August 1, 20169 yr Hi, I am currently running a storage server on windows using DrivePool ( I love DrivePool, it's amazing). I have recently been thinking of switching to unRIAD to lower overhead and add functionality. Before I switch I need to know a few things though. I currently have 980TB of storage across over 100 drives. Will unRAID be able to support this many drives and this much storage? Does unRIAD support drive pooling with no parity? It says that I can only add 30 "storage devices" to an array, i'm assuming storage devices are just harddrives/ssds? Is the 30 drive limit for the entire system or just a single array? Do I have to use arrays? If unRIAD supports pooling, is pooling also limited to 30 drives? If I have an array or a pool, can I dynamically add and remove drives at will? Does unRIAD support hotswapping drives? (adding/removing drives without reboot) If I remove a drive from the array or pool, is the data on the drive still usable/accessible from the same machine? Is it accessible if I were to put the drive in another machine? Can I prepare drives for removal? (have the system automatically migrate data off drives I want to remove) Can I setup drives for serial fill? (fill specific drives before others, ect.) Does unRIAD monitor drive health? Will it automatically migrate data off a failing drive? Thanks for any answers.
August 1, 20169 yr Hi, I am currently running a storage server on windows using DrivePool ( I love DrivePool, it's amazing). I have recently been thinking of switching to unRIAD to lower overhead and add functionality. Before I switch I need to know a few things though. I currently have 980TB of storage across over 100 drives. Will unRAID be able to support this many drives and this much storage? Does unRIAD support drive pooling with no parity? You can run unraid without parity, not a wise thing, but possible It says that I can only add 30 "storage devices" to an array, i'm assuming storage devices are just harddrives/ssds? Yes Is the 30 drive limit for the entire system or just a single array? Yes.. On both.. Unraid is an array and you have one array per system Do I have to use arrays? Unraid is an array. Raid up on it though, its not your usual kind of array. If unRIAD supports pooling, is pooling also limited to 30 drives? #N/A If I have an array or a pool, can I dynamically add and remove drives at will? Yes Does unRIAD support hotswapping drives? (adding/removing drives without reboot) No If I remove a drive from the array or pool, is the data on the drive still usable/accessible from the same machine? If you remove a drive parity will keep the data available is if the drive was not removed. Max of 2 drives can be removed (when using dual parity) Is it accessible if I were to put the drive in another machine? Yes, major selling point of unraid Can I prepare drives for removal? (have the system automatically migrate data off drives I want to remove) No, but there are plugins that can do this for you Can I setup drives for serial fill? (fill specific drives before others, ect.) Yes, you can choose your filling strategy, several available Does unRIAD monitor drive health? Yes Will it automatically migrate data off a failing drive? No, it will notify you so you can make a decission Thanks for any answers.
August 1, 20169 yr Author Thanks for the answers. I think it was camouflaged, but you missed the first and most important question. I currently have 980TB of storage across over 100 drives. Will unRAID be able to support this many drives and this much storage? Some of your previous answers confused me. You said I can run unRAID without parity, but you didn't specify if it supports drive pooling? Or is unRAIDS arrays essentially drive pools? (Multiple drives seen as a single drive) Based on what you said, Each installation of unRAID can only support a single array and this array can only support 30 drives. Correct? Based on your previous response, is it correct that every drive connected to the unRAID system is in the array and it is not possible to have drives connected that are not part of the array? The solution I need is a drive pooling system that can see an unlimited number of drives as a single logical drive, automatically balances files (without striping) across the physical drives. Monitors drive health and automatically migrates data off failing drives. Allows me to add and remove drives at will (hot swap preferable) stored in a format that i could remove a drive from the pool and use the data somewhere else and can migrate data off a drive i want to remove and use for something else. It seems like unRIAD has half of what I need, but if it can't support the amount of data i'm storing or the amount of drives I have then it's not going to work for me.
August 1, 20169 yr Community Expert UnRAID is not designed to handle the amount of data you have or the number of drives, so I doubt whether it will meet your needs. UnRAID is designed primarily as a NAS system for the home user and it does not appear that you fit into that category.
August 1, 20169 yr unRAID supports a maximum of 30 drives in the array, and only one array per server. So no, 100 drives won't work and based on current drive capacities I don't see how you could get 980TB in a single array/server. Pooling is accomplished via User Shares. A User Share can span all the drives in an array (or selective). unRAID supports an array of Cache devices in addition to data devices. Via a plugin it also supports access to additional devices (but "access" does not include pooling or parity protection). The only way I could see this working would be an array of devices, where the device itself is a hardware RAID controller and presents a bunch of disks as a single device. You'd lose some important benefits of unRAID if you managed to get this to work, though.
August 2, 20169 yr Thanks for the answers. I think it was camouflaged, but you missed the first and most important question. I currently have 980TB of storage across over 100 drives. Will unRAID be able to support this many drives and this much storage? Max drive size now is 10TB.. So no.. Wondering what your setup is right now to do this,, Some of your previous answers confused me. You said I can run unRAID without parity, but you didn't specify if it supports drive pooling? Or is unRAIDS arrays essentially drive pools? (Multiple drives seen as a single drive) Yes, this os what unraid does Based on what you said, Each installation of unRAID can only support a single array and this array can only support 30 drives. Correct? Yes Based on your previous response, is it correct that every drive connected to the unRAID system is in the array and it is not possible to have drives connected that are not part of the array? This is possible using a plugin to the core system The solution I need is a drive pooling system that can see an unlimited number of drives as a single logical drive, automatically balances files (without striping) across the physical drives. Monitors drive health and automatically migrates data off failing drives. Allows me to add and remove drives at will (hot swap preferable) stored in a format that i could remove a drive from the pool and use the data somewhere else and can migrate data off a drive i want to remove and use for something else. It seems like unRIAD has half of what I need, but if it can't support the amount of data i'm storing or the amount of drives I have then it's not going to work for me.
August 2, 20169 yr I'm curious as to what kind of hardware you're using to be able to actually plugin that many drives together... What's the connection technology? SAS? Expanders? ESATA? PMP? FC? How many HBA cards are you using? and how are all your drives up and running at once?
August 2, 20169 yr ... I currently have 980TB of storage across over 100 drives. Will unRAID be able to support this many drives and this much storage? As has already been made clear, UnRAID does NOT support storage at this magnitude. Just out of curiousity, what is your current storage topology. To get 980TB of storage in 100 drives, you'd have to be using 10TB drives, which are VERY new. With 4TB drives, it would take nearly 250 drives. Several of us are clearly curious what your setup is that allows connecting this many drives and pooling hem all together => and, in particular, what kind of fault tolerance does this setup have ??
August 2, 20169 yr Author Thanks for the info guys. I'll keep looking. To answer your questions now: I am running 80 HGST HMH7210A0ALN600 drives on 2 rocket 750's and I have another 2 rocket 750's that have a random assortment of drives mainly from auctions. Everything is SATA The HGST drives don't really ever fail, but the auction drives fail all the time, they are more like temporary storage. To answer your question about fault tolerance.. I used to have this system split with raid10. Then I discovered DrivePool. Now I don't use any fault tolerance per se. Now I have my full array available and still don't have to worry about losing data. DrivePool automatically migrates data off of failing drives and onto good drives. I've lost over 200 drives since I started using DrivePool and have lost 0 data. I'm fully confident in the system and saved 500TB of wasted space.
August 2, 20169 yr Lots of succes ! To each his own, if this is working for you then why switch at all ?
August 2, 20169 yr Author Lots of succes ! To each his own, if this is working for you then why switch at all ? The main reason is that I want to switch to an environment that supports virtualization and containers to reduce overhead and allow better experimentation. I'm wondering now if I can switch to unRIAD, then virtualize a windows enviroment to handle the storage and just use unRAID containers for all of the rest. I haven't tried unRAID yet so i'm not sure exactly how it works, but would this be possible? or does unRAID only use devices in the array to allocate space? or could I throw an SSD in the array for the windows OS and then just assign the PCI-E slots to the windows guest so that it can access all of the storage? The only negatives I can see is that because the drives are technically connected to the windows system and not unRAID, the only way my services in unRAID can access the drives is through windows shares? Which could possibly slow things down. Yes, no? Thoughts? Ideas?
August 2, 20169 yr Maybe a dumb question, but when you have a server worth more than my house, why not just spring for a dedicated VM machine? Seems a little risky to shoot for an all-in-one solution at this scale.
August 2, 20169 yr Maybe a dumb question, but when you have a server worth more than my house, why not just spring for a dedicated VM machine? Seems a little risky to shoot for an all-in-one solution at this scale. Dude im with you, why penny pinch when a quick google of those drive pull up a price tag $1600 for refurb. he gots 80 of them. Either we are getting trolled or this dude needs to stick with enterprise hardware. SAN not a NAS
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