New to this.

[nofxz]

Hello, My name is Jon.

I would love to answer my own questions but cannot seem to spot the read this you nub section of the forum. I would gladly take direction to that area and stfu but since I am posting anyways I will just ask my questions. Apologize to my comparisons to Freenas but I was just about to build one of those, this has cache acceleration which is interesting.

Do I need ECC memory for this? I am storing mostly media.

Alot of peoples cache drives I have seen are mechanical disks. Can I use a couple high power ssds?

Can I use more then one parity or mirror the parity disk?

Do I need NAS specific drives if I am not hammering this thing 24/7 but just in the evening when I am home?

Thanks in advance

[kizer]

The Great thing about unRAID is you can use what you got then swap out what you want to upgrade later. The Biggest have to know rule is the Parity Drive has to be the biggest at all times other than that go crazy.

 

I use a bunch of Western Digital Greens that are low power and rather slow to serve up all my Media. I personally believe you only need fast drives if you want fast reading/writing but I don't transcode or do anything fancy myself.

[garycase]

Do I need ECC memory for this?

 

It's not required, but if you chose to use a motherboard/CPU that supports it, I certainly would.  You're building a fault-tolerant server ... it's nice to have a high-reliability memory subsystem as well.

 

 

Alot of peoples cache drives I have seen are mechanical disks. Can I use a couple high power ssds?

 

Yes, you can use multiple SSDs and create a btrfs cache pool, which can also provide fault tolerance for the cache.

 

 

Can I use more then one parity or mirror the parity disk?

 

Not at this time, but dual parity is definitely on the list of enhancements that should be forthcoming in future releases ... possibly as soon as v6.2.    I would definitely plan on adding a second parity drive in the not too distant future.    Note that mirroring the parity disk would provide almost no real benefit -- that would simply protect you against a failure of that specific disk;  but dual parity will provide true dual failure protection.

 

 

Do I need NAS specific drives if I am not hammering this thing 24/7 but just in the evening when I am home?

 

It's not required ... many folks simply buy the least expensive drives they can.  Personally, I only buy NAS-rated drives (mostly WD Reds), not only for their NAS rating but also because they tend to have longer warranties.