Unraid newcomer


LEKO

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First, I'll introduce myself. I've been working in the IT/telecomm industry for almost 25 years now. I've been work working for an ISP/Carrier for almost 20 years and I moved to AAA gaming industry almost 4 years ago.

My primary focus is networking at large scale: BGP, MPLS, big Data Center fabric, etc. At the moment, I've an official title of Network Administrator, but I wear many hats: DevOps (automation through Ansible, Python), network engineer and architect for many project and still doing ops/maintenance/deployment.

I spend so much time at work on big problem/challenges that I don't want to waste any time at home managing my devices. Having 3 child and a ton of connected devices/PC, I started to feel the urge of "upscaling" my data storage/backup solution. I used to have an (old) LaCie Wireless Space (1Tb NAS/router), but it was getting old and only supported SMB 1.0 which is now deprecated in most modern OSes.

Time to move on!

I looked into multiple potential solutions and handed up choosing UnRaid for some main reasons:
- Simplicity of installation/operations.
- Ease of upgrade/scale the array.
- Based on Linux. Works of on "off-the-shelf" x86 hardware.

So, my journey to UnRaid started with the upgrade of my main PC from an Intel i7-3770 to a Ryzen 5 3600 based system. Then, I scavenged all SATA HDD I could find at home, ranging from 640Gb to 3Tb. During the UnRaid first run, I found that 3 of my HDD were dead or almost dead (thanks to the UnRaid very good reporting/logging).

So here is my current UnRaid setup:

CPU: Intel i7-3770
Mobo: Gigabyte P67A-D3-B3
Memory: 12Gb DDR3 (2x2Gb + 2x4Gb)
GPU: GeForce GT 710 (only used for initial setup, will I ever use it in the future?)
Boot USB stick: 32Gb (No-brand: I know, it will probably die soon, I have 5-6 other sticks ready to take over)

Current Storage:
Parity: Seagate 3Tb
Disk1: WD 1Tb
Disk2: WD 640Gb (I don't trust it... Unraid reported couple of SMART errors)
Disk3: Seagate 1Tb 3.5 inches (Too many errors, it was slowing UnRaid array by a lot)
Disk4: Seagate 1Tb 2.5 inches (Dead, won't spin up)

I will receive a WD Purple 4Tb by the end of the day, I'll do a bit of shuffling:
Parity: WD Purple 4Tb
Disk1: WD 1Tb
Disk2: WD 640Gb (I don't trust it... Unraid reported couple of SMART errors)
Disk3: Seagate 3Tb (old parity disk)

I want to keep the 640Gb in the array to "experiment" with an old/soon to die drive. My UnRaid array is used for "backup only", no mission critical and/or applications depends on it.

So far, I have a good experience with UnRaid, the learning curve is not too steep. Some stuff would probably benefits from some more "newbie friendly" attention, but overall I feel the platform is solid.

Side note: to have some fun, I spun a CentOS 8 VM to check how it would behave and to learn a bit about VM management with UnRaid. It is straight-forward, but I ran into some issues, but I think it is mostly related to CentOS, not UnRaid.

TL;DR: UnRaid team, you did a good job!

Edited by LEKO
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Hi LEKO, welcome.  I just joined here a few days ago.  I'm not an IT/Networking professional but similarly I started using unRAID about 2 years ago for family and home network organization and some music streaming.  There are very smart members here and the forums are a great resource as you learn more about the OS.  I built this DIY-NAS as my primary along with a couple backup unRAID systems with spare hardware.  unRAID makes it easy for the builds and I enjoy how it can be customized with various apps.  If you have not already seen SpaceInvader One's Youtube tutorials, check those out, he provides very good guides for new users.

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1 hour ago, G8torbyte said:

 If you have not already seen SpaceInvader One's Youtube tutorials, check those out, he provides very good guides for new users.

I'll look into those. Thanks for tip and welcome message.

I must admit that my IT professional experience help me a lot. I don't directly manage storage at work, but I work closely with the admins that manage Petabytes of SSD SAN. These rigs are something quite not comparable to UnRaid.  :D

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