First time user of UnRaid

[Kimosabe2019]

So I've decided against using FreeNAS for launching my new Plex Server. I did a little research and the community software selection is a lot larger than the FreeNAS collection. So I need a little help here:

 

First I have Five 1 TB Hard Drives and one 1 TB SSD. I have a Sixth 1 TB Hard Drive but at this moment I don't have enough SATA ports on my motherboard just yet. If I wanted a RAID5-like setup for redundancy what would be the optimum setup?

 

Today and over the next couple of days I am transferring all my movies to other smaller hard drives so I can clean all the 1 TB hard drives and then once done the transferring, install them in the UnRaid Server.

[ChatNoir]

Hi and welcome,

in your situation, I would suggest the following setup :

• 1x 1 TB HDD as parity
• 4x 1 TB HDD as data drive in the Array
• 1x 1 TB SSD as cache
• keep your extra 1 TB HDD as spare if any of the other HDD happen to fail

Note that for initial data transfer, it would be faster to skip the parity and cache drives and only add them once your data is on the array.

 

 

[JonathanM]

15 hours ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

Five 1 TB Hard Drives

Are they healthy? Unraid needs perfect hard drives, so be sure that at the very least all the drives can pass a long smart test with no errors.

[Kimosabe2019]

So far I have installed all the drives in my case and did a PRECLEAR on all of them.

Found that all my drives were severely overheating. Between 56-68C.

 

So before I add the parity and cache drives I am going to transfer all the data back to the hard drives.

 

I am currently looking into purchasing a new NAS case that has better air flow for the hard drives. I am leaning towards the Antec P101 as you can have up to 12 hard drives in there and ample fans. There is also the Silverstone CS380 but that one is about $307.50 on Amazon right now.

[ChatNoir]

I only see space for 8 HDDs and 1 SSDs on the P101, not 12.

The 5.25 can be used for additionnal SSDs with a specific backplane.

 

Myself, I am looking at the Define XL R2, only 8 HDDs/SDDs but the 4x 5.25 bays offer evolutions for the future.

[Holaf]

I'm so glad i have kept my old Centurion 590 😅

I you plan to buy an enclosure to put 4 HDD in 3 5.25 bays, I highly suggest that you buy one with a 120mm front fan.
I have bought one with a small fan at the rear, it isn't very efficient, and with the time passing buy it is now very loud


 

[Kimosabe2019]

Well I've finally precleared all my drives. I've left my SSD alone and did not attach it as a cache drive nor did I attach my parity drive. That's the Seagate one. Now begins the long laborious transferring of all my movies back to the server. First 500 GB will take about an hour and 10 minutes.

 

Wouldn't it be faster if I attach the cache drive?

 

I've created a share called Media and within Media I am creating sub-folders called Movies, Music and Videos.

 

What would you recommend I do next?

 

Edited July 29, 2020 by Kimosabe2019
spelling error

[Gragorg]

Wouldn't it be faster if I attach the cache drive?

 

The files would copy faster to the cache drive and then would still need to me moved to the array.  So not really.

[Kimosabe2019]

Last night installed Plex Media Server. Today I am installing NextCloud for local storage.

 

Any ideas on what else I should do for my NAS?

 

Here is a snapshot of my build FYI.

[ChatNoir]

You did not use a parity drive ? Or you are still doing the initial file transfer ?

 

Also I see that your drives are very hot, so I would suggest to adapt your cooling solution to do something about this.

 

Finally, half of your drives show SMART errors, you should look into it. Though it might be because of the temperature.

[trurl]

18 minutes ago, ChatNoir said:

half of your drives show SMART errors

Go to Tools - Diagnostics and attach the complete Diagnostics ZIP file to your NEXT post in this thread.

[trurl]

1 hour ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

Last night installed Plex Media Server. Today I am installing NextCloud for local storage.

Also, would have been better if you had installed cache before enabling dockers.

[Kimosabe2019]

ChatNoir: Still doing my initial transfer. Will enable cache and parity once done today.

 

My hard drives are old and my case is terrible. I originally saw my hard drives overheat when I did the PreClear stuff. So I began looking online for a better case that had fans cooling the hard drives. I am also going to replace all 4 of my 1 TB hard drives with 2 TB Seagate IronWolf 2TB NAS Hard Drive 5900 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive ST2000VN004.

 

I will be also purchasing the Antec P101 Computer Case as it has 3 fans on the front cooling the hard drives directly.

 

Currently I have a desktop fan blowing on the NAS and all temps have come down. Please see snapshot.

homenas-diagnostics-20200729-0947.zip

Edited July 29, 2020 by Kimosabe2019

[trurl]

Disk3 is just CRC. You can acknowledge that by clicking on the warning on the Dashboard and it will warn again if it increases.

 

Unfortunately, disk1 is more serious:

ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAGS    VALUE WORST THRESH FAIL RAW_VALUE
187 Reported_Uncorrect      -O--CK   100   001   000    -    23516

I would replace that ASAP. Hopefully you can build parity so you can do a replacement.

 

I see you have a 1TB unassigned, it also has a warning but that is just a single Reported Uncorrect. But you might as well skip using that one as parity if you intend to replace your disks with 2TB soon. Parity must be at least as large as the largest single data disk, so you would have to build 2TB parity before you could replace any data disks.

 

You might consider using that 1TB as disk1 instead of that bad one you already have in that slot. That would require working through some things to make that replacement since you don't currently have parity.

 

Also see you have 120GB SSD. That is too small for much use caching user share writes, but should be fine if you only use it for dockers and VMs.

 

And as I already mentioned, enabling dockers before installing cache wasn't the best idea. That will also require working through some things to get your dockers on cache where they belong.

 

Personally, I would skip over 2TB and build a server with at least 4TB disks, using fewer disks if you can't afford it.

[trurl]

11 minutes ago, trurl said:

skip over 2TB and build a server with at least 4TB disks, using fewer disks

Fewer disks require fewer ports, each additional disk is an additional point of failure, larger disks perform better.

 

Saw you mentioned 1TB SSD for cache, so maybe the 120GB SSD was just an Unassigned Device involved in the data load?

[Kimosabe2019]

 

1 hour ago, trurl said:

And as I already mentioned, enabling dockers before installing cache wasn't the best idea. That will also require working through some things to get your dockers on cache where they belong.

 

Personally, I would skip over 2TB and build a server with at least 4TB disks, using fewer disks if you can't afford it.

I do have an extra 1 TB SSD lying around. Was just reading that 120 GB cache was good enough for my Plex Server.

 

Now what course of action should I take now since I prematurely enabled Docker? Can I undo Docker? I can always reinstall Plex once all my data is transferred back.

 

I will buy two 4 TB Seagate IronWolf drives to replace the two that have the drive errors. That will most likely be next week. Until then I will just continue transferring all my data back to the drives and replace that disk1 drive with another one. I'll need to find a 2TB drive somewhere for parity. This is a lot of work!

[Hoopster]

39 minutes ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

I will buy two 4 TB Seagate IronWolf drives to replace the two that have the drive errors. That will most likely be next week. Until then I will just continue transferring all my data back to the drives and replace that disk1 drive with another one. I'll need to find a 2TB drive somewhere for parity. This is a lot of work!

Parity must be as large or larger than the biggest data drive in the array.  If you are going to buy 4TB IronWolf data drives, you will need at least a 4TB drive for parity as well.  A 2TB parity will do you for now, but, not when you upgrade to larger drives.

 

Ideally, appdata (the user share for docker containers) should be on an SSD cache drive.  You can move it there, but, there is a procedure for doing so now that you have it on the array.  Alternatively, you could remove the Plex docker, reconfigure cache, Docker, etc. on the SSD and then reinstall your Plex Docker from the Community Apps Previous Apps section.  It will retain all settings you currently have configured.

 

If Plex is all you intend to run, a 120GB cache drive is sufficient if you are going to use it just for appdata/dockers and you will not cache writes to the array on the cache drive or use it for a lot of other purposes.  I have almost 20 docker containers (including Plex) on a 256GB NVMe SSD and it is nowhere near full even with other uses such as downloads and HandBrake transcodes.

Edited July 29, 2020 by Hoopster

[trurl]

34 minutes ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

Now what course of action should I take now since I prematurely enabled Docker? Can I undo Docker? I can always reinstall Plex once all my data is transferred back.

Go to Settings - Docker, disable dockers and delete the docker image. Do the same for Settings - VM Manager. Do you have any VMs?

 

Leave these disabled until cache is installed, then you can invoke mover to get appdata,domains,system shares moved to cache.

 

@Hoopster pretty much covered everything else I was typing.

 

[trurl]

9 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

If you are going to buy 4TB IronWolf data drives, you will need at least a 4TB drive for parity as well.  A 2TB parity will do you for now, but, not when you upgrade to larger drives.

You could just get a 4TB to build parity on, then another 4TB to replace/rebuild disk1, and keep the others for now. Then you can replace them with 4TB later as needed since you will already have parity large enough.

[Kimosabe2019]

Okay pretty much all the data is on the drives. I have one more 1 TB backup drive that I took out of a old laptop (so it wouldn't be any use for the unraid). I have the 120GB SSD and the Seagate 1TB hard drive left unassigned. I already deleted the Docker image.

 

Is this what you want me to do?

 

1. Assign the 120 GB SSD as cache drive.

2. Insert the 1 TB Seagate drive into the array.

3. Purchase a 4TB parity drive and install it as parity.

4. Purchase another 4TB hard drive to replace the corrupted drives.

4. Rebuild data. <--- How to do do this?

5. REMOVE the corrupted drive. WDC_WD10EZEX-60ZF5A0_WD-WCC1S7914565 - 1 TB (sde)

6. Activate Docker.

7. Move appdata to the SSD drive.

8. Re-install Plex Media Server.

 

Edited July 29, 2020 by Kimosabe2019

[trurl]

Let's just leave docker out of it for now. We can talk about that in more detail later. We need to get into the details of rebuilding, etc.

43 minutes ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

Purchase a 2 TB parity drive and install it as parity.

4 hours ago, Kimosabe2019 said:

I will buy two 4 TB Seagate IronWolf drives

As already mentioned, you can't use 2TB parity with 4TB data drives. I don't see any point in buying a 2TB drive.