My son got me Unraid for my cake day.  I got it running on some old but nice hardware. 

 

Right now I'm testing every old drive I have and either going to put them into service or drill holes in them.  The wife will be happy to see items gone anyway so that's just a win-win.

 

Trying to get my head around an SSD for a cache drive, getting a parity drive and then storage.  I haven't started researching yet but I will as soon as I finish posting this.

 

I have the basic version which should be enough to keep me busy until I know what I'm doing.

 

Don

Edited May 26, 20206 yr by don256us
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4 hours ago, don256us said:

Right now I'm testing every old drive I have and either going to put them into service or drill holes in them. 

Make sure they test perfect, don't allow any partial defectives to slip in.

 

Parity protection relies on ALL the remaining data disks to be read perfectly over their entire capacity to recover the missing bits from a failed drive.

4 hours ago, don256us said:

Trying to get my head around an SSD for a cache drive, getting a parity drive and then storage.  I haven't started researching yet but I will as soon as I finish posting this.

I suggest looking up @SpaceInvaderOne's videos on youtube, he has a bunch of topics from basic to quite advanced.

Thank you very much.

Turns out I have "a" drive of any value in terms of capacity.  I put a drill press through the rest.  I found a reputable site with tested used drives from HGST for cheap.  I bought 5.  They are supposed to have zero bad sectors.  I'm looking at getting a reasonably sized SSD for the cache drive.

 

My anticipated array should be (4 x 2TB) + (1 x 2TB parity) + (480-512GB cache SSD).  If I understand the terms of the basic license, that should max me out and I have a minimal outlay of $$$.  I don't plan to put any data on the array that is not also stored on other devices if it's important.  To be blunt, I'm just going to put copies of my media files on the array so that I can use Plex.  If I loose a movie or more from the array, I have the original stored in a closet somewhere that I can still use.

 

I've also been watching SI1's videos.  Very well thought out and very helpful.  Thank you for pointing me in that direction.