October 15, 201015 yr Looking to trying out unRAID for my business. I'm backing up client data daily and need an expandable/safe storage option. Currently storage runs around 500GB for customer data, but thankfully it is climbing quickly. So I need to be able to expand drives as more clients come online. Also, I will be storing my business data (client images of drives, software, documents, movies, music and photos). If this is for me then the next question is what about hardware specs? I am thinking of using something along the lines of either an Atom setup with 2GB or maybe a dual core Celeron with 2GB RAM. What are ya'll's thoughts?
October 15, 201015 yr How will your client data be reaching you? Over the internet, hot swap drives, etc? Also, will multiple clients need to be able to access the data on your server simultaneously? Finally, what is your budget?
October 15, 201015 yr Author Thanks for your speedy reply! The client data comes over the internet via software from Vembu called Storegrid. Right now, the software runs on my 2003 Server then is stored on the internal drives, but the software allows for storage via NAS or SAN. So I don't think that will be a problem. Clients will not be accessing stored data via the internet or at all. The only time clients will access data will be for recovery, and it will still have to run through the 2003 box. The only simultaneous interaction will be with clients backing up and then just normal use of access data here in my office. My budget right now is around $200-$500. I already have a big server case and some drives. I'm wondering what type of horsepower is needed to run this.
October 15, 201015 yr Thanks for your speedy reply! The client data comes over the internet via software from Vembu called Storegrid. Right now, the software runs on my 2003 Server then is stored on the internal drives, but the software allows for storage via NAS or SAN. So I don't think that will be a problem. Clients will not be accessing stored data via the internet or at all. The only time clients will access data will be for recovery, and it will still have to run through the 2003 box. The only simultaneous interaction will be with clients backing up and then just normal use of access data here in my office. My budget right now is around $200-$500. I already have a big server case and some drives. I'm wondering what type of horsepower is needed to run this. You hardly need any horsepower at all. Almost anything from a 386 upward will work. The amount of memory needed is 512 Meg or more. That will naturally limit the low end motherboard you can use since older motherboards won't support that amount of RAM. Almost any newer Pentium class CPU on up will do however. unRAID is NOT a CPU hog. In the same way, to use SATA drives you'll want a more modern motherboard with an SATA disk controller built in. One with 6 ports is eas to find these days. You'll probably be wanting a motherboard with PCI-e connectors if you anticipate adding additional disk controllers for future growth, although you can run with a PCI bus, it will limit parity check speeds when you put more than 2 or 3 disks on it. That will not affect your daily usage, but it is a factor when upgrading or re-constructing a failed disk. The motherboard must be new enough to be able to boot from a USB flash drive. Stay away from older Gigabyte boards, as some of them had a "feature" where their BIOS wrote a copy of itself to the hard-disks, and that feature was either on by default, or not able to be disabled at all. If you use a Gigabyte board you want one where the feature is DISABLED BY DEFAULT, that way, when the cmos battery dies it will not re-enable itself. Other than that, you need a power supply that can power the number of disks you anticipate. A "single rail" supply makes this much easier, as many high wattage "multi-rail" supplies targeted toward "gamers" supply most of their power to the power hungry video cards used by those playing games, but leave the connectors for the hard disks limited to a small fraction of the total wattage advertised by the manufacturer. Joe L.
October 15, 201015 yr Author If I started off with a lower grade board and CPU how hard is it to upgrade to a new system? Is it as easy as installing the new board and CPU and going or does everything need to be reinstalled? Also, I am not going to use the 3 in 2 or 4 in 3 bays right now but when I do, will anything have to change?
October 15, 201015 yr If I started off with a lower grade board and CPU how hard is it to upgrade to a new system? Is it as easy as installing the new board and CPU and going or does everything need to be reinstalled? Also, I am not going to use the 3 in 2 or 4 in 3 bays right now but when I do, will anything have to change? You take a screen shot of the existing "Devices" assignment page, move everything to the new MB, plug the drives all in, odds are they will not be detected on the new hardware in the same order so the array will not start. You then just need to go to the "devices" assignment page on the web-management interface and re-assign the drives to the correct slots in the array based on your prior saved/printed screenshot. The disks are identified by their model/serial numbers so it is easy to get them back to their original assignments. Then go back to the main web-management page and the array should start. It is easier to do than to type this explanation.
October 15, 201015 yr Looking to trying out unRAID for my business. I'm backing up client data daily and need an expandable/safe storage option. Currently storage runs around 500GB for customer data, but thankfully it is climbing quickly. So I need to be able to expand drives as more clients come online. Also, I will be storing my business data (client images of drives, software, documents, movies, music and photos). If this is for me then the next question is what about hardware specs? I am thinking of using something along the lines of either an Atom setup with 2GB or maybe a dual core Celeron with 2GB RAM. What are ya'll's thoughts? I am not 100% sure what you are going to be trying to do with your business. unRAID is a great solution for applications that require some writing but mostly reading. For example, storing of large media files. They are written to the array once and read (played) many times. unRAID is not the greatest platform for high volumes of writes, and in particular, high volumes of parallel writes. The reason is that a read and a write is required for every "logical" write operation. This read+write occurs on both the data disk and on the parity disk. This read+write is needed to maintain parity, and a reasonable performance compromise for unRAID's unique expandable architecture. However, the fact that, regardless of the data disk you are writing to, the same parity disk is involved means that parity I/O quickly bottlenecks attempts to do writes in parallel. The exact opposite is true for reading. Parity is completely uninvolved so parallel reads are fast and perform well in parallel especially across multiple disks. I would seriously consider another solution if you plan is to eventually be able to write several terabytes to the array each day. Although it may be an adequate solution for now, I fear it will not be able to keep up with your success.
October 15, 201015 yr Author OK. That's what I most concerned with is if it will do what I need. I don't write terabytes of data, mainly around 3-5GB/day. I just liked how easy it was to add drives in at will and have the protection. What would be a solution you would recommend?
October 15, 201015 yr OK. That's what I most concerned with is if it will do what I need. I don't write terabytes of data, mainly around 3-5GB/day. I just liked how easy it was to add drives in at will and have the protection. What would be a solution you would recommend? Write speed over the LAN is typically between 20 to 35 MB/s with peaks higher for small files. 5GB (5000 MB) would therefore typically take between 140 and 250 seconds. It sounds like you'll be fine.
October 15, 201015 yr Author I think so. It would only be as fast as the data comes in, so it isn't like I would be doing direct transfers anyway. I just want to make sure that this is the solution for me and not something I don't need.
October 15, 201015 yr Well, unRAID is free to try (for up to 3 disks). If you've got any spare hardware laying around, slap it together and play around with unRAID.
October 15, 201015 yr No matter what solution you decide on, you still need to back your client's data up on a regular basis.
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