topgazza Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 Hi My son has Unraid on his media server and uses it as Raid 5 and says its works superbly. I have a Shuttle PC with Windows 10 on and SSD and I am going to install 2 x 3TB WD Red drives to use as a Plex storage either as a straight mirror copy using Carbon Copy Cloner or preferably as a RAID. What are my options as I dont really want to but a third drive for parity and have used RAID 1 before. I like what I hear and read about Unraid so I am interested in exploring this option if it keeps it simple. I currently have all my movies in a USB WD MyBook with a portable drive as backup on my iMac. It works well but I want to declutter as I have a number of external drives on my iMac for full iMac backup, Time Machine, Photos and of course movies. Copying movies to new raid would be easy from the MyBook which is USB. But what setup should I use on my Shuttle ? Any advice appreciated Quote Link to comment
trurl Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 Unraid is NOT RAID. The parity array is not exactly like any standard RAID implementation, though it is similar in some ways. Each disk in the Unraid parity array is an independent filesystem. Each file exists completely on a single disk, there is no striping. Folders can span disks (User Shares), but files cannot. Various btrfs raid configurations are supported in the cache pool. See this Wiki Overview: https://wiki.unraid.net/UnRAID_6/Overview 1 Quote Link to comment
topgazza Posted October 31, 2019 Author Share Posted October 31, 2019 (edited) Thanks trurl. Indeed, I knew Unraid is an OS, but I wondered if there was any option other than a parity raid. But thats a very good wiki I must say. My son, like me, is in IT as a network consultant and is more upto date with building this sort of thing then myself as a humble project Manager. So I will pick his brains as well. But it sounds like I will need a third drive, 3TB, to use Unraid properly ? Edited October 31, 2019 by topgazza Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 (edited) How are you thinking of attaching the drives to the Shuttle? Although technically Unraid supports USB drives in practice they tend to prove unreliable when used with Unraid as Unraid cannot handle array drives temporarily disconnecting and then coming back (as USB drives are prone to do). Edited October 31, 2019 by itimpi Quote Link to comment
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