March 11, 201610 yr Hello I'm new to unRAID and have a few open questions regarding my system. System: i5 4460 Asrock Z87 Professional 8GB RAM non ECC 9x 4TB WD Red 1) I want somethign similar to a RAID5, so is this set up correctly? 5) Is it normal, that it fills up a disk one by one? 3) Why is there such a difference in the CPU usage (interface vs htop) 4) What is the difference between a user share and a diskshare? 5) What UPS would you guys buy in my position? 6) Are there any must have plugins? 7) How much would I gain and is it worth it to buy SSD for caching? Thanks for your help!
March 11, 201610 yr Community Expert #1 Yes! But it is not RAID5. Like RAID5, it protects against the failure of a single disk in version 6.1.X. However, if you have a two disks that fail you only lose the information that is stored on those two disks. Any Linux OS can read the files on the remaining disks! In many cases, it actually possible to recover all or some of the data from a failed disk depending on the nature of the failure. #5 See here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Allocation_method #4 See Here: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Un-Official_UnRAID_Manual#Export_settings_.28for_unRaid_5.x.29 #5 (you have it twice) APC is the author of the software but many of the Cyperpower UPS work also. You should probably be looking at about a 900VA as a minimum. Pure sine wave output is a plus but I, for one, don't think it absolutely necessary unless you have a lot of outages. #6 I would start with these: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=36543.0 and add the powerdown one: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=31735.0 #7 It speeds up writes to the file system by (roughly) a factor of two. It is also more necessary if you are going to use Dockers and/or VMs as the system for these are more conveniently stored on a cache drive(s). EDIT Fixed dumb error on my part in #7! Writes was reads....
March 11, 201610 yr Hello I'm new to unRAID and have a few open questions regarding my system. System: i5 4460 Asrock Z87 Professional 8GB RAM non ECC 9x 4TB WD Red 1) I want somethign similar to a RAID5, so is this set up correctly? 5) Is it normal, that it fills up a disk one by one? 3) Why is there such a difference in the CPU usage (interface vs htop) 4) What is the difference between a user share and a diskshare? 5) What UPS would you guys buy in my position? 6) Are there any must have plugins? 7) How much would I gain and is it worth it to buy SSD for caching? Thanks for your help! 1) Yes looks good. It's not really like RAID5 for a lot of reasons, but you are set to survive a single disk failure. 2) This id going to depend entirely on the logic you set up for your user shares, like which allocation method (High-water, Fill-up, etc.), Excludes/Includes, and Split-levels. So it doesn't have to do that, but it can if you want. 3) This is a good question. Hope someone else can give more insight into this. 4) A user share is a file system in user space that aggregates multiple disks into a single share. A disk share shares only that one disk. /mnt/user/movies is a user share and /mnt/disk1/movies is a disk share. The user share would read all of the /mnt/disk1/movies for each disk and aggregate it. (Caution, mixing user shares and disk shares when doing move or copy operations can result in data loss) Most users use user shares exclusively. 7) Adding an SSD cache gives you to things, the illusion of quicker writes to the array since writes to cache enabled shares would written to the SSD and be moved to the array at a later time. The second thing is the SSD gives you a location to put VM/Dockers/Application files (Plex Metadata) that won't spin up your array disks.
March 11, 201610 yr Author Thanks for your replies, things are getting clearer. Is a single SSD good enough for the cache? I have a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo lying around somewhere
March 11, 201610 yr Thanks for your replies, things are getting clearer. Is a single SSD good enough for the cache? I have a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo lying around somewhere That depends, a single drive is good enough to accomplish what you want a cache to do, but it doesn't give you any data redundancy for cache only shares (shares that are never moved to the array, mostly used for App data). Two cache drives (formatted as BTRSF) allows you the option of having a cache pool (creating a RAID1 set up) for your cache only shares and cache data waiting to be written to the array.
March 11, 201610 yr Author Makes sense... In that case I need to get a sata extender, as I wont have enough space for two more SSD's. Will this product with two Samsung 850 Evo 500GB do its work?
March 11, 201610 yr In my opinion, I'd stay away from BTRFS as the underlying filesystem for a drive. Format your cache as XFS and run only one. Anything on the cache drive is easily replaced if need be.
March 11, 201610 yr 1. Because unRAID is not RAID5, there is no need to keep your disks spun up all the time. Most people would set "default spin down delay" to something like 1 hour so individual disks can spin down when they are not being used. You probably also want to set "enable auto start" to yes 6. Install Community Applications first, it makes finding and installing other apps a breeze: https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40262.0 If your system has IPMI, get the IPMI Support plugin, otherwise get Dynamix System Temp. Then you'll want to look at Nerd Tools, Powerdown, Dynamix System Information, Dynamix Cache Directories, Dynamix SSD trim (assuming you install an SSD cache drive), Recycle Bin and Open Files. If you want to interact with drives outside of the array, get Unassigned Devices and Preclear. That should be a good start Note that each app has its own support thread, it is best to ask for support in those existing threads rather than start a new one.
March 11, 201610 yr Author Thanks for your replies again, helping me greatly! I've installed the SSD as cache now. My data structure looks like this now: Why did I get a 2nd user folder? My plan now is to have the downloads folder and everythign docker related on the SSD. For that I've moved every docker installation to: /mnt/cache/Docker/DOCKERNAME I've adjusted the settings on every share "Use cache disk:" to yes, except the downloads and dockers share, which are set to only. One one thing that I do not like is that the booting USB stick is visible in the windows explorer:
March 11, 201610 yr Thanks for your replies again, helping me greatly! I've installed the SSD as cache now. My data structure looks like this now: Why did I get a 2nd user folder? My plan now is to have the downloads folder and everythign docker related on the SSD. For that I've moved every docker installation to: /mnt/cache/Docker/DOCKERNAME I've adjusted the settings on every share "Use cache disk:" to yes, except the downloads and dockers share, which are set to only. One one thing that I do not like is that the booting USB stick is visible in the windows explorer: user is the contents of all of your shares. user0 is the contents of all your shares except for what's sitting on the cache drive. It's used by mover. You can stop the flash drive from being exported over smb if you like by going to Main, Boot Device, SMB Settings
March 12, 201610 yr FYI, standard practice is to set your "dockers" folder to /mnt/cache/appdata/[docker name] ALSO, don't forget to review each disk[x] share and move all contents to /mnt/cache/docker that were on the disk before and remove the old docker folders from the disks. Might confuse the Mover and move the /mnt/cache/docker folder over to the array disks.
March 12, 201610 yr Author I have a docker folder on my cache directory and on my user one too, does this mean, that the mover got confused?
March 12, 201610 yr No nits supposed to be on mnt/user too. If it's on mnt/diskX (where X is your disk numbers) that should be fixed.
March 12, 201610 yr Community Expert Your appdata folder is a share. All shares are in /mnt/user. If it is also in /mnt/user0 then that means some of it is not on cache. user is the contents of all of your shares. user0 is the contents of all your shares except for what's sitting on the cache drive. It's used by mover.
March 12, 201610 yr Author I'm not getting the hang of the filesystem here... Couchpotato downloaded a movie to the share "downloads" which is cache ONLY. couchpotato then moved the file to the share "movies", which has cache ON. Why is the movie still located on the cache?
March 12, 201610 yr Community Expert A share set to use cache will have new data written to cache and then moved to the array according to the mover schedule settings. Default is daily in the middle of the night. You can also manually invoke mover.
March 12, 201610 yr Author Ah, thanks for the clarification! I'm amazed by the community here, very helpfull and quick! Thank you all for your patience!
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