Hi everyone, Im new at forum and on unRAID, i knew about it thanks to Linus and he's awesome youtube channel.

 

So a little bit about me and my implementation, Im the IT manager of a small SaaS company in Ecuador, and Im trying to improve our infrastructure so I decided to give a try to unRAID and until now (5 days left) Im very happy about it, even if I did the trial on a regular pc (i7-4790/2x2gb+2x1gb/1x1tb hdd) but now that trial is about to end we will buy the standard license (because this motherboard just support 4 sata3 and 2 sata2 devices) so my intention is to improve the hardware too.

 

So we use unRAID mainly for VMs (win and linux) and as NAS (for our important data), now im planning to buy 2x8gb ram, 1x4tb wd purple for parity, 1x2tb wd purple for data, and i have a 128gb ssd too that I just connected today to give a try to the cache disk option.

 

I will be glad if some more experienced user can tell me if im doing good or how can i have a better improvement.

 

 

Thanks

Hi, and welcome.  A couple of thoughts.

 

The "go to" disk for NAS is WD Red, not Purple.

Since you are using VMs for business, if you are running them from the cache drive you should implement a cache pool of 2 or more SSDs for redundancy.

VMs can use a lot of memory and they tend to work best with pinned CPUs.  People who do lots of VM work tend to use Xeon E5s with lots of memory.  It's entirely up to you - if the Core i7 is working well for you then great.

Remember that the redundancy unRAID provides isn't a backup solution.  Make sure your array and VMs are backed up.

Hi @tdallen, thanks for your suggestions and the fast reply.

 

Red drives sadly are not an option for us, the supplier we have just have them in Purple version and I guess as they are also made for 24/7 read/write, it should works fine, if you have more info about Purple not working well for this kind of setup I would be glad to know before we buy them.

 

About cache, I just intalled the ssd this morning and I havent play too much with it yet, in fact, it is still empty, Im reading the FAQs to understand how it works and when I should use it, if i can move my dev server to the ssd would be really nice.

 

About memory, my mainboard handle 32gb max, and i dont think we will need more, at least for some time. I understand there is a lot of better components to use like ECC memories, Xeon procs, better Sata controllers, etc, but with our current limitations about options and budget im trying my best with what I have at hand to get my boss attention to build a propper server in the future.

 

Your setup looks really nice btw

I don't know of any folks who've used Purple drives.  In theory they're optimized for sequential access.  Do you have any Seagate options available?  I might use an Ironwolf over a WD Purple just because Purple represents a bit of an unknown to me in a random access NAS.

 

The cache drive in unRAID serves two purposes.  First, you can use it to cache writes to the array.  Second, it is the defacto application drive for Dockers and VMs.  These days it is used more as an application drive than its traditional role for write caching.  That said, people who do serious VM work also use another strategy, which is to mount additional SSDs via the Unassigned Devices plugin and run their VMs from those dedicated SSDs.  You can get it via the Community Applications plugin.

 

I keep waiting for my old setup to die so I can replace it with something new and fun .  It just keeps running, though :).

thanks a lot for the awesome explanation!

you have cleared my doubts now!

WD Purples are fine. There's no problem whatsoever with them. I've got four of them in one server because I got a good deal on them. If you have any real experience of them yourself then by all means comment but please don't give people the wrong impression by speculating. There's even a helium-filled 8 TB model.

@John_M I don't think I speculated, just recommended the NAS drive instead.  That said, I'm glad to hear that WD Purples are working well for you, and will now report that people are successfully using them for unRAID if asked.  I'm also glad they will work out for the OP given his limited selection in Ecuador.

 

As a point of interest since there's been very little discussion on the forums about the WD Purple drives, how do you view them compared to NAS drives?  I.e., use either based on price, prefer NAS but happy to use Purple, etc.

 

Thanks.

Purples are as good as Reds in unRAID. They are rated for continuous use and for multiple drives in a bay. They are typically more expensive but I managed to get four 6 TB for less than the price of four 6 TB Reds. They have the same warranty and they come in the same range of capacities. I don't know if it's true but it really wouldn't surprise me if they were the same mechanically, though with different firmware. My own speed tests showed that they are marginally slower on writes than Reds but identical on reads. The difference is irrelevant when used with unRAID. They are optimised for recording multiple video streams - I imagine that's a tweak applied to the cache. It has nothing to do with sequential access. Mechanically they appear to be identical. I'd put them on a par with Reds and somewhat above Blues and Greens. If i could find some more Purples that were cheaper than Reds I'd use them.