About to give UnRaid and test drive, good setup?

[Orcinus]

A friend told me about his UnRaid setup and I wanted to test it out for my self.  I have access to a variety of spare parts to use but wanted to see what people thought before I dove in.

 

I plan to use my setup as a Plex server and for some network shares, and use components of an old tower server with dual quad core processors and 8 GB ram. From what I have read it seems that should be enough for my Plex needs (right?).

 

My biggest concern is about hard drives.  I have a 3 TB green 5400 rpm I plan to use for parity, 1 128 GB

SSD for cache, 2x 1 GB 7200 rpm (I think lol) drives and 2x 500 GB 7200 rpm drives.  Will my parity disk cause a bottle neck?  And would it effect video/transcoding ( I'm guessing it will only effect write speed?)

 

UnRaid seems perfect for the random bits and pieces I have to use.  I will probably need to order a few things like a new power supply or faster parity, so I just wanted to see if this was decent setup before I start building and buying.  I also plan on making some sort of custom case to transplant my components into.

 

Thanks,

[tdallen]

Hello and welcome -

 

It would help if you post the CPU and motherboard in the old tower, but it sounds like some old Xeons (which would be fine).  Also, how much transcoding do you want Plex to do for you (how many streams, what quality)?

 

Your disks are certainly not optimal, but they should be fine to start.  You'll install Dockers like Plex on the SSD cache drive, that's where the transcoding will occur.  You'll want to upgrade your drives over time, but don't stress about "I need a fast parity drive".  New, modern drives like WD Reds or Seagate NAS drives are all ideal for unRAID data and parity drives.  Note that unRAID needs to format drives as you add them to the array - you'll loose the data on them.

[NewDisplayName]

Yes, thats overkill. Depending on what u want to use.

Plex and shares will be no problem, also the drives should be okay.

 

Just take the biggest drive u have for parity. 

 

U rly mean 1gb drives?

 

Ur array speed doesnt really matter since u use a cache drive it will be written to cache first, then to the array, and if that takes longer, that shouldnt bother u.

[Orcinus]

LOL, oops, yea 1 GB drive is a bit small huh?  Thanks for the info though.

 

Due to unforeseen circumstances I fried my 3TB drive, but have 2 1 TB replacement, how do I set the 2nd 1TB as "hot spare" or something in case it's needed?  2nd Parity?
 

When I get close to filling my array I will probably go to a larger parity and figure out other drives etc later.  I have really slowed down my media expansion lately, but UnRaid seems perfect for my little experiment.

 

Thanks again.

 

[tdallen]

unRAID doesn't really have the concept of a hot spare, but you could set a second parity if you want.

[pwm]

Hot spares are most important in a traditional RAID-5, where it is imperative to quickly replace a broken disk and rebuilt before another issue happens that will result in a 100% complete data loss of all information in the RAID.

 

With unRAID, it's way better to use an additional drive as second parity, and make sure that your system is configured to send out a status mail every night to let you know if a disk develops some problems.

[Orcinus]

Alright, good to know.  I will probably do the 2nd Parity for now since the drive is just sitting idle.  I appreciate all the info, my parity sync is nearly complete, and plex is up and running transcoding etc. fine.  I even made a Windows 10 VM for gigles.  

 

Happy UnRaidng

[NewDisplayName]

U can just add it to the pc and under unraid u see the drives as unasigned (you could let them there and with the right plugin also use it) and then, if u need, u just stop array and add it where u want (array = more space, or parity (would help if more then 1 disk dies at the same time)