June 30, 20197 yr Hi everyone, Firstly, I'm new to UnRAID and am looking at configuring my first server shortly. I have a question that I'm looking to have answered before purchasing any hardware: 1. It appears that UnRAID is software based. Is this correct? 2. If so do i require a RAID controller or simply a bunch of sata ports? 3. I'm looking at a new motherboard that states it does not support RAID, will this be an issue? Sorry if this has been asked before, i did have a quick look at the forums for similar questions. Thanks for your assistance
June 30, 20197 yr Unraid is purely software, and doesn't play well with RAID controllers. Plain HBA controllers are much preferred, if you find a RAID controller that can be flashed to IT mode instead of IR mode, those generally work well. Avoid Marvell based disk controllers, LSI are preferred.
July 1, 20197 yr 3 hours ago, teitzelthomas said: 1. It appears that UnRAID is software based. Is this correct? 2. If so do i require a RAID controller or simply a bunch of sata ports? 3. I'm looking at a new motherboard that states it does not support RAID, will this be an issue? How many disks will be in your server? Depending on how big the array will be, you may be fine with just motherboard SATA ports. Many motherboards (especially "server" motherboards) can have 6, 8 or more SATA ports and or/NVMe slots. For many years, I never expanded beyond the 8 SATA ports my MB provides. One Parity drive, 4 data drives, 1 cache drive and an optical drive for MakeMKV left me one free slot. As I plan to expand the number of data drives and cache drives, I need to move beyond that and have added an LSI-based HBA card in IT mode with support for up to 8 more disks. One thing to keep in mind, especially of you go with an older LSI-based HBA (many cheap ones can be found on eBay), SATA SSDs should be attached to MB SATA ports as they support TRIM operations. Many of the newer LSI chipsets now support this as well, but, the older ones do not. Edited July 1, 20197 yr by Hoopster
July 1, 20197 yr Author Thanks guys for your prompt advise. I will be looking at the following setup: so suspect the onboard SATA ports/ specifications should be adequate 2x 6TB WD Red Storage 1x 6TB WD Red Parity Drive 1x 240GB SSD SATA Cache Drive ASUS Prime H370M-PLUS Motherboard Intel Core i5 9400 This is for a Plex server Edited July 1, 20197 yr by teitzelthomas
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.