not.  BTW, by mounting a non-array disk with Samba (or using unmenu), you can have a disk, similar in concept to a cache disk but without the user share features, using even the free edition of unRAID.

 

As Joe L. suggests, spend some time with the wiki.  It answers a lot of the questions you are going to have!