Unraid without parity drive. Some questions about setup

[CK77]

Hi all,

 

I ordered a little intel NUC8i5 with 16GB RAM to use as an Unraid server. It should be here in about 3 weeks  This is just to play around with, i'm saving up for a proper server in the next 1.5 years or so. I just want to get my feet wet now.

 

I'm told that if you use USB3 devices it's best to not use parity because USB3 can be "unsable" sometimes. I also live in an area with regular power outages and i have no UPS at the moment. I'm working on that by the end of the year. So i'm not using parity drives!

 

I want to use Unraid to store my media and other data and run a dew docker instances. Emby, Sonarr, Radarr, Jacket, Home Assistant and PiHole for now, maybe some more to play with later.

 

I would have 2x WD UDB3 4TB HD's and 1x WD USB3 2TB drive for the array and a 500GB WD NVME drive for the cache. I'll have some more WD USB3 HDs with my my current movies/tv shows/... on it which will turn into backups of those files.

 

Now my questions is about setting up my shares.

 

Would it make more sense to dedicate certain drives in the array to certain shares? For instance drive 1 for Movies, drive 2 for TV shows, drive 3 for projects, music, downloads,...

 

This way if a drive in the array dies, i know exactly which back up i need to place back.

 

If i just tell the shares to use all the drives and one of them crashes, i'll need to start putting files back from a bunch of different drives, that seems more work if something goes wrong?

 

Am i overthinking this? Any input would be great! I'm trying to gather as much info as i can for when my NUC gets here.

 

Thanks in advance for any input

 

Edited September 11, 2020 by CK77

[Frank1940]

5 hours ago, CK77 said:

I ordered a little intel NUC8i5 with 16GB RAM to use as an Unraid server. It should be here in about 3 weeks  This is just to play around with, i'm saving up for a proper server in the next 1.5 years or so. I just want to get my feet wet now.

 

I had a very quick look at this device (and its price) plus delaying a year to save for a 'proper server' and my comment is this:  Why don't you simply look for a used PC (at a 'garage' or 'car-boot' sale) and save a goody portion of this extra expense?   (Even a used refurbished PC from Amazon would come in under the price of the NUC8i5 (and give you proper SATA ports).  A simple Unraid NAS with few Dockers and plugins will run on virtually any Intel or AMD processor made in the past ten years.)

 

About the rest of your post.  Setting up and using an 'temporary' Unraid server without a parity drive is not going to provide you much experience about Unraid operation.  And I would almost guarantee you that your backup will get out of sync with the array at some point in the future.  Assigning shares to drives always seems like a good idea until one of the drives gets full.  What happens then?   It could be painless if you are watching for it to happen and have a plan to deal with it. Or it could get very messy, if you don't.  

 

I have not heard of any problems with USB3 drives used as data drives being more unstable than USB2 drives.  (However, using USB drives as array drives is not often done.  Those enclosures are often not particularly good at heat dissipation.)  There is a potential problem with the boot flash drive being plugged into a USB3 port with certain MB/BIOS combinations.  (The source of this instability has never been identified...)  Some folks feel that USB3 flash drives are more prone to failure than USB2 drives because they are 'faster' and thus tended to run hotter.  (Difficult to prove...)  But a USB3 flash boot drive will not provide any increase in performance as, basically, the flash drive is only access during the boot process and a second or two during shutdown. 

[trurl]

Here is what he was referring to:

 

 

My reasoning here is that any disconnects due to USB (whatever number) is going to result in out-of-sync array requiring frequent rebuilds. Plus the bottleneck of putting multiple disks on one port, potentially defeating parallel access of parity operations.

[Frank1940]

5 minutes ago, trurl said:

Here is what he was referring to:

Thanks.  Having a bit more background does put things into a different light--  Particularly about being off shore.  I also did not realize that he was thinking about a multiple drive USB3 enclosure.  That could make the time required for parity checks somewhat unbearable depending on the exact hardware and versions of USB involved in the string.  I was thinking that the OP was going to be using one drive per USB enclosure which is the more typical use scenario. 

[civic95man]

Coming from my experience, don't do it.  I tried this when I first starting with unraid.  While it worked and I never had any serious issues, it was a huge pain and it significantly limits what you can do.  It would be best to just find a small used or refurbished computer.

[CK77]

Thanks for all your replies!!!

 

Here is some reasoning for this purchase now.

 

I thought about the second hand route, but I prefer to go with new because i live in Honduras and order all my parts from the US. Computer parts in Honduras are usually old, but you still pay brand new prices for them here, plus customer service sucks. Ordering from the US also has it's problems. Since I don't have a US credit card I can only order from Amazon, they have no issue with those things. Then i need to get it all to a freight forwarder in Miami who ships it to me in Honduras. By the time it's here we are a month further. I worry about warranty with second hand computers being shipped to Honduras. Shipping items back to the US will always be my cost and it's not cheap. Yeah we don't have any fancy IT technicians living here on the island. There are downsides to living on a tropical island

 

I normally run everyting on a intel NUC7i3 on Windows. Those computers survive here for about 3-4 years. My current NUC is close to 3 so by buying the NUC8i5 i would have a replacement if that old one fails. But for now i would have some device to play around with Unraid and experiment. If i like it, which i assume i will, I can start saving up for a proper server, i think for what i need i will pay about $1500. Once i can start working again i can save up for that.

 

I wasn't planning on creating proper backups for the movies and tv shows, more a script to copy whatever is missing on the backup drives once a week or so. I could even do it manually. Just looking for the best way to get my feet wet with Unraid with what i have right now.

[CK77]

Missed out on my plan for what if the Movie or TV share linked to a single HD runs full.

Can't I just add another HD to the array and link that up to the same share?

 

Again, I'm doing this just because i only have a bunch of external HD's with all my data on.

 

I realize that for the price of the NUC i can put pretty much a pc together, but the big expense will be the HD's. At a minimum i would need to buy 1x 8TB for parity and then 2x 6TB for the array. Or maybe 2x 10TB wich would be at least another $500, plus a UPS another $150 and then the shipping for all that, that's another 20% extra. It just adds all up

[trurl]

26 minutes ago, CK77 said:

what if the Movie or TV share linked to a single HD runs full.

Can't I just add another HD to the array and link that up to the same share?

User Shares span disks. You can limit which disks a User Share uses if you want, but by default all disks are allowed.

[CK77]

2 hours ago, trurl said:

User Shares span disks. You can limit which disks a User Share uses if you want, but by default all disks are allowed.

So that was my question.

If i'm setting up my Unraid without parity for now, would it be smarter to select which drive each share uses. so if the drve in the array fails, i just have to copy let's say my movies back. If my disk for the movie share is full, i can just add another usb3 disk to the array and change the settings on the share to include the new disk?

If i let my shares span all my drives in the array and a drive fails i need to copy back from a bunch of sources.

Edited September 11, 2020 by CK77

[trurl]

That seems reasonable. Not that different from what I do and I do have parity with all disks on separate SATA ports.

 

 

[CK77]

5 hours ago, trurl said:

That seems reasonable. Not that different from what I do and I do have parity with all disks on separate SATA ports.

 

 

That's my end goal 

 

I understand that having a proper computer with sata ports and internal HD's is the way to go and gives you the best experience. It's just not in my budget at the moment.  

 

That's why i'm trying to gauge what sort of experience i would get with my setup.

As long as my write speeds to the array are around 70-90MB/s like i get on windows i'll be super happy.

That way i can recreate what i have in windows (Emby/Sonarr/Radarr) on Unraid and add some more stuff like Hassio to play around with

 

This is really more a learning experience for me and it keeps me entertained in these times

[trurl]

3 hours ago, CK77 said:

write speeds to the array are around 70-90MB/s

Write speed with parity is often somewhat slower than this. There are ways to work with that and tradeoffs. Caching, Turbo Write. 

[mrbilky]

Maybe I missed it but you didn't mention what model external drives you have can you just shuck them seems like a very popular option then building a low specced pc with new hardware should be doable I've did a little search for AMD bundles and they seem to be around your budget with a little tweaking this way you could expand upon it as budget allows

[CK77]

7 hours ago, trurl said:

Write speed with parity is often somewhat slower than this. There are ways to work with that and tradeoffs. Caching, Turbo Write. 

In my setup at the moment i wouldn't use a parity drive, so would i keep getting these speeds then?

Are you saying even when you have proper WD or Seagate NAS drives with parity set up you won't get write speeds of around 100MB/s? I assumed with those that the bottleneck would be the lan speed 

6 hours ago, mrbilky said:

Maybe I missed it but you didn't mention what model external drives you have can you just shuck them seems like a very popular option then building a low specced pc with new hardware should be doable I've did a little search for AMD bundles and they seem to be around your budget with a little tweaking this way you could expand upon it as budget allows

My External HD's are all 2.5" WD 4TB Passport or 2TB Elements drives

[trurl]

20 minutes ago, CK77 said:

Are you saying even when you have proper WD or Seagate NAS drives with parity set up you won't get write speeds of around 100MB/s? I assumed with those that the bottleneck would be the lan speed 

Parity is updated realtime. Any time a disk in the parity array is written, parity is calculated and updated. There are 2 different methods for updating parity and these have tradeoffs, but both are slower than writing without parity. See here for more details: