January 3, 20188 yr 1. How would unRAID handle bitrot and data corruption? 2. Do you really need a GPU if you only plan on using it for storage and nothing else? 3. Can you add a password so that only one person can access the share for the storage? 4. Is there encryption for the drives? What type of encryption is it using? 5. Will I be able to take out one drive and attach it to a different system running Linux and use it? If there is encryption on unRAID, would I be able to unlock it on a different system? Thanks
January 3, 20188 yr Community Expert 13 minutes ago, bob291 said: 2. Do you really need a GPU if you only plan on using it for storage and nothing else? unRAID does not include any automatic recovery from bitrot. The assumption is that in practice bitrot that is not detected at the drive hardware level is very rare and if it does happen you recover any corrupted files from your backups. If you use BTRFS as the file system then bitrot can be auto-detected but not fixed. XFS and Reiserfs do not auto-detect bitrot. There is the File Integrity plugin that can add check-summing to XFS systems to help detect bitrot (but you still need backups to recover from it). 13 minutes ago, bob291 said: 3. Can you add a password so that only one person can access the share for the storage? Yes. Using the SMB security modes you can control who has read and/or write access. 13 minutes ago, bob291 said: 4. Is there encryption for the drives? What type of encryption is it using? Encryption is a new feature being introduced as part of the 6.4 release. I suggest you read the release notes for more details. 13 minutes ago, bob291 said: 5. Will I be able to take out one drive and attach it to a different system running Linux and use it? If there is encryption on unRAID, would I be able to unlock it on a different system? Unencrypted array drives can definitely be removed and read on any Linux system. If you have a cache 'pool' consisting of multiple drives I am not sure if this special case you can handle the drives individually or have to treat them as a unit (but normally one is asking the question in the context of array data drives). I have no experience of doing this with encrypted drives but since standard Linux based encryption is being used I would be very surprised if it cannot be done. Someone else can probably confirm this.
January 3, 20188 yr 32 minutes ago, bob291 said: If there is encryption on unRAID, would I be able to unlock it on a different system? Yes. unRAID makes use of LUKS and as long as the key to unlock is known, it can be used on a different system also supporting LUKS.
January 3, 20188 yr Author Thanks for the fast replies. I had no idea it's possible to use BTRFS with unRAID, I thought the filesystem is experimental and somewhat unstable? I'd love to use something like RAID6 with BTRFS, is there support for it yet? Also I'm completely fine with restoring corrupt data from backups, but having something that detects a corrupt file or mismatch in hash as soon as it happens is what I'm after... Edited January 3, 20188 yr by bob291
January 3, 20188 yr Most of the issues with BTRFS have been with hardware RAID. Quite a few of us have been using BTRFS on our arrays in unRAID without issues so I would say its stable on a software RAID platform like unRAID. So something close to RAID 6 under unRAID would be having two parity drives, but you have to be careful because you can't compare hardware RAID to unRAID. With hardware RAID parity is striped across all the drives, this is not the case with unRAID. If parity fails and you lose a drive in unRAID, you only lose the data on that drive, not everything which is the case with hardware RAID. If you are truly after protecting yourself from bitrot and you want the performance of hardware RAID then you might want to look into ZFS.
January 3, 20188 yr Author One of the many reasons why I want to avoid using ZFS is because of the fact that it is impossible to expand the pool/array with single drives, which is something you can do just fine in unRAID. When you talk about hardware RAID, do you mean a SAT/SATA controller, like the M1015? Also I exaggerated a little bit in my earlier post, I'm only looking for a way for corrupted files or hashes that mismatches to get reported immediately.
January 3, 20188 yr Community Expert 4 minutes ago, bob291 said: I'm only looking for a way for corrupted files or hashes that mismatches to get reported immediately. You can have that with btrfs, it just can't fix them because each unRAID data disk is a separate filesystem. IMO, btrfs is almost as stable as xfs for single device use, i.e., data disk use, stable enough for raid1/10 usage in the cache pool, but it can require some maintenance like regular balances. etc, and it can still act up if one of the devices drops and rejoins the pool, raid5/6 though much better in later kernels still has some issues and should be avoided.
January 3, 20188 yr I think your best bet then is to go with unRAID and use BTRFS, as long as you have a backup (which you should) then you can restore and files that get corrupted due to bit rot.
January 3, 20188 yr You are getting confused, there are no 'setups' unRAID utilizes JBOD all the disks in your server become part of the the array. This is software RAID, so no RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 etc. You choose a file system for all your drives, so they are all XFS or BTRFS, with the exception of your cache drive, it can be different from your array drives, it doesn't have to be the same. Edited January 3, 20188 yr by ashman70
January 3, 20188 yr Author Would two 8TB parity drives with three 8TB drives work in unRAID? If one drive fails, would I only have to replace the drive and unRAID takes care of the rest (rebuilding the data etc)? With BTRFS* Edited January 3, 20188 yr by bob291
January 3, 20188 yr As @ashman70 notes - unRAID will use each data disk as if it was a single disk from the perspective of the file systems. It's just that unRAID inserts itself under the individual file systems at the block level to be able to filter all writes and on every file system change compute updated parity information for the parity drives. So BTRFS will not know that there exists any parity drive. Each disk with BTRFS will behave as if it is 100% a single disk.
January 3, 20188 yr 2 minutes ago, bob291 said: Would two 8TB parity drives with three 8TB drives work in unRAID? If one drive fails, would I only have to replace the drive and unRAID takes care of the rest (rebuilding the data etc)? With BTRFS* Yes - with two parity drives, any two drives of the array can fail and unRAID will be able to rebuild the content based on the content of the remaining disks. If a third drive fails, then all repair functionality is off, and any data disk failed will result in data loss. And you can have different file systems for the different data disks - unRAID works on the block level and not on the file system level.
January 3, 20188 yr 11 minutes ago, bob291 said: What type of BTRFS setups are there for unRAID? Just RAID0 and RAID1? BTRFS RAID options are only available on the unRAID cache pool, not the unRAID storage array.
January 3, 20188 yr Author Oh how well does unRAID handle these type of things? Would I just have to replace the drive and the software takes care of it after I plug in the new drive? Also how do I check if there are hash mismatches in the GUI? edit: I see, so only the cache pool. Any news when it'll be available for the storage array? Edited January 3, 20188 yr by bob291
January 3, 20188 yr 20 minutes ago, bob291 said: Oh how well does unRAID handle these type of things? Would I just have to replace the drive and the software takes care of it after I plug in the new drive? Also how do I check if there are hash mismatches in the GUI? edit: I see, so only the cache pool. Any news when it'll be available for the storage array? When what will be available? unRAID already supports BTRFS for the data disks in the array. unRAID itself works under BTRFS for parity processing. You would not want a RAID5/RAID6 where the RAID is handled by BTRFS because there are lots of remaining bugs in the BTRFS RAID code. Which isn't a problem with unRAID since you will not use the BTRFS RAID5/RAID6 code in the array - just the single-disk code.
January 7, 20188 yr Author Gonna have to bump up the thread as I have one more question. How reliable is the checksum plugin? Will it add a new hash to the list when a new is added or moved around the directory? Does it get rid of the hash when the file gets deleted? Or would I have to run the plugin to collect the hashes? and would it be able to export the checksum so that it can be used on a different filesystem to check for the files integrity?
January 7, 20188 yr It stores the hash as an extended attribute together with the file. It can export a list if you want it to. Note that all the different plugins have their own support threads, where you can find more information.
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