My unraid experience so far and reco for tweaks

[tiwing]

I'm about 3 years into unraid. Never had 5.x installed, always had 6.x server. So far experience has been awesome. Flawless except for when I screwed up things myself. Looking for suggestions and things I might have missed.

 

Primary server

consists of 5 misc drives of 4, 3, and 2tb for a 10tb array + single parity. 256GB dual cache drives, no unassigned devices. 24GB EEC ram. 1 VM running on cache, Plex and handbrake in dockers, and about 4TB of media. Drives are a mix of 1 and 3 years old. Server is lightly used in a home environment. Parity set to calculate monthly.

 

Shares - appdata, cachedisk, system, docker, and vm  cache=prefer. media (contains all movies, music) cache=no. All other shares (personal files) cache=yes. Mover set to run every 6 hours. local user logins are matched on the server for user ID and PW, and all share are explicitly set to secure or private depending on need. Sensitive shares are set to hidden export.

 

only one VM exists and is on cache disk and manages all backups and is my torrent downloader. VM runs 24/7. 

 

Plex uses /tmp for transcoding

 

installed plugins: trash bin, krusader, community applications, activestreams, ssd trim, proftpd, dynamix schedules

 

Offsite Backup server

is 3 drives for 6tb + single parity and will grow as the primary space fills up. 12GB ram. No cache drives since this is a backup server. But Plex, handbrake, and a copy of the VM are on the array (not running) in case they're needed in a pinch until my primary server can be saved - I can handle slow writes and parity drive going nuts for a few days. Backup is a combination of daily and weekly managed by the windows 10 VM of all files. Server is currently accessible through a point to point vpn, but is being moved to a bridged wifi connection in my neighbors basement.

 

Local backup

4TB USB drive attached to my router - nightly backups managed by windows 10 VM of all NON-media

 

Things I messed up:

- installed original unraid server on a PARTITIONED usb thumb drive. duh. still haven't figured that one out but that server is stuck at v 6.5.0 until I clear space on the drive. That's actually this afternoon's project.

- when I took the cache drives out of my backup server I lost all my dockers in the GUI, but configs were still there on the array so a quick install and they came back. 

- I messed around with unassigned devices, but never got it working right and figured everything should be protected anyhow.

 

But my experience has been awesome so far. Very glad I made the switch from freenas to unraid - seems like it was the right time, and have never looked back.

 

So - what can I do better? what have I missed?

 

cheers

Tiwing

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[dukiethecorgi]

Unattached devices are handy, sometimes you want a disk for a specific purpose so it makes no sense to have it in the array.  For instance, I have a 250gb SSD that I use for downloads and extracting downloads because otherwise my cache disks slow to a crawl, and I rather have a cheap SSD take all the R/W cycles instead of my Samsung SSD