Hello there.... another new guy..

[BWS001]

So here is my story of the last 20 days.. Admittedly I haven't been working on this solidly but I've seen rather steady progress.

 

first things first.. Very cool app.. I am just about finishing the build on my array... unBalance, will be a godsend in moving things around..

I had 2 Synology NAS's and an Ubuntu Server running plex  and a Virtual BOX VM that had all me Media apps (Radarr, Lidarr Sonarr, NZBget behind my VPN)

 

The plan is to decommission them all..

 

The NAS's are old and nearly full and it is a pain having all those moving pieces to keep up with.. FreeNAS/Unraid??? 

 

Played with FREENAS and decided I work too hard on Computers at work.. Unraid is so much simpler..

 

I had a spare ASUS z-87 Pro with a  4770K and 32Gb of RAM doing very little and a collection of "retired" drives 2x3Tb, 2x2Tb and a 500Gb..  I built the array with No parity (for the moment) as well as 2 275 SSD's I wasn't really using..  I bought a cage to house 4 more drives.. I had a 4 port SATA 3 controller kicking around in the spare parts bin...  the case is somewhat useless but I will make it work

 

Machine should now support 12 drives now! Case may too...  I will need to do some work with the fans to keep this thing cool

 

My first week and a bit with the somewhat bare NAS was less then positive.. the machine would spontaneously reboot 3-6 hours in and I didn't now why.. finally put a monitor on it and saw it was a kernel panic... stripped the machine down a bit.. (there was an extra NIC and and additional 2 port controller I had forgotten to remove) No dice... still had a kernel panic... Re-flashed the bios.. (actually updated it) and it hasn't panicked again..

 

The existing NAS's are;  a 413J which had 4X3Tb  with about 7Tb of Data

and a 415play with 2x4Tb and 2x8 Tb   with 11Tb of Data (some of it redundant). 

 

I decided what was going where and created some shares..

 

I wrote a couple of scripts that use rsync to copy the data..  I tricked the NAS into giving me access to the share root so I didn't have to do a folder at a time if I didn't want to. ( I edited the exports & exports_syno ) and then reloaded sudo exportfs -va .. just don't change the shares in DSM!

 

It copied the 413J over the network in under a day.

 

I then backed up the NAS to a pair of 4TB passports just in case and shut down the NAS..

 

I pulled  2 of the 3TB drives out of it.. the ones without 62000 hours on them (yes I have a pair of 3Tb WD reds with 62K hours on them) added them to the array and started copying over the other NAS.. 

 

The copy is almost done.. maybe another hour... I am moving the data off of the 500GB so I can decom it and  introduce drives from the other NAS.. (it would be  waste to do dual parity with them wouldn't it!)  I may introduce another 3Tb for parity beforehand since I have to reconfigure the drives in the case.

 

 

I will update this post as I go.. 

 

I do have a few questions for people..

 

• The VM I built is very slow.. Any way to speed it up???..  it runs reasonably quick on the old machine with Virtualbox smaller CPU and slower memory..
• I was hoping to use a 4 port NIC (HP NC364T) I have.. Unraid loads the driver but lspci doesn't show the card I will try turning off the on-board controller as they may be conflicting.. Any other ideals?
• I've read a couple things on moving some of the appdata out of the array and a couple people saying it's a no-no..  Plex data can be recreated easily and doesn't need to be "protected" so rather then the massive IO why not move it outside?
• If my array is 2x8Tb, 2x4Tb and 4x3Tb.. iI think it's  a waste using the 2 8Tb drives as dual parity?  Is there a better way and have dual parity? 

 

As Dr. Frankenstein said "It's alive" ..

 

I just have some tinkering to do!

 

[trurl]

You want appdata, domains, system shares all on cache. You can see how much of each drive each user share is using by going to Shares - User Shares and clicking Compute All. If you don't get a result after several minutes refresh the page.

[BWS001]

Thanks for the response..

 

What about using an  "unassigned device"?  or am I ever really gonna need that much cache.. (that's another need thing to get a better understanding of)

 

[trurl]

Some people put those things on an Unassigned Device, basically for the same reasons they go on cache, so performance won't be impacted by the slower writes to the parity array, and so they won't keep parity and array disks spinning. To me it just seems simpler to put them on cache, which is where they go by default and Unraid already manages the cache pool. There is no reason not to use Unassigned Devices plugin for this though, it is well maintained.

 

Personally I think people worry too much about caching writes to user shares. Caching the initial data load is usually a bad idea, since cache won't have the capacity, and you can't get things moved from cache as fast as you can write to cache.

 

Most of my writes are scheduled backups from other computers on my network, or queued downloads from my dockers. I am not waiting around for those to finish anyway, so they might as well go directly to the array.

 

And there is Turbo Write which speeds up writes to the parity array anyway if you want to do it that way.

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/50397-turbo-write/

 

I only use SSD cache for my dockers, for keeping a subset of my music and photos so they can be frequently accessed by other devices on my network without spinning any disks, and for DVR since there is some performance advantage when trying to watch one thing while recording another. Then on the rare occasion I want to keep a recording I manually move it to another share on the array.

 

Other people will have other use cases and other opinions.

[trurl]

8 hours ago, BWS001 said:

2 275 SSD

I assume you are using these in cache pool. This is exactly what I have for mine. SSDs shouldn't be used in the parity array.