Hi all,

I bought a hp microserver Gen8 with 4x 2TB red drives but i'm not sure to go with unraid since I have only 4 bay.

I need to backup family photo raw (and iphoto library), cartoons video and some hd movies from my iMac and download contents using transmission.

I don't think to expand the disks since I have few movies and personal data.

A ZFS solution (like Nas4Free not Freenas) could be better for my needs?

Sorry for my bad english.

 

Thanks in advance,

alex

 

it would help for the recommendation if we knew what version of the gen 8 you have as it will help with the recommendation, but in general with the limited needs you have currently and not needing to upgrade anytime soon, I would think the exact opposite, with ZFS being a memory hog, and if I remember right you need 2 of your 4 disks to mirror your zpool, although not sure on that one as it's been awhile since I played with ZFS. I do know some single core processors struggle with version 6 of Unraid, but you shouldn't have that problem. I would recommend looking through the forums as there are many with microservers using Unraid and that could help in your decision process.

 

~Burt

I burtjr thank you for your response.

Yes I know, with ZFS I need 2 of my 4 disk for mirroring, so 2 vdev in mirror to create a Zpool striped of mirror vdev, total 4TB disk usable space.

This hp is dual core cpu celeron with 4GB RAM.

I already tried the unraid 6 trial version and it runs without any problem.

But unraid 6 costs and nas4free is free.  

Ok I'm will search in the forum

 

unRAID runs better on low end hardware than nas4free.  4x2TB gets you 6TB of storage with unRAID (or 4TB with dual parity, your choice).  And the unRAID sofware license will be just about the cheapest component of your server.

If your Microserver doesn't use ECC memory, then it's pointless (IMO) to go with ZFS.  You didn't mention what processor or what type of memory is in your server, and the HP site lists some options for Microservers that I don't believe support ECC (you'll have to check the hardware specs on the motherboard and on the CPU).  The whole point of ZFS is data integrity, and if you're not going to go all the way then I'd say don't bother.  ZFS also requires a fair amount of memory...the guideline is 1gb of memory per terabyte of hard drive space, but as you get to 8gb of memory that requirement isn't as critical.

If you look around, you'll also find there is a ZFS plugin for unRAID, but it's a little fiddly and there's no gui support for it.

I currently use FreeNAS and I love it.  I enjoy not having to worry whether my data is slowly rotting on my arrays.  I'm exploring unRAID because I want to do more virtualization.

Hi,

 

I was to say exactly the ECC thing. As far as it's a Celeron CPU I'm pretty sure there is no ECC support.

I will tell you my scenario.

First I tried FreeNAS a few years ago. I liked it. What a nice piece of software. Deal breaker, I didn't have ECC support and some good hardware anyway.

Now I choose unRAID for few important reasons. 

1. don't necessary need server grade components (I have a 4790 with 12 GB RAM and it's overkill already)

2. unlike other file systems, I still get data redundancy but I can get a HDD out and read its data on other computers

 

This second one was the thing that made me to choose unRAID.  I'm sure that I can still recover some data even if my machine completely dies. You pull the HDDs out, plug them to a linux computer and there is your data.

Even ZFS or conventional RAIDs do not have this advantage (except RAID1 if you are willing to trade half of storage capacity).

 

Good luck.

Edited March 27, 20179 yr by andreidelait

6 hours ago, ralex_75 said:

microserver Gen8 

 

AFAIK the Gen8, unlike the Gen7, requires ECC.

Yes, my Hp has 4GB ECC memory.

My concern was about that this machine has only 4 disks bay, fixed size (2TB) and I don't have enough data to fill them pretty fast... is unRaid wasted?

I need only some services, sharing, torrent and plex (maybe).

Thanks everybody!

 

There are many users using a microserver with unRAID, both gen7 and gen8, as long as it meets your needs it's not wasted.

5 hours ago, ralex_75 said:

Yes, my Hp has 4GB ECC memory.

My concern was about that this machine has only 4 disks bay, fixed size (2TB) and I don't have enough data to fill them pretty fast... is unRaid wasted?

I need only some services, sharing, torrent and plex (maybe).

Thanks everybody!

 

You should be planning for a cache drive (application drive) to run those Dockers.  

Hi tdallen, 

 

at this moment I have two ssd, 120GB SSD and 250GB SSD, for write cache and dockers what should I use?

Maybe in the future i could create some vm but mainly I use this server at home only for media stream and backup my imac data (family photo library and documents),not for working or gaming.

 

Thanks!

Edited March 28, 20179 yr by ralex_75

It depends.  I don't do any write-caching, I find writes directly to the array are fast enough for my needs (and writes are very fast with Turbo Write which spins up all disks).  My Docker image file is 20GB.  Plex needs space on the cache drive that depends on the size of your library.  And downloaders need space to work - and they tend to accumulate junk files that need to be cleaned up periodically.  That said, I've never seen more than 70-80GB of my cache drive in use.  So the 120GB drive would probably work in my case, but 250 is a very safe choice (and the better choice if you want to do write-caching).

I don't know how well Plex will run on a Celeron.  They are single or dual core...so you'll be sharing NAS functions and transcoding on either the same core or maybe one other.  If you have multiple people transcoding at once, that could be problematic.  Would also depend on your clients...Plex should allow them to use hardware decoding if the client supports it (which should reduce CPU usage on your Plex server).  Using a recent Android box as a client would probably work, but a Roku would likely require everything to be transcoded on your Plex server.

Hi all,

I bought a hp microserver Gen8 with 4x 2TB red drives but i'm not sure to go with unraid since I have only 4 bay.
I need to backup family photo raw (and iphoto library), cartoons video and some hd movies from my iMac and download contents using transmission.
I don't think to expand the disks since I have few movies and personal data.
A ZFS solution (like Nas4Free not Freenas) could be better for my needs?
Sorry for my bad english.
 
Thanks in advance,
alex
 

Hi there

I dont know all that much about the mentioned products specifically (or its specifications) but I would advice;
((Assuming you need more storage space and/or possibly want (a slight) performance increase))
(Please do the reseach before purchasing and going for it...asuming "you dont got véry deep pockets" to trow money @ it continuesly)

If the 4 Bay is fast enough and you got a place/system/setup elsewhere (locally or not) to take use and/or advantage of the 2TB drives...
Buy the new Gen/revision 4TB or 6TB drives of the RED series, faster and better I/O performance overall. (If those larger sizes are supported obviously)
(Especially on specific read and write tasks I noticed a performance increase on in depth HDD reviews of the RED series and other drives, media aplications/setups included)

(Info on drives go; Hardware.info NL and then translate with Google translator or other web-page/tool)
They got in dept reviews on 1000's of products...including over 98% of consumer available Seagate and Western Drives. (+99% of RED drives in the series over the year they tested by my knowledge, if not lemme know)


Then If the system with the 4 bays is fast enough you would get some performance increase....if the rest of the hardware can keep up. (More dense so more simultanious reads and writes p/sec...p/action of drive header)

But above all, more storage space. (Which should probably be main goal in scenario, unless you got a fat wallet and can chuck those drives in the closet and not look back)

If you look into large scale/hardware count reviews @ harddrives you will see that they explain every detail and result for those interested or simply not thát knowlegable and wanna learn)...great Folks up in there.
It's a little like LTT dutch version but if you look in correct direction and from the correct angle you will learn a heck of a lot from it.

(Critically viewed/looked @) And your english could indeed use some sork but it aint terrible!, it's wrather ok.
Use it a lot like me and you'll get the hang of it over the years.
(I can even do a little German nowadays...on the good days tho, practice makes perfect as long as you can do it again...you wreck it you fécked) ;-P

Greets Jimmy ;-D
Good luck and pls report back, love to read more from time to time.

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

Yes, my Hp has 4GB ECC memory.
My concern was about that this machine has only 4 disks bay, fixed size (2TB) and I don't have enough data to fill them pretty fast... is unRaid wasted?
I need only some services, sharing, torrent and plex (maybe).
Thanks everybody!
 

Plex servers run on almost anything, but keep in mind...any requested stream or playback must have support for the file formats...
If not no deal but thén it really requires performance, as well as when on fist run/after first setup due to library filling and adding thubnails and icons + missing info.

If file sizes are fully supported on playback device and no conversion(transcoding) is reqeusted by playback...it will perform nicely. (Dunno about FHD video)

Amd further if you like low latency and low load times RAID can help for sure.
(Maybe I am such an audio/media-phile but I seem to be capable of filling 100TB within couple years.

Good luck! [emoji6]

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