unRAID Capabilities


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Hello everyone. I am looking at implementing a setup of unRAID for a local business near me. I have used the system for about 2 years now at home and there are still a few things that I am not sure about. 

 

1. Hypothetically, if you have a 1TB cache drive, and 8TB of data array storage available.... and are uploading a 2TB file to a cached share, how does unRAID handle the lack of space on the cache? Does it skip the cache and write to the array? Does it write to the cache until full then swap over to the array? Etc.

 

2. Suppose I want to run an OS router solution such as pfSense or vyOS as a virtual machine on the unRAID platform. Will unRAID be able to handle this or is it out of its league?

 

Thanks for any support or answers I can receive.

 

-DaemonHunter

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1).  At this point Unraid has no idea of the files size, it just knows that a request to open a new file has arrived.   UnRaid will select a drive according to the Minimum Free Space Settings for the Cache (under Settings->Global Share Settings) and the Share (under the share’s Settings).    If the file then later turns out to be too large to fit on the selected drive the file write will fail when the free space is exhausted..   In other words there is no automatic fall-over to another drive.

 

The normal way to avoid this is to set the Minimum Free Space setting to be at least as large as the largest file you will write.   That way Unraid can select a drive that meets those criteria and if no drive does will fail the write immediately.   In you hypothetical example where the file is larger than the cache drive there is no safe solution if the Share is set to use the cache.    Even if set to ‘not use the cache 2TB would be almost certainly be an Unreasonable setting for the Minimum Free Space setting as it would mean you could not fill the drive anywhere near its capacity without manual intervention.

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12 hours ago, DaemonHunter said:

I am looking at implementing a setup of unRAID for a local business near me

While I applaud your initiative to give this a try, I STRONGLY suggest you not do it. Unraid is great for basic NAS duty in a business, as long as there is someone on staff to keep up with the maintenance. Relying on it for 24/7/365 uptime for services like VM's and dockers is not a good idea.

 

I personally run pfSense as a VM on Unraid, and 99.9% of the time, it just works, and is great. However... there is no way I could recommend selling that combination as a turnkey set it and forget it to a local business. It requires too much tinkering and attention to stay working well and securely. Gone are the days that you could set up a system and not update it for years and expect decent results. Now you have to stay on top of updates, and each update that is applied has a chance of taking down the system for a period of time until the resident tech can figure out what new tweaks need to be applied to get running again. If you are running their internet through a VM on unraid, you will quickly become their least favourite person when they have no internet and can't get a quick solution.

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