January 19, 201115 yr I thought that I would share with you my initial experience with unRaid. Overall I am happy with my investment, so please view this post as constructive feedback. Hardware: After reading the forums for a few days, and tring to find compatible well supported hardware from an Australian supplier, I ended up with a (new) SuperMicro C2SEE from eBay (USA). I have put in a Celeron 430 and 4 gig of Kingston RAM (supported). I have also used a Corsair VX430 power supply. Drives: 1 x WD EARS 2.0T (no jumpers) 4 x WD EARS 1.5T (no jumpers) Pros: 1) Install is easy, configuration is idiot proof 2) Power efficient, works out of the box. Drives spin down when not in use 3) Finally have protected storage on my cheap WD drives 4) Easily expand from my 5 disks to 14 disks without any purchase other than cheap disk 5) Cheap to expand to 20T + Cons: 1) VERY slow write performace (13Mb/sec) 2) No monitoring for disk failure/parity issues (SMTP alerts would be nice) 3) System expansion for Torrent, DNS, DHCP services is scary for non linux guru 4) Backup not considered, sure my data is on fault tolerant disk, but if I delete something it is gone 5) Not overly cost effective for a small setup (less than 4T) Overall: A great system that is expandable, missing a few features that an entry level ($250) NAS might have. Scales up VERY well. Great for tech users who have large media collection, still a bit out of reach of non-technical family friends. Without alerting and backup I would be reluctant to recycle old hardware to setup cheap systems for friends.
January 19, 201115 yr If you install unMENU it helps you install other addons and you can easily install an email function so it will email you if there is a problem with your server. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5568.0
January 19, 201115 yr Cons: 1) VERY slow write performace (13Mb/sec) 2) No monitoring for disk failure/parity issues (SMTP alerts would be nice) 3) System expansion for Torrent, DNS, DHCP services is scary for non linux guru 4) Backup not considered, sure my data is on fault tolerant disk, but if I delete something it is gone 5) Not overly cost effective for a small setup (less than 4T) 1. mine writes directly to the array at 17 to 20 mb/s ... check if you disks are not set as IDE in the BIOS ... AHCI is the recommended setting user a faster Parity disk as i do (hitachi 7200rpm) might get you a little bit of a gain 2. Kizer already said... install unmenu it has a few cool scripts ... 3. Again unmenu has a torrent script... dhcp and dns don't see the need in a family environment .... most of the time your modem or router will take care of that 4. some users installed crashplan to backup their "valued files" to the cloud... of course not an option for TB's of info but you can have a backup solution if needed... if you got the $$ then you could setup 2 unraid's and sync them ..... 5. well i have 3 computers with ICH chipsets which were all running raid 5 on 6 onboard disks .... which was worse as a. all disks had to spin to access the raid 5 b. lost 2 times an array and ALL data due to stupid issue's c. 3 computers had to be on to access all data now unraid is on ... other 2 i put on/off as needed .... not all disks are spinning all the time if i loose 2 disks at the same time i loose maximum the content of 2 disks ... all other data is still there and safe again when parity is rebuild...
January 19, 201115 yr Author Is version 5 going to support some more features that can be found in unMenu? I am not overly keen on installing unMenu
January 19, 201115 yr Unraid 5 will have a plugin system, what that entails is still in flux but you can take a look at the Beta forums for more information. As to installing unmenu, I too did without it for years...but after installing it last night (Took putting one file on the flash and running one command, not exactly something that you have to be a linux guru to do) I'll not be without the abilities it gives again. Items I enabled in under 15 minutes once unmenu was installed: 1> Swap file, gives Linux swap area (I used a cache drive) 2> Email allerts 3> Bandwidth Monitoring
January 19, 201115 yr Is version 5 going to support some more features that can be found in unMenu? I am not overly keen on installing unMenu 5.0b2 has a file-browser.. somewhat similar to the one in unMENU. It, like the file-browser in UNMENU allows read-only access to your files. The new 5.0b2 file browser currently has NO security, so access to anything is possible. (the file-browser in unMENU can be configured/restricted) unRAID 5.0b2 has a function to show disk usage, similar to the "Disk Usage" plug in unMENU. Other than that, so far, 5.0beta2 is a replacement of the existing functionality of the unRAID web-pages, and a re-work of linux file permissions and security to allow NFS, SAMBA, and AFP to work together better. 5.0b3 (due out soon) is expected to have AFP. Joe L.
January 19, 201115 yr FWIW using the low power 5,900 rpm Seagate disks, this is the performance I have seen: Write speeds over NFS without parity: 64.9 MB/s (4 TB of BD images) Write speed over NFS with parity: 22.7 MB/s (2 TB of DVD images) Write speed over SMB using wifi N from laptop 40' away from AP (with parity but it isn't the limiting factor): 10.8 MB/s
January 19, 201115 yr I thought that I would share with you my initial experience with unRaid. Drives: 1 x WD EARS 2.0T (no jumpers) 4 x WD EARS 1.5T (no jumpers) Cons: 1) VERY slow write performace (13Mb/sec) Curious...what unRAID version are you using with the unjumpered EARS drives? And what is your connected ethernet speed?
January 20, 201115 yr Author Using 4.6, and the link speed is gigabit. Copying data from a Win2008R2 server, which is likely to try SMB2 eth0: negotiated 1000baseT-FD flow-control, link ok eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:30:48:b1:c5:bd inet addr:192.168.168.220 Bcast:192.168.168.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1486130739 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:185714966 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:3158928563 (2.9 GiB) TX bytes:3904779167 (3.6 GiB) Interrupt:26 Base address:0x8000
January 20, 201115 yr Using 4.6 Drives: 1 x WD EARS 2.0T (no jumpers) 4 x WD EARS 1.5T (no jumpers) 4K Alignment could greatly impact your write speeds http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5384.0
January 20, 201115 yr Also as for installing unMENU you can isntall it and then launch it if/when you need to use it. I leave it off all the time until I need to start it up. After I'm done tinkering I normally shut it off. Reason I shut it off I guess in my mind is one less port on my network that can do/undo things on my server. Then again I'm not really worried that my 5year old is going to haxxor my leet boxxen and mess with my files or my wife whos biggest concerns is where did she store her Disney pictures even thou I only gave her read/write to one folder.
January 21, 201115 yr Can Unmenu be installed on 5.0b2? I'd like to try the new beta, but I don't want to give up all the functionality that Unmenu offers.
January 21, 201115 yr Can Unmenu be installed on 5.0b2? I'd like to try the new beta, but I don't want to give up all the functionality that Unmenu offers. Yes, unMenu will work fine on 5.0b2 BUT I would not suggest running it right now. 5.0 is a major change in the user interface and there are quite a few things in 4.7b1 that are further ahead of 5.0b2. If you want to upgrade it is your choice, and there is nothing wrong with 5.0b2 but I figured I would put in my 2 cent.
January 21, 201115 yr I think what he is trying to say is.... Version 4.7 of unRAID has two bug-fixes that are not in 5.0b2. Those are the fix of a kernel oops, and a fix when transferring files from Windows7 to increase the allowable number of open files (Widows7 does not close them on a timely manner) according to Tom@lime-tech, Version 5.0b3 is expected to be released this weekend sometime. Wait for it and those two items will be corrected as well as some more polish to the new 5.0 interface. I'd install that version after waiting a few days to let those with test servers give it the initial try. unMENU will work equally well with both the 4.X series of unRAID or the 5.0 series. You do not need to do anything special, just use the "Check for Updates" button to make sure it is up to date. A lot of really nice enhancements have been added recently by bjp999 to the myMain plugin. Joe L.
January 22, 201115 yr Thanks for the advice. I just upgraded to 4.7b1 and added my first EARS drive without the jumper. Looking at the road map it looks like support for the advanced format drives won't be available until 5.0b4 so I'll hold off until then. I do want to say thanks to Joe L. for creating an awesome preclear script. I ran it with the -A switch and the -M 4 switch. It emailed every step of the process and I didn't even have to check up on it. You've done some amazing work.
January 22, 201115 yr Drives: 1 x WD EARS 2.0T (no jumpers) 4 x WD EARS 1.5T (no jumpers) Your slower speed could be due to you not using 4.7B1 and the proper advanced disk formatting. Basically, the partition should start on sector 64 and not sector 63. unRAID 4.6 only supports sector 63 partitions. My WD green drives typically give me >25Mbps transfer speeds. Peter
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