As I outgrow my simple Windows 7 RAID setup, I started looking at programs like OpenMediaVault and FreeNAS but ran into weird problems with Plex permissions in OMV and HD issues with FreeNAS. I think my last ditch effort with these types of programs is unRAID. I never considered unRAID before, since it only supported 1 drive for parity. I see that 6.2 will address that and let me have a RAID 6, dual parity drive setup. I plan on playing around with the beta real soon.

 

In the mean time, is the shortcomings of unRAID as pointed out in this AVSForum post still accurate?

 

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/39-networking-media-servers-content-streaming/2118690-nas-qnap-diy-freenas.html

 

unRAID

Pros

Quite literally built to be a cheap media server

Hardware requirements are a bare minimum. There are people running their unRAID with 1GB of RAM with an old 45W Sempron they had lying around in the garage.

You don't have to waste a HDD for the OS. Your OS is loaded into memory from a cheap Flash Drive.

Any size drive will be used to it's full capacity as long as it is no bigger than the smallest Parity Drive

Allows a cache drive that lets your I/O speed jump to the speed of the cache drive. If you use a fast SSD for the cache drive then reads and writes will be super quick. The array gets updated from the cache as the system is able.

Uses less power than ZFS because the data isn't striped so only the drive with the file spins up to serve or store data.

Lots of plugins for popular programs (like Plex)

Community is active, vibrant and friendly. New people are warmly greeted and taken care of promptly.

Real-Time parity eliminates the Write Hole if you aren't using a cache drive. Still minimized if you are using a cache drive since you don't have to wait for the next parity update.

HDD failure that exceeds parity limitations means you only lose data on the drives that failed. The data on working drives is completely recoverable though not as easily as flexRAID and SnapRAID

 

Cons

If you are using a cache drive you take the chance of losing your data if something happens before the data is written to the array

Slowest option. 70-80MB/s are the fastest times that I see reported for arrays with spinners

3rd party programs are limited to the plugins available

Software is the most expensive once you move past 3 drives.

Doesn't use true drive pooling (has workarounds)

Integrity and data protection is the weakest of the mentioned solutions. It is not validated with any checksum.

Silent errors can run undetected and be propogated into parity

Currently limited to 1 parity drive so you can only tolerate the loss of one data drive before data loss occurs

Disks that are imported into the array must be cleared and cannot have data on them unless they are already formatted with the ReiserFS, XFS or Btrfs filesystems.

 

I know that 6.2 will take care of at least one of those criticisms (parity drive). The thing that worries me a little bit is the point about "silent errors can run undetected and be propagated into parity". I see that unRAID supports BTRFS but since I'm going to commit the cardinal sin of not using ECC ram, should I even bother with BTRFS? I worry a LITTLE bit about bit rot but not to the point where I'm going to cry if I'm watching a 5 year old home video of some precious memory and during playback, there's a sound pop, graphical glitch in the MKV file I'm watching for a split second. If the entire file becomes unreadable, yes, that will bring me to tears through.

 

My other option............ remove Windows......install OpenSUSE, Mint or Debian and install mdadm and set my RAID 6 software array up like that.

 

 

 

I think you will be fine with UnRaid, are you planning on having a backup of your data or will you only have one copy on your UnRaid server. If you are planning on backing up your important data, then I wouldn't worry too much about bit rot, there is a plugin you can install to check the integrity of your data if you are really worried about it, quite a few people use it I believe.

I think you will be fine with UnRaid, are you planning on having a backup of your data or will you only have one copy on your UnRaid server. If you are planning on backing up your important data, then I wouldn't worry too much about bit rot, there is a plugin you can install to check the integrity of your data if you are really worried about it, quite a few people use it I believe.

 

For backup right now, I have an external hard drive I plug in and sync up with changes on my server (home movies, digital pics, mp3's). Going forward, I plan on uploading my mp3s to Google (free for 50,000 tracks).... my pictures (using Google's 'high resolution' vs. original format so it's free) and backing up my home movies to Amazon's Cloud for $60/year.

 

Everything else I have on my media server is OTA captures of TV shows and movies that I've ripped from my Blu-ray and DVD collection. (Losing that will suck but won't be life ending bad like losing pics and home movies would be.)

 

That post on AVSForum is a bit dated and a few things have changed, but it's pretty fair.  That said, unRAID was still smitbret's very close number 2 choice, if you noticed.  Two things that have happened since that post is that people are increasingly frustrated with FlexRaid (plenty of reading on AVSForum on that topic) and unRAID now has a File Integrity Plugin.  The plugin is less sophisticated than some bitrot implementations - it requires that you have a backup copy of your data to restore in case of corruption.  But I consider that to be good backup discipline.  And if you're really worried about it - wouldn't you spring for ECC RAM?  That's a good idea, too.

 

Broad generalizations on file systems.  Most people are using XFS for data drives now.  BTRFS is (generally) not yet considered stable enough in this community for data drives.  Cache drives are a different story, though - BTRFS pooling allows for a RAID 1'ish implementation for your cache drives under unRAID.  So, people are split - if you only have one cache drive XFS is fine but if you want two or more then BTRFS is the way to go.

Not to forget the 3rd Party Programs bit has changed quite a lot with docker. !

 

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

 

That post doesn't mention dockers and VMs. Plugins are only recommended for additional unRAID functionality such as the File Integrity plugin mentioned. Applications are better done with dockers. There are literally hundreds of dockers by literally dozens of docker authors on the forum. And you can run additional OSes as VMs.

 

And 1GB RAM with the Sempron is probably not going do it for V6. I wouldn't try it with less than 4GB RAM, but I did have it running on an Atom for a while on my backup server.