Is Unraid right for me?

[Shamalamadindong]

Hello! I'm sorry if this is in the wrong section, its my first time posting here.

 

I'm currently on the verge of overhauling my media server and i need some advice on if Unraid is right for my situation.

 

Specs:

• Intel Core i7 860
  
• Gigabyte P55-UD6
  
• 12GB Non-ECC RAM
  
• 7x 3TB, 1x4TB(Parity drive?)
  
• Miscellaneous 1TB to 2TB drives which i may or may not end up using
  
• SAMSUNG MZ7WD120HAFV 120GB SSD(Cache?)
  
• Unused Dell H200 for future drive expansions
  

Its running Windows Server 2012 with Drivebender for pooling/redundancy. Up until now i've always thrown in a couple of extra drives every time it was getting full but that isn't possible anymore due to a recent financial setback. Of course the data is still piling up despite my financial inability to expand.

 

I have already taken some measures to work around buying new drives such as deleting stuff i haven't watched and never will and re-encoding a lot of stuff to HEVC. Despite that i'm down to 2TB of free space which will likely fill up in the next two/three months.

 

Because i don't have a practical way of backing up 10TB of data my only data loss protection is the file duplication in Drivebender which automatically makes certain that all selected files are on two different drives which means i'm basically running Raid1 regarding storage capacity loss.

 

What do i need?

• Less storage capacity loss
  
• Drive pooling
  
• Plex support
  
• Ability to pull out the remaining disks and access data in the event of multiple disks failing
  
• I would very much prefer to avoid command lines/consoles
  
• mix and match drives
  
• Ability to saturate Gigabit, maybe 2 Gigabit depending on the future
  

As i understand it Unraid ticks all of the above boxes?

[Helmonder]

Yup.. that will work... You will need spare drives to start it of however...

 

You need to have one drive solely dedicated to making sure you can restore a failed drive, this is called the parity drive, it needs to be the largest drive you have in your array. This will be completely wiped so you need to find an alternate location to keep that data.

 

All drives will need to be reformatted, so you need to start of with your second largest (or same size as parity drive) drive and clean that out and make it empty. So you will need an alternate location to keep that data.

 

If you can manage that you can take next largest drive, copy it to the new array, when it is empty add it to the new array as empty drive, take your next drive, and on and on.

 

If you cannot do that it gets more complicated.. You will need to at least make 1 drive available.. You could take that and use it as first data drive without parity, put it in, copy data from another drive to it, add that drive to the new array when it is empty, do another drive, then add parity after that..

[Shamalamadindong]

Not a problem, i have enough storage capacity spread around the house to temporarily stash 10TB.

 

So,

 

7x3TB as data

1x4TB as parity

1x120GB SSD as cache

 

That would work right?

[danioj]

Not a problem, i have enough storage capacity spread around the house to temporarily stash 10TB.

 

So,

 

7x3TB as data

1x4TB as parity

1x120GB SSD as cache

 

That would work right?

 

Assuming the data is safe and you trust where you are placing your backup of your data then yes that setup would work.

 

You have a slight waste there with using your largest drive as Parity. Your parity drive needs to be equivalent of your largest array drive. It can be larger but imho if it is larger then the amount beyond the largest array disk => in your case 1TB, is just wasted. Unless of course you plan to add  more 4TB drives to the array soon. If not then it most certainly is wasted space. If you don't plan on adding more 4TB drives to the array, can I suggest you add a 3TB disk (perhaps from what you have lying around) to the setup and use the 4TB drive elsewhere. People might jump in and say it is "future proofing to allow for an addition of a 4TB drive in the future" but I don't agree. If you have a backup you trust (which you imply you do) you can always safely upgrade parity at a later date assuming you ever need to.

 

Also - also note that you will have to clear your drives prior to their use. The clear is intended to fully wipe your drives in preparation for their use and also gives you then benefit of giving the drives a real workout prior to deploying them. There is a script called pre_clear (or a faster alternative called bjp_preclear developed by a mod here which is just as good but faster) which allows you to clear the drives before adding them to the array. Note that if you don't preclear your drives before adding them to the array your array will be unusable while the clear process completes. People tend to use the preclear script to obtain the benefits of working out the drive prior to deployment. Like me I give them 3 cycles per drive so I know (as much as I can) that the drives aren't close to failure.

 

Anyway, to answer your question, yes it looks like it will work and welcome to unRAID if you choose to make the jump! 

[Shamalamadindong]

I assume i can just designate a 4TB as the parity drive if i ever start expanding again?

[danioj]

I assume i can just designate a 4TB as the parity drive if i ever start expanding again?

 

It's a little more complicated than that especially if you want to avoid rebuilds / are worried (in that you don't have a backup of) about your data or some other consideration etc.

 

However it is a question that gets asked allot and happens regularly. Given most people seem to have started using unRAID around the time 2TB drives were the largest drive (and perhaps even earlier) since the introduction of drives now most commonly as large as 8TB, anyone wanting to utilise these larger drives has had to upgrade their parity drive too as well as adding larger disks to the array.

 

The following thread is a fairly recent question about doing this. It contains useful links: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=39543.0

[Helmonder]

 

I assume i can just designate a 4TB as the parity drive if i ever start expanding again?

 

Actually.. Yes.. If you start with a 3tb as parity and want to move to larger driver in the future you just disconnect the parity drive, put in the larger disk and tell the areay its your parity drive.

 

Preclearing is important every time you add a disk.. I usually do 3 passed, note that 3 passes over a 6tb (i did that last) takes close to a week..!

[Shamalamadindong]

Thanks for all the help guys. The array is building right now.