Taking my storage off WHS and moving it to UnRaid

[showson1]

Sorry, this is a big long but might be good for new users who are considering unRAID and may have the same thoughts I've been having.

 

Ok, so I've been using WHS for a little over a year now (I think) and, to be honest, I haven't had an issues with my data.

My wife and I have all our shared documents, all the music I've ripped, all the DVDs/Bluerays I've ripped, all our photos, etc.. on there.

 

We are using WHS server as our media center storage and I ALSO record live TV on there and serve it up (through a SageTV extender) to two rooms in the house.

 

OK, so with all that stuff going on the WHS slows WAY down from time to time, so much so that we either can't watch movies/tv or even connect to SageTV.

After some research it looks like it's a combination of the processing used to record the TV and the processing (and length of time) involved with the file structure that's used on WHS.

 

Because of that, and the fact that all the desktops in my house are either Mac or Linux (WHS is the only Windows box), I've decided to move my storage out to an external NAS and use the WHS as a SageTV server only.

 

I've been doing a TON of research on different hardware and software NAS.

I quickly ruled out the hardware NAS as the consumer ones appeared to be slow (compared with a DYI one) and ones with good performance are expensive.

 

Plus I had an extra machine, so Software NAS it is.

I've been looking at UnRAID, FreeNAS, NasLite, OpenFiler and... uhh... some other software that the name escapes me now.

 

After a lot of playing around I narrowed it down to FreeNAS and UnRAID.

I like the concept of FreeNAS, but it's just not right. There's SO much in there, some of it I'll never use, and no matter what I do I can not get a transfer rate I'm happy with over Gigabit.

Plus for storage expansion, the best you can do is create a ZFS pool and add storage to that to increase it, if you wanted to swap storage or recover from lost data it's a PAIN!

 

I LOVED the concept of unRAID, easy to change the size of your storage, cached drive to increase access, etc.

The problem I had with unRAID is that it didn't have a lot of the features that I DID like about FreeNAS and seemed kind of limited... or so I thought.

 

I've been digging a little deeper into it and reading about all the scripts and packages that the community has built for it and WOW, I'm amazed at how much can be done with this system.

Maybe not out of the box, but with not too much tweaking it seems.

 

I've only messed with the free version (no user security and only 3 disks) but I'm going to play with it some more tonight / this weekend and add some of the add-on stuff and will most likely be purchasing a license in the next few days.

 

FreeNAS is nice, and free, but just feels like someone's project and not a great option for a straight storage system.

I really didn't want to shell out the money for the unRAID license, but if everything works as advertised, I'll be pulling out the credit card.

 

[kizer]

I was sorta skeptical about unRAID until two nights ago. I threw in 3 old junky drives on a machine that is questionable. Did the following and I was sold.

 

Built the array

Created a mapped drive of G to my unRAID server

Placed a 720p quality file on disk1 which was G for all practical purposes

Played the file and it worked very well.

I then disconnected Disk 1 from the array

Clicked on G and played the 720p file and it played just fine.

 

When I saw that I was giddy as all could be. I mean I used some junk I had laying around the house and more or less built something that can/will protect TB's of data for free. Like you I only brought down the Free version and I do require user accounts so I will be picking up the Plus version for starters.

 

I put the removed drive back in and it rebuilt the array and I was right back where I was before I pulled the drive. Simply amazing.

[poofyhairguy]

I agree Kizer that Unraid's technical merits are what makes it so awesome. You do a little a research and you discover that RAID 5/6 is overkill for media (price-wise), but something like WHS wastes a lot of data with duplication.

 

Unraid is basically the only safe way to have a 20 disk array with only one parity disk. That alone makes it worth the money...

[Blofeld]

Totally agree.

Once you'de done your research, UnRAID looks better and better.

Just started building my server, and once (if! I got it running, I'll fork out for two PRO licences - it leaves me the most room to grow, and an additional reserve for not much more money, so it makes sense.

Does anyone know, by the way, how long I can wait with registering the second USB stick? Could I theoretically leave the 2nd license dormant for, say, a year, before I activate it?

[Rajahal]

Does anyone know, by the way, how long I can wait with registering the second USB stick? Could I theoretically leave the 2nd license dormant for, say, a year, before I activate it?

 

As far as I know there is no time limit on activating your second key.