Size of system drive


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Im currently looking into moving my Windows PC with PLEX over to unraid. Theres a bunch of different drives from 10TB Seagate Ironwolf to 8TB Seagate drives and anything in between.

 

Soo far i have figured i will repurpose the 10TB Ironwolf as parity drive since its the biggest and the most "pro" of the bunch and hopefully will withstand the read/write amount.

Im thinking of ordering a 1TB SSD and use as Cache drive. Probably the Samsung 860 since its pretty decent priced.

 

But what about the system drive? The one the unraid system will be on. How big should this one be? I havent found a thread where this has been discussed. Im mainly gonna do Unraid that contains Plex Media Server, Plex monitoring, Deluge, Sonarr, and some VMs for testing etc. 

Im guessing that plex acts like on windows and use the program disc to store db, artwork temp for converting formats for offline play to other units etc.

I have around 1800 Blurays and 200 tv shows.

 

I have a 256GB SSD of Samsung 840 Pro atm on my Windows system. Will this be enough? Im betting its alot harder swapping this one out down the line without doing clone copy stuff. Those of you with somewhat similar installs, how big is your main drive and do you regret not going bigger?

 

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The Unraid OS doesn't have a system drive. The Unraid OS is unpacked fresh from the archives on the boot flash drive into RAM each time it boots. The OS runs completely in RAM.

 

If you are thinking of VMs and dockers, then those are often installed on cache. The cache drive can have multiple uses. Some people also put those on an Unassigned Device. Cache or an Unassigned Device is preferred so the performance isn't affected by parity, and so the applications don't keep parity and array disks spinning. Using cache for this is somewhat simpler because Unraid manages the cache pool. Unassigned Devices are managed by a plugin.

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30 minutes ago, trurl said:

The Unraid OS doesn't have a system drive. The Unraid OS is unpacked fresh from the archives on the boot flash drive into RAM each time it boots. The OS runs completely in RAM.

 

If you are thinking of VMs and dockers, then those are often installed on cache. The cache drive can have multiple uses. Some people also put those on an Unassigned Device. Cache or an Unassigned Device is preferred so the performance isn't affected by parity, and so the applications don't keep parity and array disks spinning. Using cache for this is somewhat simpler because Unraid manages the cache pool. Unassigned Devices are managed by a plugin.

Oh that one gave me whiplash from the headspin

So to put it this way.

you have unraid on a Flash drive that loads into memory on every bootup.

The you have your cached drive that you  put a docker on containing Plex media server for example. Then all content surround Plex media server will stay there and not be part of the unraid protection (which is why it might be good to have a second cache disk?) and then you store all the movies and such data on the unraid array? 

 

Have i gotten it correctly?

Think im gonna set up a practice system as soon as i get my IBM M1015 IT Mode card so i can tinker and learn without risking my data

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15 minutes ago, svennand said:

you have unraid on a Flash drive that loads into memory on every bootup.

The you have your cached drive that you  put a docker on containing Plex media server for example. Then all content surround Plex media server will stay there and not be part of the unraid protection (which is why it might be good to have a second cache disk?) and then you store all the movies and such data on the unraid array? 

 

Have i gotten it correctly?

I believe you stated it almost perfectly. The cache pool can use multiple drives, configured in any valid BTRFS RAID level, either redundancy or speed or space.

The usable capacity for the cache pool can get tricky if you use different sized drives in the pool. https://carfax.org.uk/btrfs-usage/

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10 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

I believe you stated it almost perfectly. The cache pool can use multiple drives, configured in any valid BTRFS RAID level, either redundancy or speed or space.

The usable capacity for the cache pool can get tricky if you use different sized drives in the pool. https://carfax.org.uk/btrfs-usage/

 

Thats awesome! Im liking unraid more and more for each day im looking into it, and i havent even tried it yet.

Looking into cache pool as we speak :)

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