Would like to make the move to unRAID, just a few general questions


gooner_47

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Hi all, I have an old machine which I no longer have a use for, would like to repurpose it as a NAS, media server, and usenet download box. Been reading a lot about the best OS to use, and keep coming back to unRAID. Just had a few general questions before I jump in fully...

 

The spec of the (very old!) machine is a Core 2 Duo 6600 2.4GHz, 6 GB RAM. Will unRAID run fine on this hardware? I will want to stream 4K movies over the network, but they'll be to an Apple TV 4K - so no transcoding required.

 

I have an old WD green 6TB. Is this going to be suitable for either a data or parity disk? I know it's not a NAS specific drive (e.g. WD red), but does this matter to unRAID?

 

I know the parity drive has to be equal to or bigger than all the rest of the drives... should I just bite the bullet and get a 14TB drive for this purpose - increasing my options for expansion in future? Or is this something which can be upgraded easily in future?

 

I have an old Samsung 840 Evo 250GB which I was going to use as a cache disk. At the moment it has a Windows installation on it. Do I need to wipe/prepare this drive before I begin to use it with unRAID? Or will the OS format this for me?

 

Can I use the box as a Time Machine target for backing up my Macbook Pro?

 

Is it possible to automate uploading the entire contents of the array to a cloud service for backup purposes?

 

That's all I can think of right now! Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can give.

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I've got one of my backup unraid boxes running that same CPU, it runs ok, but don't expect miracles. Direct play of media files should be fine.

 

Unraid doesn't care what type of disk you use, NAS or not, only that the entire media is good. Windows doesn't really care if blank space on the disk is bad, so a disk that ran fine on windows can cause issues in unraid. Make sure any disks you put in the array at LEAST pass a long smart test, I'd run the WD diagnostic suite on that drive and make sure it passes all the tests with no issues.

 

Whenever you are buying new disks, buy the largest drive that makes financial sense at the time. First consideration is $$/TB, but keep in mind physical slots have a cost too, running out of ports or physical space or power supply capacity all are not insignificant costs, so overall it can be cheaper per TB to buy a little large. Don't overbuy total capacity though, a good rule of thumb on mid size arrays (10-20 disks) is to always keep free an amount equal to your largest single disk. Keeping more disks in the array than you are going to need capacity wise is wasteful and risky, as even totally empty drives have to be read completely flawlessly end to end to reconstruct a failed drive. Parity doesn't reconstruct files, it deals with raw drives regardless of content.

 

As a general rule, any drive that will be introduced into an unraid array will be wiped and or formatted before the array can use it. Once it's set up in unraid, it can be read by any OS with proper file system support (not windows) or moved to another unraid setup intact if you follow instructions. By default unraid assumes replacement drives should be overwritten with the replaced drives partition, and new additions should be completely overwritten with zeroes.

 

Time machine support is tricky. Apple is an even harder target than Microsoft for 3rd party compatibility, some have gotten time machine to work, some struggle, ymmv.

 

Cloud backup is possible, but for many scenarios, it's not practical. The upload speed of your internet, the total bytes capacity, and the speed of your cloud provider all conspire to make it difficult.

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The cool thing about unraid is, that you can do everything with it. U can run other OSes or even other unraids on that box.... all depends on your hardware tho.

 

I only have 

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-4370 CPU @ 3.80GHz (before i had dualcore 2,4ghz - was also running fine)

 

and its running very good, you  only need enaught ram (i just bought another) i startet with 4gb, then 16gb and now i ordered 32gb.

 

More things you want to run: more ram... CPU is probably not the bottleneck.

 

You can add hardware as you like anytime.

 

You dont need to do anything to drives before, unraid will do that, but some ppl say you should use preclear plugin. (i never used that tho)

Edited by nuhll
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2 hours ago, gooner_47 said:

I have an old WD green 6TB. Is this going to be suitable for either a data or parity disk? I know it's not a NAS specific drive (e.g. WD red), but does this matter to unRAID?

 

I know the parity drive has to be equal to or bigger than all the rest of the drives... should I just bite the bullet and get a 14TB drive for this purpose - increasing my options for expansion in future? Or is this something which can be upgraded easily in future?

There are 2 ways to interpret what you said about the size of parity so let me say it in another way to make sure you understand things correctly.

 

Parity must be as large or larger than ANY SINGLE data disk in the array. It doesn't need to be as large as ALL the drives combined. Some people don't understand how parity works, and seem to think the parity disk contains a backup of all the other disks. Parity plus ALL the other disks allow the data for a missing disk to be calculated. Here is a wiki about parity:

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Overview#Parity-Protected_Array

 

Whether or not any specific drive is suitable depends on its health, whether old or new. As you can see from the way parity works, every bit of every disk in the array must be reliably read to reliably reconstruct every bit of a missing disk. So, just any old disk might not be suitable. It depends on its health. WD has free downloads of disk testing software and other methods of testing are also available.

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Thanks for the replies. Certainly not expecting blistering performance! Then again, for a NAS I don’t think that matters too much.

 

Understood about drive health, I will boot back up into Windows and run the WD diagnostic tool on it. While I’m in there I’ll use the Samsung tool to check the SSD health too.

 

I understood about the parity drive, didn’t phrase it very well. Thank you for double checking this with me. The only reason I mentioned a 14TB drive is to allow the possibility of adding drives of up to 14TB in the future. Although if I were to start with a 6TB parity drive, and decide at some point in the future I want to start using larger hard drives - is it possible to upgrade it?

 

“any drive that will be introduced into an unraid array will be wiped and or formatted before the array can use it”

 

Fairly certain I understand you on this, but just want to be absolutely sure... are you saying when I tell unRAID to use the ssd as a cache drive, it will wipe/format it for me? i.e. i don’t need to do any preparation before adding it?

 

thsnks again

 

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1 minute ago, gooner_47 said:

are you saying when I tell unRAID to use the ssd as a cache drive, it will wipe/format it for me? i.e. i don’t need to do any preparation before adding it?

It will try its best to format it. There are some edge cases where that fails, and for an SSD there are commands to wipe the drive quickly, I can't remember the exact syntax off the top of my head.

 

Found it.

 

 

5 minutes ago, gooner_47 said:

Although if I were to start with a 6TB parity drive, and decide at some point in the future I want to start using larger hard drives - is it possible to upgrade it?

Very easy.

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I started my unRAID journey with the following.

 

1.7Ghz Pentium 4

4Gb Ram

(1) 10Gb Drive

(2) 8Gb Drives

 

Over the course of many years I've swapped out every drive multiple times and the Processor/Ram/MotherBoard 3X until I'm at now which you can see in my Signature. 😀 I started small as you can from 16Gb to now 17.6TB just so I could beat up the OS some and see if it was what I really wanted. I wouldn't use anything else for a NAS now. 

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