rmp5s Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 (edited) I'm going to be running unRAID on an HP Proliant DL360e G8 (12core/24thread dual Xeons, 64GB RAM, 4 HDDs for 20TB+). For now, it is going to be used to run a few Windows VMs...one to run Blue Iris for my security cams, one to run Plex and another for rendering videos and archiving photos and videos. But...I was wondering: I have a p420 RAID card and was planning on creating a RAID10 volume with that, then presenting this volume to unRAID so it can divvy up the space and allocate it to the VMs. Would it be better to present the drives to unRAID and let it create the RAID volume? Redundancy is of the utmost priority. This is going to be used to back up photo and video archives. Any pros and cons to do it one way or the other? Thanks! Edited December 28, 2018 by rmp5s Quote Link to comment
Can0n Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 (edited) just send the drives out as JBOD or independent disks. assign 2 for parity and you got your redundancy allowing you to lose any two drives without losing any content. you are over complicating it by using a raid card. Edited December 28, 2018 by Can0nfan Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted December 28, 2018 Author Share Posted December 28, 2018 4 minutes ago, Can0nfan said: just send the drives out as JBOD or independent disks. assign 2 for parity and you got your redundancy allowing you to lose any two drives without losing any content. you are over complicating it by using a raid card. So, just give the drives to unRAID. And benefit to doing it this way over using the hardware RAID controller? Quote Link to comment
Can0n Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 i heard there are lots of issues running hardware RAID behind unRAID since unraid needs full unrestricted access to the disks.... just plug the drives into a sata connection/sata card and unRAID will see them..use a SSD for caching and sell the hardware raid card if you plan on using unRAID....I have been using it for about 3 years and its solid...my system with 12 3.5" drives can peak at 100MB/sec in usage with no real issues. my 2.5" drives in my other system are running far slower even using the same RAID card in IT mode and the same SFF-8087 cables to the backplane but its a different backplane so i suspect thats the issue. Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted December 28, 2018 Author Share Posted December 28, 2018 1 hour ago, Can0nfan said: i heard there are lots of issues running hardware RAID behind unRAID since unraid needs full unrestricted access to the disks.... just plug the drives into a sata connection/sata card and unRAID will see them..use a SSD for caching and sell the hardware raid card if you plan on using unRAID....I have been using it for about 3 years and its solid...my system with 12 3.5" drives can peak at 100MB/sec in usage with no real issues. my 2.5" drives in my other system are running far slower even using the same RAID card in IT mode and the same SFF-8087 cables to the backplane but its a different backplane so i suspect thats the issue. Ah yes. Good point. Didn't think about that. Out comes the RAID card!! Thanks. 1 Quote Link to comment
Can0n Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 5 minutes ago, rmp5s said: Ah yes. Good point. Didn't think about that. Out comes the RAID card!! Thanks. please mark as solved now so others in future can see this....cheers Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted December 28, 2018 Author Share Posted December 28, 2018 1 minute ago, Can0nfan said: please mark as solved now so others in future can see this....cheers I'm sure I'm going to find it as soon as I post this, but where do I go to mark it as solved? Quote Link to comment
Can0n Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 Just now, rmp5s said: I'm sure I'm going to find it as soon as I post this, but where do I go to mark it as solved? the subject should read (Solved) RAID first or RAID with unRAID? Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted December 28, 2018 Author Share Posted December 28, 2018 1 minute ago, Can0nfan said: the subject should read (Solved) RAID first or RAID with unRAID? Done. Thanks again. Quote Link to comment
Can0n Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 12 minutes ago, rmp5s said: Done. Thanks again. you're welcome Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted December 28, 2018 Share Posted December 28, 2018 4 hours ago, rmp5s said: Redundancy is of the utmost priority. This is going to be used to back up photo and video archives. I'm unclear on what you are saying. If this is the second physical location that has your photos and videos, great! If you are counting on unraid to be a backup itself, NO. You need a backup. Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 On 12/28/2018 at 3:09 PM, jonathanm said: I'm unclear on what you are saying. If this is the second physical location that has your photos and videos, great! If you are counting on unraid to be a backup itself, NO. You need a backup. No. This is going to be the main archive. There will be another off-site. I just don't want a drive dying to completely screw the thing. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 4 minutes ago, rmp5s said: No. This is going to be the main archive. There will be another off-site. I just don't want a drive dying to completely screw the thing. Cool. As long as you have the data physically elsewhere. Drives dying are only one small percentage of data loss causes, especially with unraid running good hardware. I see MANY more instances of direct user or configuration errors causing data loss. Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 Just now, jonathanm said: Cool. As long as you have the data physically elsewhere. Drives dying are only one small percentage of data loss causes, especially with unraid running good hardware. I see MANY more instances of direct user or configuration errors causing data loss. Yup. For sure. "RAID is not a backup", as the saying somewhat goes. What RAID options are there, anyway? It doesn't do the usual 0, 1, 5, 10, etc types of RAID, does it? I'll be running 4 drives. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 2 minutes ago, rmp5s said: Yup. For sure. "RAID is not a backup", as the saying somewhat goes. What RAID options are there, anyway? It doesn't do the usual 0, 1, 5, 10, etc types of RAID, does it? I'll be running 4 drives. For the main array, Unraid with single or dual parity is the only option. For the cache pool, any valid BTRFS RAID mode can be used. Unraid is not RAID, each disk has a valid partition all to itself, nothing is striped. The parity information is only on the parity drive(s), not spread across the drives. Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 Just now, jonathanm said: For the main array, Unraid with single or dual parity is the only option. For the cache pool, any valid BTRFS RAID mode can be used. Unraid is not RAID, each disk has a valid partition all to itself, nothing is striped. The parity information is only on the parity drive(s), not spread across the drives. Interesting. Hence the "un" in "unRAID", I suppose. Got a link to more info on this? Fault tolerance is important to me. I've had BAD bad times with RAID in the past...lol Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 (edited) 5 minutes ago, jonathanm said: For the main array, Unraid with single or dual parity is the only option. For the cache pool, any valid BTRFS RAID mode can be used. Unraid is not RAID, each disk has a valid partition all to itself, nothing is striped. The parity information is only on the parity drive(s), not spread across the drives. So far, I've found this. Any other info is greatly appreciated. My last drive will be here in a couple days...I'm preparing for the setup. Trying to plan a bit. "In addition, by eliminating the use of traditional RAID-based technologies, we can scale on-demand by adding more drives and without needing to rebalance existing data." THAT is friggin epic. Edited January 4, 2019 by rmp5s Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 https://wiki.unraid.net/Parity Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 Just now, jonathanm said: https://wiki.unraid.net/Parity Beautimous. Thank you, friend. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 1 minute ago, rmp5s said: And, "In addition, by eliminating the use of traditional RAID-based technologies, we can scale on-demand by adding more drives and without needing to rebalance existing data." THAT is friggin epic. Which is why so many of us use Unraid. It's that good. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 The link you posted is actually more up to date. The unraid team is rather small, they spend most their time on the software and not the docs.🙄 Quote Link to comment
Squid Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 5 minutes ago, rmp5s said: I've had BAD bad times with RAID in the past In my mind (and what was the deciding factor for me when I purchased) was that unlike any other RAID system, if you exceed the tolerance allowed (ie: more than 2 drives go down), you will NOT lose everything (like you would on a RAID). Rather, you only loose some. TBH, I don't understand why anyone would want to take the chance of losing everything vs only losing part in the worst case scenario. Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 8 minutes ago, jonathanm said: Which is why so many of us use Unraid. It's that good. Yea, looking forward to getting this all set up. Seems like it's the best of many worlds. Kinda of a dream come true...hypervisor AND NAS in one? Sold!! 7 minutes ago, jonathanm said: The link you posted is actually more up to date. The unraid team is rather small, they spend most their time on the software and not the docs.🙄 Oh ok, cool. I'll check it out. 6 minutes ago, Squid said: In my mind (and what was the deciding factor for me when I purchased) was that unlike any other RAID system, if you exceed the tolerance allowed (ie: more than 2 drives go down), you will NOT lose everything (like you would on a RAID). Rather, you only loose some. TBH, I don't understand why anyone would want to take the chance of losing everything vs only losing part in the worst case scenario. Yea, the issues I've had in the past were usually related to errors in the RAID controller itself killing the array. Had it happen to me a couple times and I swore off software RAID. "Fool me once", right? Quote Link to comment
rmp5s Posted January 4, 2019 Author Share Posted January 4, 2019 16 minutes ago, rmp5s said: "In addition, by eliminating the use of traditional RAID-based technologies, we can scale on-demand by adding more drives and without needing to rebalance existing data." This was a big unknown for me...awesome to see that that works the way I was hoping it would. Now I wonder, though...what happens if you add a drive that already contains data? Is there a way to keep it? If I have 3 drives in the array and add a 4th that has data, is there a way to have unRAID add that data to the array, then add the disk? And, is it possible to migrate the entire array to new hardware? Like, what would happen if I took all the drives and the boot thumbdrive out of my server and put them all in another server? Would it work? It says unRAID is "hardware agnostic"...is it THAT hardware agnostic? If it is...my God, this would be the most amazing thing ever. lol Quote Link to comment
Squid Posted January 4, 2019 Share Posted January 4, 2019 (edited) 9 minutes ago, rmp5s said: what happens if you add a drive that already contains data? If the array is already existing, then unRaid will want to clear the drive (zero it out) resulting in loss of all data on that drive. IF the drive is already formatted with a support FS and the correct partition scheme, there is a workaround, but generally its easier to simply mount the drive with the data already on it and copy its contents over to another drive already in the array and then add it in afterwards. 9 minutes ago, rmp5s said: And, is it possible to migrate the entire array to new hardware? Like, what would happen if I took all the drives and the boot thumbdrive out of my server and put them all in another server? Would it work? It says unRAID is "hardware agnostic"...is it THAT hardware agnostic? I've done it many times. No problems. I can't even be bothered anymore to take a screenshot of my drive assignments "just in case" Quote If it is...my God, this would be the most amazing thing ever. lol Its not "this would be", but rather "this IS" Edited January 4, 2019 by Squid Quote Link to comment
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