Sell me on unRAID, and help me work out the hardware situation?

[Beer]

Hi everyone.  I have been going through what seems like an eternity of uncertainty around how I want to handle my home NAS/hypervisor/server. 

 

I have already purchased my hardware:

* ASRock Rack EPC612D4U (8x SATA)

* Xeon E5-2630L V3 8-core

* 32GB DDR4 ECC

* 6x 4TB HGST NAS HDD

* 2x 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD

* 3x 32GB USB drives (originally for ESXi/FreeNAS installs)

 

Original plan was this:

* ESXi (on internal USB)

* FreeNAS in a VM (on mirrored USB)

* Onboard SATA controller and all 8 drives passed through to FreeNAS VM

* 6x HDD in RAIDz2 for media storage/home backups

* 2x SSD mirrored, and shared back to ESXi for redundant VM storage

 

Goals:

* Primary: Plex Server/NAS

* Host VMs

* Home Backups (Crashplan, or something)

 

 

So far all I have done is install/setup ESXi and FreeNAS, and setup the hardware passthrough.  I'm not too deep into this yet and I want peoples opinions on what I could do with my hardware in an unRAID setup, and what the pros/cons would be versus my original plans.  I'm not opposed to starting over on the software side if I have good reasons to, or even a couple hardware changes.  I'm not terribly familiar with unraid and its caching/parity situation.

 

I did read in the wiki that dual parity is "coming", but it links to 7-9 year old threads saying "it's coming" so that's a bit worrying.

 

My biggest issue is that I'm not sold on RAIDz2.  I like the protection, but the future expandability is concerning.

 

What I'm looking for is to take what I have, and build a theoretical unRAID box out of it, and tell me why that is as good or better than my original plan.

 

 

Thanks 

 

[kizer]

Dual Parity is here. Been here for a while.

[Beer]

Dual Parity is here. Been here for a while.

 

Oh, that's good to know.. thanks.  The wiki must just be horribly outdated then https://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Parity#Dual_parity

[JonathanM]

I did read in the wiki that dual parity is "coming", but it links to 7-9 year old threads saying "it's coming" so that's a bit worrying.

 

I was all ready to post a smart alec reply about reading the official website, but when I went to the main page about unraid, sure enough, no mention of dual parity.

 

One of the quirks of unraid that you will have to accept and get over is the lag between feature sets and official documentation.

Read here for a little more current overview, but keep in mind this page was written 4 months ago. You really have to actively participate in the forums to stay current.

https://lime-technology.com/unraid-server-os-6-2-released/

[1812]

Just do it!

 

Pros:

You can achieve all that you want with the hardware you posted.

 

Cons

Slower writes directly to the array (which cache drive helps mitigate.)

 

Many people do all of the things you've listed and more on less.

[tdallen]

Cons

Slower writes directly to the array (which cache drive helps mitigate.)

TurboWrite is the greatest thing since sliced bread .  Unless I'm writing lots of small files I get somewhere around gigabit wire speed most of the time.

[1812]

Cons

Slower writes directly to the array (which cache drive helps mitigate.)

TurboWrite is the greatest thing since sliced bread .  Unless I'm writing lots of small files I get somewhere around gigabit wire speed most of the time.

 

Well, there IS that...