3 NVME drives, SSD's and JBOD's

[Bradleyb127]

Sounds like a sitcom title but this is the situation I'm in and would really appreciate some advice.

 

I'm currently running a Windows server with Plex that's seven-years old and is time to upgrade.   I'm using Stablebit DriveScanner and Stablebit DrivePool and understand both and are working well for me.   

 

A friend highly recommends building a new server that runs unraid since there's nothing that I'm doing on the Windows server that can't be done in unraid.   (I run Plex, Sonarr, Radarr, NZBGET, mySQL and one web site) so yea, all of that can be done running unraid. 

 

My question, I'm purchased the new equipment and the motherboard supports three m.2 NVME drives that I want to use in raid0 for the performance to store VM images on, three SSD drives for mySQL, web site and other often used files and use JBOD's for media storage.    I don't think unraid does disk stripping.    

 

I've played with unraid and am beginning to understand it a little but have a couple of questions:

 

To get the performance out of the three nvme and sata drives, I have to configure those using the RAID on the motherboard (two raids, one for each type of drives each with three drives) and unraid will see those as one device but probably won't be able to report smart.   

 

Even so, I don't want unraid using a cache drive or creating parity on those drives and I can't figure out how to make that happen.    Would I mount each raid drive as an unassigned drive and share it that way and not add it to the unraid array?

 

Any advice would be appreciated. 

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

[JonathanM]

10 hours ago, Bradleyb127 said:

I have to configure those using the RAID on the motherboard (two raids, one for each type of drives each with three drives) and unraid will see those as one device but probably won't be able to report smart. 

Are you sure about that? VERY few motherboards actually have hardware RAID controllers, most use software RAID that must have typically windows drivers loaded in order to see the volumes.

[Bradleyb127]

No, I'm not sure about that - I will look into it.     I did just assume that since RAID was configured in the BIOS that it was motherboard based.    Thank you.   

[Bradleyb127]

I've got the equipment but have hit a wall.    I'm comfortable with putting spinning drives in the array, and I'm using SSD's for the cache but I'm not sure what to do with the NVME drives.    I have unassigned devices and have each NVME drive shared, but I don't know how to access them.      Can the three NVME drives be shared as one share?   What do other people do when you have spinning hard drives, SSD's and NVME drives in the same system?

[JorgeB]

6 hours ago, Bradleyb127 said:

I have unassigned devices and have each NVME drive shared, but I don't know how to access them.   

You can share them individually with UD, there's a share button next to each device, share name can be set by device, see UD help.

 

6 hours ago, Bradleyb127 said:

Can the three NVME drives be shared as one share? 

You can create a pool with UD devices, but it involves using the command line.

[testdasi]

9 hours ago, Bradleyb127 said:

What do other people do when you have spinning hard drives, SSD's and NVME drives in the same system?

HDD is in the array, SSD (SATA and/or NVMe depending on use case) in the cache pool.

Depending on the exact use case, remaining SATA SSD is typically mounted as unassigned devices.

Remaining NVMe SSD can be mounted as UD or passed through to the VM using PCIe method (because NVMe drive is essentially just a PCIe card like a GPU).