Well I have been looking at un-RAID for a while and setup up a basic un-RAID to test. The system was custom built for un-RAID with information from the forums. I am now at the point where I plan to buy a resigstration key and set up the whole shebang, a previous post advised starting wiith 4.0 but this is were I am confused. With all the new betas and stuff you have to do to the un-RAID server would I be better off just using 3.1 and getting my server up and running? The basic test server I made ran fine and was doing everything I needed, which is just a stable media server. What would be the advantages of using 4.0 over 3.1? By the way I only need 8 drives.  Thanks!

 

Well I have been looking at un-RAID for a while and setup up a basic un-RAID to test. The system was custom built for un-RAID with information from the forums. I am now at the point where I plan to buy a registration key and set up the whole shebang, a previous post advised starting with 4.0 but this is were I am confused. With all the new betas and stuff you have to do to the un-RAID server would I be better off just using 3.1 and getting my server up and running? The basic test server I made ran fine and was doing everything I needed, which is just a stable media server. What would be the advantages of using 4.0 over 3.1? By the way I only need 8 drives.  Thanks!

 

I can probably answer this as well as anybody. 

 

The 3.1 release of unRaid uses an older version of Linux.  It did not support a lot of the SATA hardware on more current motherboards.

 

The final 3.1 release is quite stable, is based on version 2.4 of Linux, and will serve you quite well to get started.  It can certainly be used if it supports your motherboard, disks, and network card/interface.

 

Once you do have Linux 3.1 running to upgrade to 4.0 is very very simple.  Only three (I think) files need to be copied from the distribution to the USB flash drive, the system re-booted, and the drives re-assigned to their prior slots.

 

Basic functionality is nearly identical from 3.1 to 4.0.  If you do not need the hardware support from the new drivers in 4.0 unRaid, then start with the 3.1 version and wait till 4.0-final is available before upgrading.  If nothing else, 4.0 should be better performing than the older version of Linux. 

 

Version 4.0 of unRaid is based on version 2.6 of Linux.  You might get the impression from the series of beta releases it is not as stable, however, most of the beta releases were to add support for additional hardware where support was not available for version 2.4 of Linux.    In other words, the newer motherboards have hardware not supported under the older version of Linux and Tom was forced to upgrade to Linux 2.6 to ensure unRaid users could purchase an SATA based motherboard and be successful in setting up an array.  Tom has been  responsive and has been adding drivers as SATA based motherboards are tried with the 4.0 release.

 

In addition to supporting more hardware, unRaid 4.0 ( actually the newer 2.6.20 version of Linux it is built on) fixes an obscure bug where disk drives are reported to be 1056 bytes smaller than their actual size.  If you start adding identical drives and all of a sudden it reports your parity drive is not big enough you might want to use the latest 4.0 beta.  This bug has apparently only shown itself to a handful of users, as Tom has never been able to duplicate it or determine its cause.  The migration to Linux 2.6 has cured this elusive bug.  As people upgrade, some have found their disk sizes growing by 1056 bytes.

 

Recently, in 4.0-beta7, Tom fixed a bug that caused formatted drives to be reported as unformatted.  This might have also been an issue under 3.1 unRaid, but was timing related and could be that it first showed itself under Linux 2.6 because it was faster at some tasks than Linux 2.4.

 

So, to recap... If not yet configured, I might suggest you try 4.0-beta8 (not yet out, but imminent) as it is as easy as 3.1 to configure (nearly identical actually) but if you are already running with 3.1, you can wait till 4.0-final is available.

 

Joe L.

 

 

 

 

Excellent reply Joe.

 

Only thing I'd change is the bug that could cause a formatted drive to show as unformatted was only introduced in 4.0 & is fixed in latest beta.