Hello,

 

 

can someone who is more into unraid take a look at my configuration I choose for my farther and if it would work out?

Thank you guys, so here we go:

 

 

Intel Pentium G4400 or Intel Core i3 6100 2x 3.70GHz So.1151 BOX

Fujitsu D3417-B or MSI C236M WORKSTATION

4000GB WD Red *2

16GB Crucial CT16G4WFD8213 DDR4-2133

360 Watt Seasonic G Serie 360 Non-Modular

Nanoxia Deep Silence 4 gedämmt Mini Tower

 

USB or a small SSD for the systems? (looks like unraid is ment for USB and if so does it work with skylake - usb3.0 controller which freenas doesn't?)

My farther intends to use it as a media storage for his kodi media

center connected to his tv (for recorded tv movies) and for savely

storing emotional valuable data (photos and video's of us being little,

his large music collection, etc).

 

 

    He is on a tight budget, you would laugh if you looked at the hardware he uses to cut the commercials by hand and the time consuming of

    offloading it from a tvheadend server rendering, transcoding it with

    handbrake and uploading it to the nas.

 

    I already wondered if he'd go with a core i3 instead and create a

    transcoding folder for that stuff and let the nas do it (he has a very

    old amd athlon maschine) but I worry if I can set this up for him with

    jail / watchfolder stuff.

    Moreover he wants the maschine to be his tv recorder at the same time

    because a water damage nearly killed his current 1 hdd nas and destroyed

    his seperate tvhe machine.

    However this again seems hard to realize since I found no real solution for tv recording in a docker/ jail.

    (And the stuff found left me question if it would work).

 

Which way to go for data security and reliability regarding setup/ raid configuration / file system to take advantage from ecc?

Can you please give me a recommended way to setup the config or if I should change some stuff? I really dont understand how unraid works in that matter.

 

Best regards

Jan

I'm not sure exactly what your questions are, but I'll offer some comments and see where that leads.

 

- The motherboards and chips you selected support ECC RAM.

- It looks like that RAM is on the compatibility list for the MSI, couldn't tell about the Fujitsu.

- I haven't seen any unRAID builds with a Fujitsu motherboard.  That doesn't mean anything, but MSI is more common.

- You don't have to do anything to take advantage of ECC RAM.  Just install it and go.

- I assume you are going to have 1 4TB drive as a data drive, and one as Parity?

- I'm not sure what you mean about USB or SSD...

- If you want to install Dockers/VMs then an SSD is recommended as the Cache/Application drive.

 

Lastly, if you want to do TV capture then you're probably going to need to install a VM with another operating system.  Things get more complicated from there.  16GB is probably fine but you should plan your memory usage - VMs need more than Dockers.  You also typically want a more powerful CPU - the Core i3 *might* work but consider an i5 or better.  Also, your CPU and motherboard would need to support VT-d IOMMU hardware pass through for the capture card.  Also if you want to hook the VM up to a monitor or TV then you'll need another graphics card.  So, there's lots of homework to do if you want to go the TV capture route on unRAID.

 

Hope that helps, or at least starts the discussion.

If you're already decided on using OMV, why not ask on their forums? 

 

Although if you ask me, unRaid is a far better solution than OMV.

Of course I ment unraid, my head is just troubled in chaos because I have to find the best solution for my father, I am sorry I mixed it up.

Thanks for your tips so far.

 

So here is what I dont understand, how does this parity disk thing work?

It can't be a Raid 1 mirror because then you wouldn't be able to just add more disks and use the full capacity with only 4TB of "parity"(whatever that means).

Can someone (in simple terms) explain how this stuff works?

Parity is a calculation.  This example is overly simplistic, but may help.

 

Let's say you have 4 disks - 3 data, one parity.  At the exact same spot on each data disk you have a byte of data.  Let's say the data is 1, 1, and 0 on each of the 3 data disks respectively.  Parity is calculated and stored on the parity disk.  Let's say the parity information was a simple sum of the other drives.  Parity would be 1+1+0=2.  (That's not how parity is really calculated, this is just an illustration.)

 

Now, drive 2 fails.  Using the available information I know that disk 1 has the value "1", disk 3 has the value "0", and the sum of the three is "2".  It's very easy to calculate the missing data and therefore emulate the missing drive - 1+x+0=2 means that x=1.  It's worth noting that when you only have two drives in your array, one data and one parity, the parity calculation is basically a mirror.

 

Like I said, this example was way too simplistic.  If you want more information you can google "how does parity work" or "how does raid work".  But the concept is straightforward - by combining the data you have along with a unique calculation you can determine the missing data.  It's worth noting that the example above can only recover from a single disk failure.  There's no way to calculate x+y+0=2.

@tdallen

Thanks for your time and effort to explain it to me. I at least have now a (very) basic idea of parity.

So if I set it up with 2 drives I get 4TB of storage, basically a Raid 1 mirror.

However, it seems like in unraid you just can add drives to the pool later and extend it (you probably have to recalculate parity then) but why doesn't, lets say by adding 1 drive everytime the budget allows, the parity drive become too small for the storage capacity?

You're on the right track.  You can add more data drives later.  unRAID (or the recommended Preclear Plugin) will zero out the drive before adding it to the array.  Since all values are zero parity does not have to be recalulated.  Clearing (basic unRAID) or Preclearing (via plugin) is time consuming, though - like, several days.

 

Your Parity drive needs to be as large as, or larger than, the largest data drive in your array.  So if you populate your array with 4TB drives now and later want to add a 6TB drive, you'll have to upgrade your Parity drive to 6TB first.

But I can keep adding as many 4TB drives to the data pool as I want?

Why doesn't the parity drive doesn't get to small for storing all the information?

Crazy math I guess, if I find the time I will look into this deeper, sounds really interesting.

But thank you for your help so far. 

Is there a handbrake plugin, so that my father would upload basic .mp4's to a folder on the server and let handbrake automatically compress and delete the lager file when finished? To avoid that his old cheap system running all night (which for me is a fire threat )  Or should I post this question in a different section of the forum?

Yes, you can keep adding 4TB drives up to the limit of your unRAID license.  Go ahead and google parity calculation - it's not a sum, it's an XOR calculation which results in a parity value that fits just fine on the parity disk.  Remember, it doesn't just take the parity drive to recover from a drive failure - it takes the *rest* of your drives as well.  If you ever suffer a drive failure you want to be able to react quickly because an additional failure could result in data loss.

 

There's a Handbrake Docker you can look into, Docker support threads are over in this forum.  Also, once you are up and running with your unRAID instance you should install the Community Applications plugin - that's where to find all the great plugins and dockers for unRAID.

Thank you so much giving me starting guidance.

Topic can be closed now.