Is unraid right for me?

[david97]

I'm just a home user that wants to back up all my data and use plex, i have 12TB of data and a lot of hard drives. I normally don't leave my PC on all the time only when i plan to use it. Will this be a issue for unraid? I turn it off to save some power and hard drive life. Coming from a synology NAS that i have out grown.

 

Thanks

[Hoopster]

31 minutes ago, david97 said:

I'm just a home user that wants to back up all my data and use plex, i have 12TB of data and a lot of hard drives. I normally don't leave my PC on all the time only when i plan to use it. Will this be a issue for unraid? I turn it off to save some power and hard drive life. Coming from a synology NAS that i have out grown.

 

Thanks

You've just described the primary use case of a lot of unRAID users.

 

unRAID will certainly work for you and work well.  Although you may envision using it only for backups and Plex now, like most, once you discover its many other potential uses, it can grow with you and your needs.

 

For users such as you whose primary focus is data/media storage, unRAID can expand storage very easily with whatever drives you have.  RAID-based systems, like Synology, are very limited in this regard. Of course, those have their advantages as well, but, for your use, unRAID is a great fit.

 

Get a trial license and try it free for 30 days.

 

Shutting your server down when not in use is no issue.  I used to do this as well.  Now, I leave it running 24x7 and let the drives spin down when not in use.  I calculated that having it running 24x7 is costing me a grand total of about ~$2.50 a month vs. shutting it down at night.

[david97]

11 hours ago, Hoopster said:

You've just described the primary use case of a lot of unRAID users.

 

unRAID will certainly work for you and work well.  Although you may envision using it only for backups and Plex now, like most, once you discover its many other potential uses, it can grow with you and your needs.

 

For users such as you whose primary focus is data/media storage, unRAID can expand storage very easily with whatever drives you have.  RAID-based systems, like Synology, are very limited in this regard. Of course, those have their advantages as well, but, for your use, unRAID is a great fit.

 

Get a trial license and try it free for 30 days.

 

Shutting your server down when not in use is no issue.  I used to do this as well.  Now, I leave it running 24x7 and let the drives spin down when not in use.  I calculated that having it running 24x7 is costing me a grand total of about ~$2.50 a month vs. shutting it down at night.

 

I ask about shutting it down since i read somewhere or seen a video that unraid checks the parity drive once a week.

 

Thanks for the reply!

[JonathanM]

2 hours ago, david97 said:

unraid checks the parity drive once a week.

Only if that's what you set the schedule for.

 

Parity is maintained in real time continuously. A parity consistency check can be scheduled or triggered manually whenever you want.

 

Most people schedule a check at the first of the month.

 

Because unraid typically only spins up drives that are being actively used, it's possible for a drive with seldom used content to stay spun down for long periods of time and never accessed. Parity depends on all drives being read flawlessly, so a parity check is a good way to keep tabs on the health of those seldom used drives so they can be trusted if needed to recover from a failure of a frequently used drive.

[Hoopster]

4 hours ago, david97 said:

i read somewhere or seen a video that unraid checks the parity drive once a week

As Jonathanm mentioned, parity check schedule is under your control.  How long it will take to run a complete parity check is dependent on the size of the parity drive and its rpm rating.  Of course, that is also affected by the read speed of the other drives as well.

 

The parity drive in my main server is a 7200 rpm 8TB drive and parity checks take about 16.5 hours. Parity check in my system happen once a month on the 15th at 1am.  Parity checks can also be paused if the server is in heavy use and can be resumed later during down time.

 

[david97]

off topic is a AMD cpu RYZEN 5 3600 paired with Nvidia gpu a good choce? I usually go intel but AMD is way cheaper for more performance now as I may try running Windows 10 in VM.

Thanks for the info!