January 29, 201610 yr Hi all, Is it possible to setup a Raid10 array on 4 separate disk using the onboard sata controller and use iSCSI or NFS shares to use on my ESXi server? Has anyone done that and could guide me through? Greetz
February 2, 201610 yr My first unRAID server was an eight-"drive" array where each "drive" was really a five-drive RAID5 array. To unRAID each RAID5 array looked like a single disk. I realize there are reasons not to do it that way, and I don't do it that way any more. But as far as I know, there's nothing preventing you from setting up your four-drive RAID10 array (in the BIOS), and having unRAID see that as a single drive. You could then use that drive as either a data disk, parity disk, cache disk, or "none of the above", i.e. mount it separately from the disks that unRAID manages. As Aaron points out, unRAID does not do iSCSI. And I've never shared a "none of the above" disk in unRAID so I can't say if that can be done. But if you were to make your four-drive RAID10 "disk" a data disk or a cache disk, *that* can be shared easily enough. I've considered doing something like that for the parity disk, to make it less likely to be the bottleneck when writing to more than one data disk at the same time. But right now I'm pushing towards low power consumption on my latest build (less than one watt per terabyte at idle), and using more drives that way would go against that goal.
February 2, 201610 yr I'm using 4 SSD disks as Cache, and I've changed the default raid1 to raid 10. And it works really well! You can share a folder on the cache with NFS to your vSphere Hypervisor. If you are presenting all the disks to unRAID you can see temperatures and get alarms when anything goes wrong. All in one place. And if its the onboard sata "raid" then its software based, and not hardware bases as it would be with a sata/sas controller card.
February 2, 201610 yr My understanding is that onboard (motherboard) RAID and controller card (HBA) RAID are both hardware RAID. Software RAID is what an OS might provide.
February 2, 201610 yr Looks like you *can* share an unassigned drive: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=45798.0
February 2, 201610 yr My understanding is that onboard (motherboard) RAID and controller card (HBA) RAID are both hardware RAID. Software RAID is what an OS might provide. Most motherboards is just software raid, aka "fake raid". If you for example set up a raid array on your motherboard, and present it to ESX it will just se the disks, not your raid array. Some info on that here. http://skrypuch.com/raid/
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