The Perfect Home Server 2016

[ironicbadger]

### DISCLAIMER ###

 

My conclusion wasn't unRAID. 

 

====

 

https://www.linuxserver.io/index.php/2016/02/06/snapraid-mergerfs-docker-the-perfect-home-media-server-2016/

[BRiT]

Nice article that was easy to read and not completely bogged down by technical details.

[JonathanM]

Does mergerfs support hard and soft file links properly?

[mr-hexen]

Was the only reason for not using unraid is because it wasn't free?

[dalben]

Ease of install is missing though.  Many people would need a schoolbusdriver to help them navigate a multi pronged setup whereas unRAID is relatively painless.

[garycase]

There are certainly use cases where snapraid is an okay solution for fault tolerance, but it's a MAJOR difference from the real-time fault tolerance provided by UnRAID.

 

Other than the fact that UnRAID isn't free, did you find other advantages in this setup?

 

Also, what is the recovery process like for failed drives with that configuration?    [Just curious how it compares in "ease of use" with UnRAID]

 

[JonathanM]

Many people would need a schoolbusdriver to help them navigate a multi pronged setup

and said schoolbusdriver would most likely be grumpy when they were done. 

[Helmonder]

Expandability... I have seen no product handling that better than unraid..

 

Just read the article.. Actually a nice job of creating unraid out of seperate components... Feature set is pretty comparable.. Even the continuous parity versus snap parity is comparable if you work with a single cache drive in unraid..

 

I do however find it weird to only look at free solutions.. The whole setup is far from free if you count the hardware,so what does the unraid license matter..

 

Also building like this makes it necessary that all used components keep playing well together... That would not need to be the case causing upgrade issues in the future.

[BRiT]

Expandability... I have seen no product handling that better than unraid..

 

Assuming you're using a base unraid system, adding in a new drive to an existing setup is a pretty horrible experience. Your entire array is taken offline for anywhere from 6 to 12 hours.

 

In the system reviewed, adding and expanding a drive is relatively simple. You just add it to the system. No lengthy process required that takes your entire array offline.

 

Yes, there are addons provided by the community to solve this horrible user experience for unraid, but you need to know about them first. Otherwise you're completely down until that process completes.

 

 

[Helmonder]

Expandability... I have seen no product handling that better than unraid..

 

Assuming you're using a base unraid system, adding in a new drive to an existing setup is a pretty horrible experience. Your entire array is taken offline for anywhere from 6 to 12 hours.

 

In the system reviewed, adding and expanding a drive is relatively simple. You just add it to the system. No lengthy process required that takes your entire array offline.

 

Yes, there are addons provided by the community to solve this horrible user experience for unraid, but you need to know about them first. Otherwise you're completely down until that process completes.

 

Agree, but noone does that.. Also, still the same issue with the mergefs solution..

[Helmonder]

If you can add a disk without any downtime it means the system is in no way checking drive validity.. Unraid does this (which i think is a good thing) but it can be avoided thru preclear... But I did not want this to be a war on specs :-). To each his or her own !

[garycase]

One major difference between the UnRAID vs. this approach is the isolation from Linux.

 

Although it's becoming a bit less true for many users, it is still true that for basic UnRAID users who just want a good NAS solution to run a few Dockers on it is VERY simple to install and run UnRAID with virtually no Linux knowledge.    Download the release; format a flash drive and copy the files to it; and run MakeBootable.    Then it's just a matter of booting to the flash drive and assigning drives.

 

vs. installing a Linux distro;  installing the various packages; and then using Linux commands to get everything set up and configured.

 

Those are two very different degrees of difficulty for a novice.

 

 

 

[garycase]

If you can add a disk without any downtime it means the system is in no way checking drive validity.. Unraid does this (which i think is a good thing) but it can be avoided thru preclear... But I did not want this to be a war on specs :-). To each his or her own !

 

I suspect the reason a drive can be added quickly is simply that parity isn't being maintained in the process.    Remember, this system doesn't maintain real-time fault-tolerance.  The next time parity is updated it would then include the newly added disk.    UnRAID could do this just as quickly if it wasn't maintaining real-time fault tolerance.    ... and of course doing a pre-clear, which results in a disk that's all zeroes and can thus be added quickly while maintaining parity provides the quick addition AND real-time fault tolerance.

 

[Helmonder]

+1  Explained better by garycaae ..

[boof]

Great read - thanks.

 

mergerfs is a new one on me - like you the alternatives you listed in the article have always had an issue that stopped them being attractive.

 

I'm excited to go and take a look at mergerfs if it resolves them.

[danioj]

Nice article. Good read. Doesn't bog down in tech stuff.

 

FWIW, it appears to me mergerfs is VERY similar to unRAID. Apart from mergerfs being free I am not seeing anything that would turn me to it (as I already have - what is for now - a lifetime unRAID Pro License x 3).

 

That being said, even if I was starting out now I think I would gladly pay the USD ~$140 I paid for my licences (all up) for the support of the community we have here and as something to Tom as the developer. I mean its not like we are paying enough to buy him a new Porsche every year!

 

Installing a nix distro for doing what I want is not something I will ever do. I have done it in the past. I run a nix VM for various things BUT I find doing anything in nix to be time consuming and arduous. 35 years old - busy life, job, family. Cant be bothered learning commands and tinkering to get things working. Especially when you are being pressured to get it "fixed"  Thats just me though. I just want something easy to set up, is simple to install, configure and understand, maintain, is scalable, affordable (including required hardware) and has good support. This for me is unRAID.

 

Funny this thread comes up. I was just going through old posts (from this and other Forums) of some bloke called "grumpybutfun" (from years back) the other night and read allot of his "gripes" about unRAID and LT and Tom. Some of them I am sure were perhaps valid at the time and I believe he was off to create his own competing product (which would deliver development, updates, a "better" distro than SW like centos etc quicker releases, better functionality than LT and unRAID and be free) and I don't see him/it around now (unless of course he is behind one of these products).

 

So many pro nix distro (for the purpose of a media / nas server) advocates forget that nix can be frightening to some users. I guess to quote Chris Tarrant "There're only easy if you know them ...". Granted the Support is provided by the community BUT I figure (as I mention above) given most of us have shelled out for unRAID it is unlikely that the community will ever disband while core NAS functionality remains stable and the software is in active development so win win there!

 

SNAP RAID doesn't provide real time fault tolerance so that is not something I would consider anyway.

 

Again, very nice article. Time well spent reading it.

[garycase]

... SNAP RAID doesn't provide real time fault tolerance so that is not something I would consider anyway.

 

Ditto.  I definitely want what I write to my server to be fault tolerant NOW (i.e. when it's written).

 

[Squid]

I tried snapraid years ago and the reason I came back was for the emulation of a dead drive.  I didn't want to have to deal with my wife complaining that 3tb of movies were unavailable because a drive died.

[hernandito]

I like the idea that unRAID's functionality can be replicated with free resources.

 

While I am comfortable with Linux, I am by no means an expert. I have setup various Ubuntu servers for various needs. Usually I simply followed guides that take you step by step. There is info out there to solve many issues. But nothing comes close to the ease of unRAID and the community support. I paid for the Pro version many years ago... and that was money well spent. I hope this revenue model works well for Limetech because they have not seen any of my money in about 5 years. I have created unRAID servers for 2 other friends, so there is a little revenue there.

 

If for some reason unRAID went away, with no hope of ever being able to rebuild it; I would resort to an expensive Drobo or Synology something. Something capable of running all the downloading goodies.

 

But in the words of Charlton Heston, "someone would have to pry my unRAID from my cold dead hands..."

 

 

[WeeboTech]

Interesting article. I think what's also missed in a comparison vs unRAID is the drive monitoring we now have.

Ease of plugins, events, boot from flash to ram.  There's huge benefits of using unRAID.

[ironicbadger]

This community is so balanced in their responses! Love it!!

 

Thanks for all the feedback - and compliments. We're really pushing over at LinuxServer.io to share as much of our collective knowledge as we can both in article and podcast form.

 

unRAID gave me a great start with storage and Linux - I bought a license I now don't use back in the day too. In the end though I am a tinkerer at heart and whilst I refute that the setup I have written about is 'too complex' even for the n00b, I accept that not everyone either has the time or inclination to do it this way. And you know, that's totally fine...

 

I love that I can replicate 99% of unRAIDs functionality using FOSS (the only missing piece being real-time parity). As I've said though for large mainly static datasets, real-time parity isn't really that important. Heck, unRAID even supports a cache drive to make up for it's mediocre write performance penalty induced due to real-time parity. Are those files protected until parity is calculated via the mover script? Nope! It is an important architectural difference between the two platforms but not as big as you might think...

 

I detected a lot of comments aimed at 'grumpy' or 'busdriver'. It's a shame he never followed through on his promised super NAS distro or whatever but we do have his, albeit somewhat unorthodox and obnoxious (at times) methods to thank for where unRAID is today I suspect. Meh - maybe I'm wrong. That's the (ancient) past now anyway.

 

Glad that some of you found this article useful. Feel free to come and join us over at #linuxserver.io for a chat on freenode.

[ashman70]

If you look at this comparison, which is a little dated now:http://www.snapraid.it/compare we now know that there are at least two date integrity plugins that can be used to check data integrity, its true that this functionality is not built into UnRaid itself, but its now possible with these plugins. I think the real difference between real time data protection and snapshot is a key differentiator, what happens between snapshots if a drive fails? What happens to that data, is it immediately accessible, how easy is it to recover it in terms of shell commands or can it be done through a web gui? I think perhaps SnapRaid is targeting at least intermediate to advanced linux users who are comfortable in the shell and know what they are doing whereas UnRaid users don't need that level of knowledge since most things are available through the web gui. I looked at SnapRaid over a year ago and simply did not get a comfort level that I would be able to set it up or maintain it without help and when I looked at UnRaid and the active support community I did get that level of comfort that I could install UnRaid and set things up and if I needed help it was there. The support communities are extremely important for these products and they are something potential customers need to consider. Free is great but I'd rather pay  for something that comes with some level of support even if I have to pay again for it.

[ironicbadger]

Free is great but I'd rather pay  for something that comes with some level of support even if I have to pay again for it.

 

It's not about the money. It's about being free and open. UnRAID is closed source - not that that is neccessarily a bad thing but I am a convert to the FOSS community. I think it's truly amazing and want to remove proprietary software from my life wherever I can.

 

Free as in cost is good but I'll pay for good software.

 

Free as in beer is better.

[gundamguy]

Are those files protected until parity is calculated via the mover script? Nope!

 

This really depends on if the user is running a cache pool (and how that is configured) or not.

[Helmonder]

 

Heck, unRAID even supports a cache drive to make up for it's mediocre write performance penalty induced due to real-time parity. Are those files protected until parity is calculated via the mover script? Nope! It is an important architectural difference between the two platforms but not as big as you might think...

 

As said.. to each its own, but in all honousty what you are saying depends on your configuratrion: I am running 4 * 250GB SSD's for a BTRFS cachepool, the pool is setup in a raid10 fashion. This actually gives me 500GB of storage that is heavier protected then the array itself..