First Unraid system

[Nexuser1]

Hello everyone,

 

This will be the first time I will be using Unraid and creating NAS/server with material i already own. In the past i used a Synology nas, but after some exchanges with colleagues, i really got interested in Unraid.

 

Could you help me with my project?

My build:

-Asus Zenith Extreme motherboard + 10gbe NIC (the one included)

-AMD threadripper 1950x

-32gb of crucial ECC ram

-2 x Intel 900P 480gb for caching?

-Nvidia Geforce 780 (just for initial installation)

-LSI 9305 - 16i

-3 x WD black 4TB, 1 x Seagate Ironwolf pro 16TB (soon to be 2 of such drives), 1X Samsung 860 pro 2TB, 1x Samsung 960 pro 2TB, ....

-1000W EVGA GQ gold PSU

-Netgear prosafe XS508M as my switch

 

I've read the manual, followed some initial instruction videos on youtube, ...

 

What do i need to focus on, what are the first things i might modify in the settings, any things i need to change before i start building the system tonight?

 

Thanks in advance.

Michaël

Edited December 5, 2019 by Nexuser1

[trurl]

Parity must be at least as large as the largest single array disk, so with those the 16TB would have to be parity. The SSDs belong in the cache pool or Unassigned.

[Healadin]

When I was deciding on OS for my NAS, I came across similar setups and people recommended FreeNAS -> you can make more "pools" (it is called vdev or something along those lines I think) there, so you can make one pool from 16 TB drives and another with 4 TB drives.

 

Depends on how many parity disks you want to have and also how many you plan to have overall. If you would end up with 3x 16 TB, 3x 4 TB and 2 parity drives you can go with one pool with 16 TB drives (and 1 parity) and second pool with 4 TB drives (1 of them parity). In case like this you would have to use 2 of 16 TB drives for parity with unraid.

 

When you are deciding on what software to use, you should consider what setup suits you best in terms of lost capacity to parity.

[testdasi]

9 minutes ago, Healadin said:

When you are deciding on what software to use, you should consider what setup suits you best in terms of lost capacity to parity.

I strongly disagree with this statement. The user must first consider what setup suits BEST in terms of DATA PROTECTION.

 

FreeNAS relies on a RAID-like setup, in the sense that data is striped across multiple disks. This means if you have more failed drives than parity, you are guaranteed to lose ALL your data because effectively every single file will be missing a portion of it.

 

Unraid is, as its name suggests, NOT RAID. Each data disk has its own file system and there is no striping (i.e. each file is stored fully only on ONE disk). This means if you have more failed drives than parity, you will only lose SOME of your data (the files actually saved on the failed drives). Each file on the working drives is still a complete file.

 

For the vast majority of users, losing some data is preferable to losing all data.

 

Available storage is a secondary concern because if one does not care about losing all data than one should not even bother with parity, hence, no parity, hence no available storage concern.

[trurl]

The only reason the 16TB winds up being parity is because it cannot be the data disk if your parity disk isn't at least that large. If/when you get that 2nd 16TB then one of them could be a data disk. Note parity only has to be as large as the largest SINGLE data disk, it doesn't have to be as large as all of the disks together since parity isn't a backup of your data. All disks are used by the parity calculation to rebuild a disk.

 

And if your parity is that large, it is easy to replace any smaller data disks with a larger disk up to 16TB since parity is already that large.

 

Two of the great advantages of the way Unraid does things vs some other system is that Unraid allows you to mix disk sizes in the array, and it is very easy to add or replace disks without rebuilding the array.