Unraid and SSDs?

[Nicolai]

Hi everyone.

 

I've spent the past week looking at hardware and I've found something that's both in my price range and should give me reasonable performance for a storage server for my little 1 man business and me and my wifes movies, pictures and what not we'd like to keep safe. Now I find out I probably shouldn't use SSDs for my array, did a bit of googling and the only posts about it is from last year.

 

So is it still the same situation, don't use SSDs for an array and go with mechanical drives?

 

Thank you for your time and your help with every other unraid question I've had

[Decto]

For the array, SSD is not recommended. Trim is not supported and the main risk is that the drives do some 'data management' which invalidates the parity. Ideally the array will be spinning disks, this is usually fast enough to max out a gigabit connection so not an issue.

 

If you use the latest beta you can create a second drive pool, in addition to the cache as SSD so that may meet your needs.

 

Unraid is not backup.... it is for availability and convenience. 

You need a backup for anything you can't replace.

 

 

Edited October 3, 2020 by Decto

[Nicolai]

19 minutes ago, Decto said:

For the array, SSD is not recommended. Trim is not supported and the main risk is that the drives do some 'data management' which invalidates the parity. Ideally the array will be spinning disks, this is usually fast enough to max out a gigabit connection so not an issue.

 

If you use the latest beta you can create a second drive pool, in addition to the cache as SSD so that may meet your needs.

 

Unraid is not backup.... it is for availability and convenience. 

You need a backup for anything you can't replace.

 

 

Unraid is the OS that suits me the best. It's parity is what I'm most interested in. I'm a one man business and having external harddrives everywhere is just not an option.

 

You can disable TRIM in Windows 10, is that not an option in unraid?

[trurl]

15 minutes ago, Nicolai said:

It's parity is what I'm most interested in.

Parity is not a substitute for backups, whether Unraid or any traditional RAID. All parity allows you to do is rebuild a missing disk. Other reasons for data loss are much more common than failed disks, including user error.

 

15 minutes ago, Nicolai said:

You can disable TRIM in Windows 10, is that not an option in unraid?

It's not a question of disabling trim for array disks because it is not enabled. It is simply a fact that SSDs in the array cannot be trimmed.

[JorgeB]

You can use SSDs on the array, I have a small one I've been using for may months, like mentioned trim won't work so write performance might suffer some with time, also recommend having a faster device (like an NVMe device for example) for parity (also with higher endurance) since parity will have much more writes than the array devices, the more array devices you have the more parity will suffer in comparison, and parity can never be trimmed even if/when Unraid supports array device trim in the future.

[Nicolai]

21 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You can use SSDs on the array, I have a small one I've been using for may months, like mentioned trim won't work so write performance might suffer some with time, also recommend having a faster device (like an NVMe device for example) for parity (also with higher endurance) since parity will have much more writes than the array devices, the more array devices you have the more parity will suffer in comparison, and parity can never be trimmed even if/when Unraid supports array device trim in the future.

Write performance would still perform better than a spinning platter, even with the time "penalty", correct? I've chosen a Supermicro X11SSM-F motherboard as the base for my build, because of it's 8 SATA connections and relative low cost compared to a C246 based motherboard, such as Supermicro X11SXH-F, as I don't plan on running more than 8 drives in total, along with an Intel Celeron G4900 for low power consumption and Intel Quick Sync for hardware accelerated transcoding when needed, it doesn't have an M.2 slot at all. I've decided to opt out on that, because saturating a SATA SSD array will be quite something and I don't need speeds that can do that. I will also be running 8-16 GB of ECC memory, since it's supported by both the C236 chipset and the G4900.

 

On 10/3/2020 at 10:00 PM, trurl said:

Parity is not a substitute for backups, whether Unraid or any traditional RAID. All parity allows you to do is rebuild a missing disk. Other reasons for data loss are much more common than failed disks, including user error.

I'd like to protect myself against a failed disk. Should more than 2 fail for what ever odd reason, the way unraid manages it, I won't lose all my data, only the failed drives. That's my reason for choosing unraid as the platform for a server. I also need it to be able to access data when I'm at locations with clients and carrying 10 USB keys and 3 external harddrives just isn't an option. That's for sure a higher risk of data loss, and not through hardware failure, but rather through a "hardware missing" problem.

I have a 1 man business, I cannot afford an offsite backup of my data, it's simply outside of my price range, even this unraid server is, but I've gotten to the point, where I have to do something to manage my data and the hardware I bring along for when I go and take pictures or shoot timelapses for clients, this is the best possible solution I can think of, to protect myself against both data loss and still allowing me to have somewhat of a practical solution for the amount of hardware I bring. I'm all ears if you have a better idea?

[JorgeB]

3 hours ago, Nicolai said:

Write performance would still perform better than a spinning platter, even with the time "penalty", correct?

Depends mostly on the SSDs used, cheap TLC or QLC models can have slower sustained writes than disks, also make sure to enable turbo write since it also helps with SSDs.

[Nicolai]

8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Depends mostly on the SSDs used, cheap TLC or QLC models can have slower sustained writes than disks, also make sure to enable turbo write since it also helps with SSDs.

Was planning on an array of WD Red WDS100T1R0A, as far as I know buying hardware made for NAS use is the better idea?

[JorgeB]

Those should give you decent speeds.