Sold on unRAID!

[nnhoang]

Hi everyone,

 

I've been holding my files in a 4 drive RAID5 setup on my r710 in a Debian VM as a NAS for years and backed everything up to a separate backup server. For the past couple of months, I ran out of space for media, so I got more picky about what shows and movies I downloaded. I've wanted a dedicated NAS server for a while and finally bit the bullet when someone locally was selling a Norco RPC-3216 case with all the hardware and they mentioned they previously ran unRAID on it. Prior to this, I only heard of unRAID here and there, I was actually wanting to build a FreeNAS server. I looked into unRAID a bit more and it actually looked to do exactly what I needed. It had parity (essential), worked with low spec hardware, had a neat cache feature, and best of all, I can use a random assortment of drives! My usage case is mainly reading off this NAS, so I didn't need much performance..

 

The specs on the server are

 

• Norco RPC-3216, 16 3.5" HDD Caddies, 3U Chassis

 

• Intel® Pentium® Processor G3258 (3M Cache, 3.20 GHz)
• 32GB - 4 x 8GB Corsair DDR3 CMX16GX3M2A1600C10
• Gigabyte GA-B85M-D34 Motherboard
• 2 x Dell H310 IT Mode
• 16 TB - 4x2TB WD Red, 2x4TB WD Red, 1x8TB Parity Shucked WD, 250GB Samsung 850 evo

 

It actually came with 2 SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8's which the guy selling the server to me said ran unRAID without a problem for years, but I didn't want to take the risk on my data so I got 2 Dell H310's and flashed them to IT mode. Migrating took a while due to the time spent understanding how shares worked with SMB and NFS on unRAID. I probably reconfigured my SMB shares 3-4 times to get to a configuration I was happy with. I just have one main share, and the rest are manually configured in settings as I'm more familiar with that method. NFS threw me around for a bit because I didn't realize unRAID didn't support NFS v4.1, so I had to reconfigure a whole bunch my other servers to be able to communicate with unRAID. Then rewriting all the scripts I had on my VM's to backup data took another few days. After testing the server with a ton of transfers, pulling drives out to see how the array would be rebuilt, etc, I'm finally done!

 

All in all, I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Parity works great when pulling out drives to rebuild, I love how unlike a 'real' RAID, if the array did break, I'd still be able to read files off the individual disks. Performance is quite good and it looks to be very stable.

 

I will definitely be upgrading my trial to the Pro purchase after stress testing for a couple more days.

 

Here's a link to the notes I took while building out the unRAID server

 

Future plans I had in mind : I get another motherboard that supports 3 PCI-e lanes to get 10gig, I've been wanting to go 10gig in my internal network for a while. Get a lower wattage CPU since I have no plans to run any dockers or VM's on this machine and of course more storage when I need it.

 

Thanks again to the community when I asked for help, everyone was very helpful!

 

Edited July 4, 2020 by nnhoang