Newbie here! New Unraid Build! Just a few questions


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Hey unRaid Community!

 

I am building out a new unraid server at home. Just to give everyone a background on what i would like to accomplish, a few things.

 

1. Run VM's on ESX Server (Media Server w/ Xeon Chip + 16GB Ram) (Media Drives locally passed through to the VM's, the actual VM VHD i would like stored over the network on unraid for redundancy purposes, either iSCSI or NFS.)

 

2. Central network storage for various client PC backups, or data dumps for the hell of it

 

3. Utilize my Random sized 3.5/2.5' drives (500GB-8TB) various sizes and brands.

 

 

Some questions about unraid.

 

1. Party Drives

                        - Essentially used as a backup disk? Not too sure how 1 drive can back up 10+TB if its only 4-6TB for Example.

                        - My understanding is the parity drives have to be bigger than the biggest drive in the array

                        - What happens if this drive fails? are backups lost? and do i have the ability to rebuild?

                        - is it worth building this with a hardware Raid 1, and running 2x disks in parity? (and is this something that can be done down the road?)

                        - are SSDs required? or will Disk Drives be fine?

2. Cache Drives

                        - Are they required? what do they do?

                        - SSD or HDD and why?

                        - Do these need to be raid 1 at the hardware level as well?

 

3. OS Drive

                        - I have seen some users use 2x USBs in Raid?! i think? is this worth doing, what happens if the flash drive fails do i loose all settings/config? is there a way to prevent this?

                        - will a 4GB drive be enough, or should  i grab a set of 16GBs

 

Thats enough questions for now, the next set of questions will tackle networking, im thinking of adding 3 nics, and spanning them together to get maximum output to the network.

 

Thanks in advance Community!!

AJ

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1. Party Drives

                        - Essentially used as a backup disk? Not too sure how 1 drive can back up 10+TB if its only 4-6TB for Example.

                        - My understanding is the parity drives have to be bigger than the biggest drive in the array

                        - What happens if this drive fails? are backups lost? and do i have the ability to rebuild?

                        - is it worth building this with a hardware Raid 1, and running 2x disks in parity? (and is this something that can be done down the road?)

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_6/Overview#Parity-Protected_Array  Like any other raid system, unRaid can recover from (using 6.2) up to 2 concurrent drive failures at a time with no data loss.  Unlike other raid solutions, if you suffer more drive failures than your array is capable of handling, you will only lose a portion of your files.  Traditional raid systems, you will have lost all of your files

2. Cache Drives

                        - Are they required? what do they do?

                        - SSD or HDD and why?

                        - Do these need to be raid 1 at the hardware level as well?

Cache drives are either used to speed up writes to that array (and during off-hours then copy the files to the parity protected array, or strictly as VM / docker image storage.)  SSD vs HDD are your choice.  You can easily set up a BTRFS raid like redundancy composed of multiple drives.  Hardware RAID is not required.  If you're planning on running VMs or dockers I would state that a cache drive is highly recommended (but not outright required)

3. OS Drive

                        - I have seen some users use 2x USBs in Raid?! i think? is this worth doing, what happens if the flash drive fails do i loose all settings/config? is there a way to prevent this?

                        - will a 4GB drive be enough, or should  i grab a set of 16GBs

You only require one.  A second USB is merely a backup that is never even plugged into the system.  But its really not that important anymore, as if in the unlikely event that the flash fails (note that there are very, very little writes to the flash drive, and generally the only reads happen at boot up time), it'll take around 5 minutes to transfer your registration to another flash drive via the webUI

 

As to size, one of my servers still has a 512Meg stick.  My main server uses an 8 GB stick, and only has ~512Meg utilized.  This is one case where size doesn't matter....

 

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Spend a little time browsing the Limetech website. It does a pretty good job of explaining how unRAID is different from any RAID system you may be familiar with, and gives a very good overview of unRAID features. You might find some of your questions are already answered there.

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Great, thank you everyone for your replies, I have it stood up right now without a cache drive, but do plan on adding one down the road.

 

In terms of upgrading the parity drive, is it as simple as remove, replace, and it will rebuild?

 

Also, if i move the system into a new case, do the sata connections have to match the intial configuration? or can unRaid determine which disk is which?

 

thanks again!

AJ

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Great, thank you everyone for your replies, I have it stood up right now without a cache drive, but do plan on adding one down the road.

 

In terms of upgrading the parity drive, is it as simple as remove, replace, and it will rebuild?

yes

 

Also, if i move the system into a new case, do the sata connections have to match the intial configuration? or can unRaid determine which disk is which?

 

thanks again!

AJ

unRAID tracks drive assignments by the drive serial number so the connections don't matter.
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