UnRaid vs WHS

[shawn]

How reliable would you guys say unRaid is in comparison to WHS? A disk failed in my WHS server and it totally destabalized the whole server. Now I have to attempt to reinstall WHS and hope that it will recognize the data disks. So not only did I lose data (duplication not turned on) and I have no idea what files were lost, I have to deal with the server in a coma and who knows if it will revive properly. So I'm a bit tired from the ordeal and am looking at alternatives in the consumer storage server market. I don't like RAID based technology because I've lost data to it before.

[chanders]

Then you'll love unRAID 

 

1. If a disk fails, you can still access the data, even if it is removed from the server!

2. You can rebuild it, by just replacing with a new one

3. No need for duplication

 

And tons of other advantages. Do a search on Google for unRAID wiki, you'll find lots of info. I'm no guru but there are plenty here, I'm sure the'll chime in, I was just first to reply 

[shawn]

I'm interested in the experience by users here who have regularly dealt with drive failures, as opposed to the theoretical features, especially those who have actually used the alternatives: FreeNAS, WHS, Drobo, etc. In theory a drive failure should not affect other disks on WHS either, but here I am. My experience with RAID5 on Ubuntu and WHS is that a drive failure would either instantly or gradually destabalize the server, crashing it even though it's not supposed to. I'm almost coming to the point of believing that any drive in a pool data server environment is at risk, and that the only remedy is multiple redundant copies in offline or at least independent machines.

 

Maybe some of you could describe what drive failures on UnRaid are like. I've already had three disk failures so far this year so I must expect drives to fail constantly.

[neilt0]

I've replaced a drive recently.

 

The drive died -- a red blob appears on the unRAID front end next to the drive (it should be green).

The server continues working, with parity simulating the drive.

I replaced the dead drive with a new one.

 

unRAID rebuilt the drive (about 12 hours in my case).

 

Done.

 

It's pretty straightforward, and does work.

[nia]

I have swapped a few drives while testing, and one recently while upgrading capacity. Essentially it's the same as a drive crashing being replaced.

 

It actually - just - works!  As simple as it is reliable. And so much easier to deal with than any windows stuff I've ever seen. And I even don't know ls from cd in Linux, so it's not because I cheat ... 

[vca]

I'm interested in the experience by users here who have regularly dealt with drive failures, as opposed to the theoretical features...

 

I've been using unRAID for about 2 years now, in that time I've had one real drive failure (which was easily fixed by replacing it and following the instructions) and one "pseudo failure" where a faulty power splitter was causing drives to fail intermittently.  The power splitter was somewhat nasty as it affected two drives at once and I needed to do a file system check and repair, but no data was lost.  If you search the forums you'll find a number of users have had power splitter issues, and while this is not the fault of unRAID its something that tends to affect unRAID users more because it is so easy to expand an unRAID system by adding more drives than your power supply has connectors for...

 

I've also upgraded my array a number of times, I've replaced the old IDE PCI controller cards and drives with SATA controllers and drives as well as upgrading most of my original SATA drives.  unRAID makes this very easy to do and follows the same process as replacing a failed drive.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

[kizer]

I had 2 IDE drives and a Sata drive installed in a test box. Yes you read right 2 IDE's of different sizes and a Sata drive installed and I used one of the home brew scripts here that Joe L put together that does some rather extensive testing on a drive before it is considered safe to use in the Array.

 

Anyways I had a drive that was tested and didn't fair to well. I knew it was short lived, but I went with it anyways. I loaded up a movie on the drive and of course pairity was built. I then installed unMENU with the email plugin.

 

Of course I expected the drive to die and sure enough I received an email from the machine telling me the drive had issues. I removed the drive and installed a new drive. This time I replaced the IDE with a Sata drive and it took a while to rebuild. The array came backup and I attempted to access the movie that I created a short cut on my desktop. Sure enough the movie fired right up as if it never went anywhere.

 

Sure it wasn't gigs or terabytes of data for my little test. As soon as that happened I was sold on the idea of this system and have since purchased a Pro license and have 4 Data drives + parity and growing.

 

If the system doesn't 100% sell it by its self. The support here on the forum should/would/and will.

[poofyhairguy]

Other Advantages of Unraid VS WHS:

 

- With Unraid one parity disk protects all the data on the array. With WHS one disk protects one disk- it uses duplication, not parity. And that sucks.

 

- With Unraid the OS runs off a pen drive, you can use every sata port for disks.

 

- Unraid is based on Linux, which even if you are Windows guy you have to admit "Linux Server" sounds better than "Windows Server."

 

- Unraid can go up to 20 disks, I have never seen a WHS build with more than 8.

 

Advantages of WHS over Unraid:

 

- Built in remote access

 

- Built in Windows support for things like auto backups

 

- (the big one) A better pluggin system. Currently to add stuff to Unraid you have to mess with its Slackware base (and Slackware is HARD. Really hard). This will be fixed in the 5.0 verison of Unraid.

 

[PhilH]

It's all a matter of preference. I have both. I love my WHS & I love my unRaid box. I run 2 unRaid boxes. One Pro version & a free version for my Dad in his Law firm.

 

I use WHS for automated backups of all of the other computers on my network. It has saved my butt a few times. I am using my small PIII unRaid server on my 5 year old sons movies at this time. I am hoping to upgrade this box in the very near future.

 

In regards to the above comment about WHS users not having many drives, just look in my sig. I have 17 not including the boot drive.

 

Both servers have their pros & cons. It just depends on what you want them to do.

 

Phil

[chanders]

- Unraid is based on Linux, which even if you are Windows guy you have to admit "Linux Server" sounds better than "Windows Server."

 

 

[neilt0]

In regards to the above comment about WHS users not having many drives, just look in my sig. I have 17 not including the boot drive.

 

With no parity (or duplication) protection? That's a bit nuts, isn't it? 

 

With duplication protection, it's even more nuts! 

[BRiT]

In regards to the above comment about WHS users not having many drives, just look in my sig. I have 17 not including the boot drive.

 

Impressive for WHS; in unRAID that requires only 9.5 drives (8.5 Data + 1 Parity). This assumes you're using data protection (mirroring) as your 17 drives is whittled down to 8.5 protected drives.

[spasszeit]

I am not going to repeat pros and cons that were already mentioned,

nor am I going to describe my very painless experience of 1 failed disk recovery,

or how easy it is to expand the array or replace a drive with a larger one.

 

I'll just say that I did recently seriously contemplate running a different home server software than unRaid.

The reason was that I had a hard time booting unRaid from a flash drive on my

new hardware purchased for a second unRaid system. I was so frustrated that I started looking at

alternatives for a while. I considered WHS, FlexRaid, FreeNAS, Openfiler and ZFS.

I have to tell you, to me absolutely nothing came even close to unRaid which I have been

using since 2007. It totally satisfies my needs and is very simple to setup and maintain

for a non-Linux-savvy user like myself.

 

My only concern is that if I do lose more than one drive the data on those two drives will be lost.

I have some data that I cannot lose, like family videos in HD. Until recently I had it backed up elsewhere, but since

the size is growing fast, I need another solution. I decided to build a second server which will be located

in a different location and where I will keep duplicates of critical data. In a way, it is similar to

the WHS's duplication, but I don't have to duplicate everything to have some kind of protection. To me unRaid is a much more elegant solution, more stable, feature rich

and over the past three years it did not let me down. I will not go other way unless I absolutely have to.

 

Finally, I just don't think that duplication on WHS is worth much. In a properly protected system (non-fail surge protector,

UPS and good ventilation) a chance of hard drive failure is very small. I had only one failed hard drive in unRaid over the past

3 years, out of 20 drives I am currently running, from which I easily recovered. This tells me that duplication would have been

a total waste of a lot of money. Now, if lightning struck the house or there was a fire or some other disasterous event, the

whole system would have been destroyed, again, that duplication would have been worth nothing in the end.

A more prudent way to use duplication is to set up different servers and keep them as far away from each other as reasonably

possible. Two unRaid servers would do the trick.

[PhilH]

In regards to the above comment about WHS users not having many drives, just look in my sig. I have 17 not including the boot drive.

 

With no parity (or duplication) protection? That's a bit nuts, isn't it?  

 

With duplication protection, it's even more nuts!  

 

I own all of the movies that are on the WHS. I'll just rerip if something goes south. The really important stuff is only about 500gig. I have duplication turned on for that. I also have the same important stuff backed up to my unRaid server. After losing some home movies of my son when I only had them on the unRaid box I'm a little more careful now. 

 

Phil

[ajeffco]

I've gone through a drive failure on WHS when running 2x 1TB drives.  Fortunately for me, the recovery procedure worked, and I didn't lose any data.  When all was said and done, I was back online, with the only pain being having to drive to compusa and get a new drive .

 

However, WHS scares me and annoys the crap out of me, and yet I love it for one simple fact.

 

It scares me when I read other forums, and see all the problems people are having with single drive failures taking out their system completely.

It annoys me because whenever I play media from the WHS "server" (which is a Core2 Duo Desktop HP machine, with 4GB ram), I get a really annoying pause before playing the media.  Doesn't matter if it's music or video, or opening other types of files.  (Vail has seem to have stopped this problem).

And yet, it has saved my butt with the wifes PC and files on more than one occasion, so it is worth every penny and bit of pain that might come with it, as long as it can keep the wife's recipe....err... important data safe.

 

I started looking for another solution to augment WHS due to the startup "lag", and to serve as a backup to WHS in case it cooks completely.  I've looked at opensolaris with zfs (read something the other day that opensolaris is pretty much dead now, thanks Oracle), Nexentastor, openfiler, Ubuntu Server with Samba, openfiler, and unraid.  I installed every one of them, and beat them to death.  The only one that didn't give me ANY grief, was unraid.  I saw a rather intriguing one that I didn't try called Turnkey.

 

I settled on unraid for its simplicity, and from what I read on the forums, "it just works", which proved to be true in the aforementioned testing. 

 

15 years ago, the challenge of making stuff work was fun for me.  Anymore, between my job, and my family, I just want something that works.  And it seems that unraid is it.  here's hoping, since I just bought the plus version .

 

One more thing to add to the WHS vs. unraid list: unraid is cheaper than WHS

[PhilH]

I don't want people to think I prefer WHS over unRaid. It is exactly the opposite. The only problem I had was running 16 drives on the pci bus. Whenever you tried to do a parity check or a rebuild it would take forever.

 

I'm now looking for either a motherboard with a few pci-x slots or a newer board with a couple of pci-e x16 slots. I would prefer the former as I have a couple of the Supermicro 8 port Pci-x sata cards.

 

Then I would relegate the WHS to a much smaller case & a low power cpu just for network backups. I would still put the important stuff on it with duplication, also mirrored on the unRaid box of course.

 

Just wanted to clear that up.. 

 

Phil

[shawn]

A very basic question: in WHS, you create a new folder and new data created in that folder will automatically span across multiple drives as needed, without intervention. Is this the case with UnRaid as well? UnRaid's page about User Shares says something about name conflcits and how the server "keeps the first reference and drops subsequent ones" and I'm not sure what that means in practice.

[boof]

A disk failed in my WHS server and it totally destabalized the whole server.

 

My experience with RAID5 on Ubuntu and WHS is that a drive failure would either instantly or gradually destabalize the server, crashing it even though it's not supposed to.

 

Is this on the same hardware? All of the things you've described should not happen, it points to something else causing the problem in conjunction. If this is on the same hardware likely you may have an issue with unraid too.

 

 

[mvdzwaan]

I just made the transfer from WHS to unraid as it was my only real option as I love the 'one drive pool' feature of WHS which in unRAID are the user shares. Another big pro of both WHS and unraid (apart from what one of the first posts mentions) is the fact you can take any drive, stick it into a pc and access all files stored on it.

 

WHS also allowed me to have a number of usb drives in my storage pool. Although not recommended it has worked without problems for me.

 

Largest benefit for me is I finally have protection on my HD media, and the drives spindown.

 

There are 3 things I'm missing on unRAID

 

* Desktop connector software (currently finalizing my own unraid connector for windows to monitor it's state from the systray)

* Desktop backup with deduplication

* Folder duplication. In the worst possible event on unraid with a failing harddisk you would loose the data on that disk. I would love to see an option with user shares where the file will be stored on 2 drives. When browsing unraid already has the functionality to show these copies as 1 file. I understand unRAID is not an alternative to a backup, but storing for instance the 'photos' user share on 2 disks would be perfect for me.

 

My main worries with unRAID

 

* Second hdd failure while rebuilding. (I've had a powersplitter failure which only occured when doing a parity check, not with intermittent use, so it would have failed on the rebuild of another drive...)

* Linux (so I'll need assistance to fix anything on that level)

* Parity check does not know what's wrong, only if something is wrong.

 

 

[Rajahal]

A very basic question: in WHS, you create a new folder and new data created in that folder will automatically span across multiple drives as needed, without intervention. Is this the case with UnRaid as well? UnRaid's page about User Shares says something about name conflcits and how the server "keeps the first reference and drops subsequent ones" and I'm not sure what that means in practice.

 

Yes, this is true of unRAID as well.  There are many parameters you can change to specify how unRAID spans drives (split level, included/excluded disks, etc.).

 

"keeps the first reference and drops subsequent ones" means that if you have two files with identical names in identical folders on different disks (say, for example, disk1/movies/movie1.avi and disk2/movies/movie1.avi) unRAID will treat the file on the lowest numbered disk as if it were the only copy.  So if you were to browse to your 'movies' user share and play 'movie1.avi', the movie on disk1 would play and the movie on disk2 would be unaffected.  unRAID will effectively ignore the second movie file, it will not delete it.

 

Desktop connector software (currently finalizing my own unraid connector for windows to monitor it's state from the systray)

 

There have been many requests for this, so definitely keep us appraised if you get something working!

 

Desktop backup with deduplication

 

Many people have had success with Crashplan.

 

Folder duplication. In the worst possible event on unraid with a failing harddisk you would loose the data on that disk. I would love to see an option with user shares where the file will be stored on 2 drives. When browsing unraid already has the functionality to show these copies as 1 file. I understand unRAID is not an alternative to a backup, but storing for instance the 'photos' user share on 2 disks would be perfect for me.

 

I believe there is an add-on or script that does this.  Or if not, you could probably accomplish it with rsync or similar.

[shawn]

Is this on the same hardware? All of the things you've described should not happen, it points to something else causing the problem in conjunction. If this is on the same hardware likely you may have an issue with unraid too.

 

They were on different hardware but yes I think the hardware is suspect in either case. Earlier I thought the drive was bad but I tried it again on a PC and fortunately it still runs ok. I'm trying to get a hold of Acer, the supplier of my WHS hardware. Apparently one of the slots always causes problems for the drives.

 

So maybe all of the OS are ok but I'm just an unlucky person whose equipment meet their demise quickly. In the case of Acer a problem may be heat, but I was just running the factory prepared machine without modification so that could be a design flaw.