Hi I am a FlexRAID Raid-FS User running a Plex server on Windows Server 2012 R2 with a 7-2TB drive array. I don’t really need any of the windows server features and I’m wondering if unRAID would be a better fit for my use case.

1. ]Does unRAID support hard links? (like with Sonarr) I ask primarily because my current solution doesn’t and it would make management a lot easier

2. With FlexRAID. The drive failure protection is determined by the size of your parity drive(s). say your parity drive is 8TB, you can handle a single 8TB drive failure or up to 4 2TB drive failures. I don’t think unRAID parity works this way does it? Regardless of the drive size you get one drive failure…is that correct?

3. My array will eventually get pretty large. I’m planning on phasing 2TB drives out and using 8TB drives. The single parity drive limitation concerns me. So I’m wondering. If 2 drives fail… is there a way to recover/initialize the array minus the data on the failed drives that doesn’t require a lot of specialized knowledge? Since the data is not striped I thought I would ask. This is pretty much the only thing that is holding me back. Backups are too expensive for my case and the data is relatively unimportant to me. I would just be extremely annoyed trying to refill a 30TB array down the road.

 

1. ]Does unRAID support hard links? (like with Sonarr) I ask primarily because my current solution doesn’t and it would make management a lot easier

unRaid 6.1.9 only supports hard links on disk shares.  unRaid 6.2RC3+ supports hard links on disk shares and on user shares

2. With FlexRAID. The drive failure protection is determined by the size of your parity drive(s). say your parity drive is 8TB, you can handle a single 8TB drive failure or up to 4 2TB drive failures. I don’t think unRAID parity works this way does it? Regardless of the drive size you get one drive failure…is that correct?

correct.  Only 1 drive can fail at a time (unRaid 6.1.9) or 2 drives if using 6.2+

3. My array will eventually get pretty large. I’m planning on phasing 2TB drives out and using 8TB drives. The single parity drive limitation concerns me. So I’m wondering. If 2 drives fail… is there a way to recover/initialize the array minus the data on the failed drives that doesn’t require a lot of specialized knowledge? Since the data is not striped I thought I would ask. This is pretty much the only thing that is holding me back. Backups are too expensive for my case and the data is relatively unimportant to me. I would just be extremely annoyed trying to refill a 30TB array down the road.

Press a button that says "New Config"  All of the data on the drives still alive will be still be there.

 

Note that unRaid 6.2+ supports up to 2 parity drives ->  ie: the system can handle 2 drive losses at a time and still recover without any data loss

thanks for the quick response. That's great! i'm really looking forward to checking out the new version. i have a few new 8TB drives coming in so i'm at a rare position where my data can survive a reformat.