Multiple drive pools


Marauder

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A feature I’d like is to have multiple drive pools. 

Mom looking to setup a storage drive pool of my sata  drives but then I also want a ‘performance’ drive pool made up of my 4 SSD drives. 

Right now I don’t see a way to do this but this would be helpful for those running vms and other more disk intensive activities. 

 

The multiple pools could also also help people who want different levels of protection of their data. Like no parity on one pool and parity on another. 

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I agree that built-in support would be nice.   It has already been requested as a desireable feature several times and so far no sign of if/when it might happen.

 

In the meantime I believe that you can already do this if you are prepared to do some CLI level work and have the additional pools mounted via the Unassigned Devices plugin 

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2 minutes ago, Marauder said:

That’s what I was thinking of doing. I’m new to unraid so not sure how full fledged the command line is and if I can download additional packages. It didn’t seem like apt or zypper was installed. Forgot to check yum. 

 

There is no package manager with unRAID as it is stripped down to the minimum required to run Unraid.   As Unraid is run from RAM you want to avoid loading anything that is not needed.   However the CLI is a standard bash shell and you should not need any additional packages to achieve multiple pools.   You need to make sure any changes you make will survive a reboot as Unraid is loaded freshly into RAM on each boot so you may need to add some commands into the ‘go’ file (or use the User Scripts plugin) to ensure this happens.

 

Loading additional packages will always have the danger of disturbing core Unraid functionality so should be avoided if possible.   Having said that the are the Nerd Pack and Dev Pack plugins that allow one to select from a variety of commonly requested extras.  Using those plugins will handle reloading them at every boot.   It also tries to make sure that the version of any of the listed packages is correct for the version of Unraid you are running.

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1 hour ago, johnnie.black said:

LT hinted more than once that multiple pools are on the roadmap, but no idea if they are coming soon or not, for now you can use multiple pools (with some limitations) with the help of the UD plugin, more info here:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/?do=findComment&comment=462135

 

I use this. it works, but would be nice for a gui option. Again, thanks Jonnie for setting up these instructions!

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/22/2018 at 4:00 PM, 1812 said:

I use this. it works, but would be nice for a gui option. Again, thanks Jonnie for setting up these instructions!

+1 from me as well.  I've setup a second 'pool' as well following these instructions which has really helped.  But, if the mover could also operate on this second pool it'd be a perfect solution.

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  • 9 months later...
1 hour ago, armsby said:

Missing multi array/pool support is the only thing that stops me from using Unraid, I really need more that one pool now when ssd and NVMe are going down in price and up in size, so it is worth building a set of NVMe and one for spinning disks

That's exactly how many (most) people are currently using unraid. The spinning rust is in the parity array, the SSD devices are in the cache pool.

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1 minute ago, armsby said:

ok, so the cache pool is also static data, it does not get written to the spinning drives as with raid-dp or zfs?

Depends on how the specific share is configured.

 

Shares can be configured to

Cache: Only (write to cache and stay there)

Cache: Yes (write to cache and move to array on schedule, write directly to array if cache free space is below specified minimum)

Cache: No (write to array and stay there)

Cache: Prefer (write to cache and overflow to array when below minimum space, and move back to cache if there is free space when mover is scheduled)

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  • 2 years later...
3 hours ago, workermaster said:

Looks like I misread this topic. I am not looking for more cache pools. I need multiple storage pools. Let's hope that 6.11 will have that then. 

The current multiple pools are not necessarily for cache, you can name them whatever you want. There is no requirement to have a pool named cache, or to cache anything. You can use them in the multiple ways already explained:

On 8/6/2019 at 12:16 PM, JonathanM said:

Depends on how the specific share is configured.

 

Shares can be configured to

Cache: Only (write to cache and stay there)

Cache: Yes (write to cache and move to array on schedule, write directly to array if cache free space is below specified minimum)

Cache: No (write to array and stay there)

Cache: Prefer (write to cache and overflow to array when below minimum space, and move back to cache if there is free space when mover is scheduled)

Each pool can have multiple disks with redundancy if configured as btrfs raid.

 

So, these can indeed be used as multiple storage pools, and many people are using them that way.

 

Multiple parity arrays are under consideration as mentioned.

 

 

 

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