Hello everyone!

I am new to unraid (and RAID in general) and I am looking into the best way to set up my new NAS. I hofe that you can help me out and answer my questions

 

What I currently have:

 

Thinkpad x240
3 8TB USB-Drives

3 5TB USB-Drives (1 main, 2 Backups of the main drive)

 

What my end goal looks like:

Ryzen 3900x
32GB ECC Ram
1TB M.2 Corsair Gen. 4 PCIe SSD
ASRock x570M Pro 4 Motherboard
40TB of usable Disc Space

For the drives:

 

I calculated, that for this use case 7 6TB Drives would be the best solution (price and upkeep for 5 years).
For parity I would use 2 12TB drives. As I understand, this should be possiblewith unraid and zfs. Another benefit would be that I could upgrade any 6TB drive at any time to a 12TB drive. Is this correct?

 

Another question: would I also be able to upgrade the parity drives to 18TB each in the future, thus allowing me to upgrade the 6TB drives to 18TB later on?

 

In order to save some money I am currently looking into setting up unraid on another, more powerful, laptop of mine and purchasing the 12tb parity drives right now, copying everything I currently have onto those two.
Then I would set up unraid with zfs and use my existing 3 5TB drives with 2 8TB drives as parity. I would then have 15TB of storage in raid and 8TB left on another harddrive, which is enough for all my data (currently). 

Does unraid + zfs work with USB drives?

 

What would I need for cache SSDs? What are they used for and how many would I need?

 

I hope that you can help me!

Kind regards
Dustin

Edited August 31, 20205 yr by Maertuerer

USB connections are not reliable enough for permanent connections to disks. If a disk disconnects, it will have to be rebuilt. So USB is not recommended for disks in the parity array or cache pool.

Also, ZFS is not currently implemented or supported on Unraid, but there is a plugin for ZFS with its plugin support thread on this forum. I have no experience with that.

3 minutes ago, trurl said:

USB connections are not reliable enough for permanent connections to disks. If a disk disconnects, it will have to be rebuilt. So USB is not recommended for disks in the parity array or cache pool.

Thanks for the quick reply! Ifeared this would be the case

 

  

1 minute ago, trurl said:

Also, ZFS is not currently implemented or supported on Unraid, but there is a plugin for ZFS with its plugin support thread on this forum. I have no experience with that.

Will take a look into that!

Edited August 31, 20205 yr by Maertuerer