December 4, 20196 yr Cheers everyone! I'm currently running a Fileserver with Windows 10, packing 8 x 2 TB HDDs pooled together using Drivepool with File Duplication for HDD-failure-safety, resulting in 8 out of 16 TB usable disk space. I'm running out of disk space now and will need to add new drives, and while I've still got some spare slots in my case, it's starting to bother me that I am "wasting" half of my disk space on live file safety. Might UnRAID and its (dual)-parity be a proper alternative for me? What I need it to run: Fileserver with SMB-Shares - The first and foremost function of the server to store all sorts of files, videos, pictures and stream movies and music to all devices in the house using Kodi. Jdownloader Crashplan for online file backups FTP Server Teamspeak 3 Server VPN Server Might UnRAID be the alternative for me without MUCH of an hassle of setting it up? Thanks in advance & cheers!
December 4, 20196 yr Do you have backups? I don't have any experience with your current setup, but Unraid must format any disk it will use in the array or cache pool, so you will need some way to get some of those disks free if you intend to reuse them. Maybe you can get rid of the duplication and if that leaves you with NTFS disks with your data you could make an array out of the free disks then mount the others as Unassigned Devices to copy their data.
December 4, 20196 yr Author Cheers trurl! The migration process itself would'nt be a problem, since I could get my hands on a 10 TB external drive to copy all my files to and from. I was just wondering if UnRAID per se would be the right choice for my needs...
December 4, 20196 yr 20 minutes ago, Turnspit said: Cheers trurl! The migration process itself would'nt be a problem, since I could get my hands on a 10 TB external drive to copy all my files to and from. I was just wondering if UnRAID per se would be the right choice for my needs... In terms of apps, the stuff you want to run all have dockers in the Community Apps "store" (all free stuff so it's not a "store") so you should be able to find something. SMB is natively supported by Unraid. In terms of dual parity, only you can judge if it works for you. File duplication usually means any failure of more than 2 drives will cause at least some data lost. Dual parity also similarly offers protection against up to 2 drive failure. However, (Write) performance will be relatively slower due to parity calculation. Reconstruct write (aka turbo write) is a decent mitigation but it requires all your drives to be spun up. Depending on your HDD speed, your network speed might very well be the bottle-neck anyway instead of the slower write speed. More than 2 drives failing for dual parity means SOME data will be lost. In contrast, depending on the duplication algorithm, it is possible that no data is lost with up to 4 drives fail if the "right" set of drives fail. This is, however, highly not probable based on how I understand Drivepool works but just thought to leave it out there for completeness sake. Personally for 8 drives, I would just go with single parity for more available storage. I calculated based on Backblaze disk failure stat that I generally only need dual parity for array of more than 8 drives or so - but then that's my level of risk tolerance.
December 5, 20196 yr Author Thanks for the input testdasi! I did some more in depth reading about UnRAID and everything that it involves and think that it might really be the right choice for me. Plus, I finally have some new tech to play around with! For the beginning I'm gonna roll with my existing 8 drives, with two parity drives (I'm a bit overcautious regarding failing drives and losing data) resulting in 12 TB of usable space, which already is a huge upgrade to my currently usable 8 TB due to Drivepool mirroring, supported by a 2 x 500 GB SSD cache pool for increased write performance. I will use an external 10 TB USB 3.0 HDD (NTFS formatted) to store all my data while migrating the Server to UnRAID. Is it possible to then directly access the external NTFS HDD via UnRAID and copy over all its contents?
December 5, 20196 yr 17 minutes ago, Turnspit said: I will use an external 10 TB USB 3.0 HDD (NTFS formatted) to store all my data while migrating the Server to UnRAID. Is it possible to then directly access the external NTFS HDD via UnRAID and copy over all its contents? Yes. Use the Unassigned Device plugin (can be found on Community Apps). NTFS is supported by the plugin.
December 5, 20196 yr Author Unassigned Device + Krusader really seems the way to go concerning this matter - thanks a ton! Looking forward to joining the UnRAID family!
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