Honest thoughs after a month of testing

[crv74]

Hi everyone,

 

i just wanted to share my thoughts after a month of test in 2 diferent servers (foxxcon 1U 4HDD SFP+ dual xeon, and Supermicro 2U 12HDD +6sata, dual xeon, dual SFP+, etc)... And the thing is...

 

I like a lot the system, the addons, Docker, Pluguins and so... I like the interface, the easy configuration and the Dashboard.

 

But I lack performance. And i don't call it in a bad way, i mean, i don't feel cheatend in any form because the name itselfs says it UnRaid... But i come from a Raid_0 2HHD Synology, amd my idea was to try some sort of 8 or 10 HDDs Raid 0... And i know it's not the purpose of unRaid.

 

And here i am, thinking if i shoud buy a license or not, if i should try som sort of another soft that let me create Raid 0s, if i should forget about parity at all, make a RAID 0 from the raid adaptor and just let unRaid "see" 1 big disk... and so.

 

If anyone can give me some light on these thoughts will be apppreciated.

 

Thanks

 

p.s. Just to clarify:

- yes, at some point i need to transfer tons of GB from 2 workstations that have 10Gb each one to this "unit". (it's a job i do once a year, and i mean transferrin 7x 60Gb files every 3 hours during 5 days)

- yes, i know that raid 0 is not a backup, and i have a cloud external backup with no size limit

 

[1812]

on Unraid, make a vm of some other os, setup your fast raid array using unassigned disks under that. problem solved. but you'll need a license to support that many disks.

 

or if you don't care about manageability, then do the raid 0 disk presented to unraid as the array. then you can skimp for the cheapest license.

 

either way, since you don't "care" about your data integrity, the solution is pretty straightforward since you like the interface and add-ons.

 

 

 

 

 

[crv74]

Hi 1812,

On 9/22/2019 at 4:42 PM, 1812 said:

on Unraid, make a vm of some other os, setup your fast raid array using unassigned disks under that. problem solved. but you'll need a license to support that many disks.

Making a VM of "unmounted" disks would be a little silly, or not? Why have unmounted discs?

Quote

 

or if you don't care about manageability, then do the raid 0 disk presented to unraid as the array. then you can skimp for the cheapest license.

Would that interfere in any aspect or option of unRaid? Or will i just see a 80Tb disc (array of 10x 8Tb)?

The price of the license is not in the factor, i was ready for the 12+ drives one.

 

Quote

 

either way, since you don't "care" about your data integrity, the solution is pretty straightforward since you like the interface and add-ons.

The part "care" i'm not really sure of that meaning. Do you mean that a single drive is also a "don't care", is the file system, or what.

Tryying a different file system, ext4, zfs, brfs or things like those as i read would hel that? Also trying another softawe option with less extensions but more oriented to what i need could be a possibiliity?

 

Thanks for the responses.

Sorry if some of my questions seem dumb, i had a lot of reading and watching tutorials for unraid and other options for my needs and maybe i am a bit confused.

 

 

 

 

Edited September 24, 2019 by crv74

[itimpi]

3 hours ago, crv74 said:

On 9/22/2019 at 3:42 PM, 1812 said:

on Unraid, make a vm of some other os, setup your fast raid array using unassigned disks under that. problem solved. but you'll need a license to support that many disks.

Making a VM of "unmounted" disks would be a little silly, or not? Why have unmounted discs?

The statement was not about unmounted disks but about disks that are not part of the main array and are managed by the Unassigned Devices plugin!  That avoids the overheads associated with writing to the array so gives much better performance.

[1812]

4 hours ago, crv74 said:

Making a VM of "unmounted" disks would be a little silly, or not? Why have unmounted discs?

@itimpi answered this above.

 

4 hours ago, crv74 said:

Would that interfere in any aspect or option of unRaid? Or will i just see a 80Tb disc (array of 10x 8Tb)?

The price of the license is not in the factor, i was ready for the 12+ drives one.

if you're not running a parity drive and only an otherwise managed raid, then no. You may find a bottleneck on transfer speeds if you are cpu limited but otherwise should not affect usage. 

 

4 hours ago, crv74 said:

The part "care" i'm not really sure of that meaning. Do you mean that a single drive is also a "don't care", is the file system, or wha

you don't "care" as in, if you lose the data, you said you have a backup online. so you con't care for having redundancy locally.

 

4 hours ago, crv74 said:

Tryying a different file system, ext4, zfs, brfs or things like those as i read would hel that? Also trying another softawe option with less extensions but more oriented to what i need could be a possibiliity?

if you takeaway the dockers/vm's/ease of use, then you are left with any basic flavor of linux making a raid set via software or hardware. unRaid started as a diy nas/fileserver and now has many more bells and whistles. I suppose if you wanted to stick with it you could do the following without using the hardware raid (and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it to begin with):

 

Setup 1 disk as a main array disk (could be anything really, it's just a 250GB placeholder, but could also be where you store docker data etc...)

Then setup all the discs you want for your fast data as cache drives. Once they are setup, then look up the procedure to change them to a raid 0. All your shares you wanted super fast read/write would be set to cache=only.  That way you'd have an 80TB disc pool managed by unRaid and still have all the other attributes you are interested in. note: I've never seen an 80TB cache pool, but I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as you have the license to support the number of discs.

 

5 hours ago, crv74 said:

Thanks for the responses.

Sorry if some of my questions seem dumb, i had a lot of reading and watching tutorials for unraid and other options for my needs and maybe i am a bit confused.

 

No worries, we all started somewhere with this OS, and I still ask "dumb" questions from time to time.

 

[Vr2Io]

Sometimes ago, I try setup a 10disks RAID0, performance really impressive, but this not practical.

 

So, finally setup in three 4disks RAID0 pool, those are for performance purpose and backup need. I still running a normal array in same machine.

 

But Unraid won't manage or monitoring those pool as general array/cache pool.

Edited September 24, 2019 by Benson