A few Questions before Installing.

[Meathead]

Hey everyone,

 

I have a few questions before I go ahead with installing Unraid. 

I have just gotten a Dual Socket System, Xeon 10 core x 2 E2680 to be exact. What I want to do is have one OS for my gaming and another for work but the hard drive setup is confusing for me as I have other hard drives I don't want to touch that have my personal data on there but I still would like to see them in my OS. If I have them out of the Unraid will they still show up as normal hard drives?

As for the hard drive setup, do I really need a cache drive? As I don't really care about the caching side of things unless it slows things down quite a lot if I don't have one setup.

I really just want a dual boot two Windows 10 OS but not a typical boot I would like to assign my cpus for each OS.

I have two graphics cards one 1050gtx and another 1080gtx I would like to switch them around when I am working on my work and then back to games OS when wanting to game. Is it quite simple to do so? 

Thanks a lot and will be waiting for your replies.

Meathead

[trurl]

4 minutes ago, Meathead said:

If I have them out of the Unraid will they still show up as normal hard drives?

The Unassigned Devices plugin will let you mount and access disks that are not assigned to unRAID.

 

4 minutes ago, Meathead said:

As for the hard drive setup, do I really need a cache drive? As I don't really care about the caching side of things unless it slows things down quite a lot if I don't have one setup.

Cache is the default drive for applications, including dockers and VMs. Many people use an SSD as cache for the performance it gives to their applications. There is no requirement to use cache to cache writes to the array.

[itimpi]

It is not clear to me that you are looking for NAS functionality (which is the prime use for choosing unRAID).    If you simply want to be able to dual boot between two OS why are you think of using unRAID in the first place?

[Meathead]

Just now, itimpi said:

It is not clear to me that you are looking for NAS functionality (which is the prime use for choosing unRAID).    If you simply want to be able to dual boot between two OS why are you think of using unRAID in the first place?

I would like to use unRAID due to is PCI Passthrough and Core Utilization, so I can setup my CPU's to different types of VM Setups. I would use VSphere or VSever if the price was not so damn high, and I would rather support a company that is not so greedy.

Thanks for the info Trurl I will take a deeper dive into it soon.  

[Meathead]

So, I had went out and got two 2tb hard drives and 1 SSD 250GB. I have setup my Unraid with one 2tb as the parity one 2tb as the data and the 250G as the Cache.

Took a few hours to do. Array starts but for some odd reason when I create a Share it just sits at "Starting Services" No plugins installed nothing, a fresh start.

What could cause this problem from a fresh start?

Thanks

[trurl]

Tools - Diagnostics, post complete zip, preferably after problem but before reboot.

[Meathead]

Here is the log file, thanks

tower-diagnostics-20180502-0021.zip

 

So by reading the log it is complaining about my ethernet ports? If needed I have a FritzBox router-modem.

Edited May 2, 2018 by Meathead

[Meathead]

So it claims that the Directory is not there.  

[John_M]

Disk1 is unmountable, with an unsupported partition layout. How did you format it? It needs to be formatted within unRAID before you copy files to it.

 

Your network connection is configured to use mode 4 (802.3ad) link aggregation but your switch is not configured to support it. Either use a managed switch and set it up accordingly or change the mode of your bond. The default setting for networking is safe an "just works".

[Meathead]

11 hours ago, John_M said:

Disk1 is unmountable, with an unsupported partition layout. How did you format it? It needs to be formatted within unRAID before you copy files to it.

 

Your network connection is configured to use mode 4 (802.3ad) link aggregation but your switch is not configured to support it. Either use a managed switch and set it up accordingly or change the mode of your bond. The default setting for networking is safe an "just works".

Thanks, So what I have done is deleted my drives, formatted in Windows and then started a new array. Does the Array also format? As it does say it clears all data on them.

[John_M]

The partition and format needs to be done within unRAID and only certain file systems are supported - the default XFS is the one I'd recommend, unless you have a good reason to choose either of the others. Of course, this will destroy any data on the disk.

[Meathead]

1 hour ago, John_M said:

The partition and format needs to be done within unRAID and only certain file systems are supported - the default XFS is the one I'd recommend, unless you have a good reason to choose either of the others. Of course, this will destroy any data on the disk.

 

Is there a tutorial on formatting the disks I want it to use and how I would do it inside Unraid. Also can I build the Array and then format the Data Disk only to get it to work?

Edited May 3, 2018 by Meathead

[John_M]

Best to start here but the rest of the page is useful too.